The Omega Workshops was an artists' group formed in London in 1913 by Roger Fry to create modern art that "applied to the needs of everyday life." However, this workshop, the intent of which was to promote decorative and applied art, has since been dismissed as simply the last phase of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This paper reconsiders the significance of this art movement by inspecting Fry's primary source materials to explore his real intention, which was to strategically adopt the concept of anonymous collaboration as the Omega's first principle, despite the fact that it caused serious conflicts between himself and other major participants in the Omega, such as Wyndham Lewis and Duncan Grant. When tracing back the origin of Fry's idea of anonymity," one finds a strong clue in the ideal co-operation he experienced in the mural project undertaken at the Borough Polytechnic in 1911. By "working together with mutual assistance," the six collaborators accomplished unexpectedly exquisite murals that went beyond their individual abilities. Thus, "they refused to sign the pictures, saying 'No, these we did together; let there be no individual signature.'" For Fry, this spirit of mutual creative co-operation was of the utmost importance to the success of the workshops. Further, Fry attempted to display English modern paintings anonymously in the Grafton Group exhibitions held in 1913 and 1914. By eliminating any biases that individual artist names might invite, Fry succeeded in highlighting the new style that was shared among these painters, a style that was, from Fry's point of view, created solely through their very unique "mutual understanding." Considering that Fry believed that art flourishes "only where there are enough people interested in the same kind of thing," it is highly probable that his intent for this activity was to create a specific "community" that became united through shared views of art, by adopting a unique strategy of "anonymity" for the distinctive co-operation that occurred at the Omega Workshops. As exemplified by Lewis's scandalous breakaway that happened three months after the workshop's opening, Fry's community ideal was not easily accepted by all participants. However, when in later years Virginia Woolf appreciated the irreplaceable qualities of the Omega's products, it became clear that their extraordinary originality had identified the innovativeness of anonymous collaborative production, thus implying the fruitage of aesthetic community that was actually realized in the Omega Workshops.
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