John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury group and the origins of the arts council movement

Abstract

The article examines the origins of the arts council movement in the ideas of the Bloomsbury Group and John Maynard Keynes. The Bloomsbury Groups' sense of experimentation and flexibility, their willingness to take action to create new institutions, and their distrust of bureaucracy, influenced Keynes's development of a new model for state patronage of the arts in 1946. He took an organization established during the Second World War to employ artists and organize morale‐boosting tours of the performing and visual arts, and oversaw its development into the Arts Council of Great Britain, the first such arts council. His model – making grants of public funds through semi‐autonomous government bodies to private individuals and privately operated arts institutions – became a standard form of public funding for the arts by the end of the twentieth century in many countries around the world.