Wilting cardigans and in-jokes

The woman in front of me was sceptical. "So, they painted teacups, then, and had lots of nude swims." We were shuffling through exuberantly decorated rooms in the farmhouse at Charleston, Sussex, country home of the central figures of the Bloomsbury group for nearly 60 years. Some of us made feeble attempts to defend Vanessa, Duncan, Roger, Clive, Virginia and the gang but were overwhelmed by the English heritage, tea-towels-and-cream teas aspect of the visit. Maybe all that passion and desire to change the way people looked at art and life had, indeed, been diluted into twee interior decoration. Buy the Charleston stencils, and you can recreate Bloomsbury in your bathroom at home.

If it's stencils you're after - or bookmarks, rubber stamps, lampshades, cushions, scarves, jewellery boxes, flower seeds, embroidery sets, videos, ties, or Tshirts, then get thee to the Bloomsbury Shop at the Tate Gallery, London. Or to the Bloomsbury Windows at Heals on Tottenham Court Road.

If ever an exhibition lent itself to comprehensive merchandising, it is The Art of Bloomsbury, the Tate's presentation of the work of the three painters and designers: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, who were bound by common aesthetic aims and by close, and overlapping personal relationships. Its curator, Richard Shone, thinks that the Bloomsberries need rescuing from neglect and has somewhat overstated his case. Since the late 1960s, the Bloomsbury industry has flourished unabated. Diaries, letters, biographies and critical studies - adorned with Bell and Grant's paintings and designs - have told us more about the dynamics of this close-knit group than most of us will ever know about our own circle of friends. Or would want to. Everything they said, thought, felt and did appears to have been exhaustively documented.

Their prolific letter-writing is a researcher's godsend, of course, encouraged by the efficiency of London's late Edwardian postal service: Virginia Woolf frequently dashed off a note describing a lunch party that had just ended, which would arrive into a friend's hands in time for afternoon tea. In recent years, films such as Carrington and Mrs Dalloway have helped keep the public interest alive, an interest that combines elements of prurience, nostalgia and the satisfactions of a rarified soap-opera.

Virginia Woolf is, of course, the most famous of the group, which, depending on latitude of definition, included her sister, the artist and designer Vanessa Bell, painter Duncan Grant, historian and biographer Lytton Strachey, economist Maynard Keynes, polemicist and publisher, Leonard Woolf - who, with Virginia, founded the influential Hogarth Press, painter David Garnett, art critic and bon viveur, Clive Bell, and art critic, painter, connoisseur and curator, Roger Fry. Others who were closely associated with the group, but not at its heart, were the novelist, E.M. Forster, the much maligned society hostess, Ottoline Morrell, the patrician gardener and poet, Vita Sackville West, the painter Dora Carrington, writer Katherine Mansfield and poet T.S. Eliot. "Bloomsbury" refers to the grid of late Georgian squares that extends northwards from the British Museum and which constituted the centre of London's publishing and academic worlds until very recently. Virginia Woolf later came to dislike the label, which was first used, playfully, by the group in 1910. By this time, number 46 Gordon Square, where Vanessa and Virginia Stevens lived with their brother Thoby, had become a meeting place for discussions and debate about aesthetics, philosophy and morality. It was a privileged milieu. The men had met at Trinity College, Cambridge, and were determined to retain the spirit of liberal intellectual inquiry they had enjoyed there, under the influence of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. They were also determined to live in a more open manner than their Victorian parents, to embrace new forms in literature and visual art and to disregard hypocrisy and social convention in their personal lives. Talking frankly about homosexuality was a key element in their sense of their own subversiveness.

The term "Bloomsbury" has become a shorthand for a cluster of generally unappealing characteristics - in-jokes and wilting cardigans - and it suggests that the group was formal and monolithic. In fact, like any social circle, it was heterogeneous and fluid; references in the Tate's exhibition notes to Early Bloomsbury and Late Bloomsbury, and statements such as: "By this time Bloomsbury was over" are absurdly reverential and almost meaningless. For many of their contemporaries, notably Wyndham Lewis, Rupert Brooke and D.H. Lawrence, the Bloomsberries were an insufferable clique of elitist dilettantes, who dominated English cultural life for years, to its detriment. The group's position as conscientious objectors during the first World War was viewed less as radical resistance than as a fastidious, even snobbish, detachment from public feeling. In the 1940s and 1950s there was a strong critical reaction to the group from commentators such as Herbert Read and F.R. Leavis, from the next generation of British painters, including Ben Nicholson, and later from 1950s writers such as Larkin and Amis.

Insularity, preciousness and a preoccupation with private life were the charges levelled at the group during and after the second World War, which, although not entirely accurate, have stubbornly stuck. In the middle decades of this century, lack of overt political engagement seemed an unforgivable sin in an artist; now that the cultural world generally has retreated from ideology, the preoccupation with the "merely" personal appears less culpable. It is easier for us now to sympathise with the group's emphasis on friendship and redefinition of family relationships.

The Tate show, and the related exhibition on Roger Fry at the Courtauld Gallery, reminds us that Fry, Grant and Bell were an important bridge between the French avant-garde and the British public, and that their gaze was fixed outwards - even if only as far as France.

As a catalyst, Roger Fry was highly significant: he curated the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, (a term coined by him) which introduced Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Seurat, Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso to a horrified London in 1910. Three years later he exhibited the work of Grant and Bell, with his own, alongside the French artists. Much of the Bloomsbury work is pallidly imitative and is badly shown up in juxtaposition with the French paintings in the current Courtauld show.

For the rest of their careers, Grant, Bell and Fry attempted to incorporate the stylistic and formal characteristics of French Modernism into their work, with varying degrees of success. A lot of their designs for the Omega Workshops, established by Fry in Fitzroy Square in 1913, seem embarrassingly amateurish. Of the three artists, Vanessa Bell now seems the most distinctive, with a rigorous eye for form and confident handling of blocks of colour, as she increasingly simplified her work towards abstraction. At times Grant and Fry's work is little more than competent pastiche, and Fry's championing of Grant's work prompts questions about his much lauded critical judgment. From this distance, it is easy to argue that Fry's obsession with French art led him to overlook other European movements such as German Expressionism or Italian Futurism, but at the time the impact of the French Cubists and Fauvists he introduced was profound. "Human character changed in 1910," Woolf wrote later, with more than a little hyperbole, while Kenneth Clarke said of Fry: "he changed the taste of a nation."

Woolf, in her writing, was always striving to mirror the formal innovations of Modernist painting, and was indisputably concerned with artistic experimentation. Mannered and strained as it can be, it is her work, of all of her Bloomsbury contemporaries, that endures. Few (other than scholars) read Strachey's Eminent Victorians today, although it was an important landmark in biographical writing, but Woolf's best work still speaks to us: in particular, the novels To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway - which employ stream-of-consciousness techniques to explore the catastrophic impact of the first World War on British society; her ringing feminist polemic, A Room Of One's Own; the genially discursive essays collected under the title The Common Reader.

The conversational tone of her essays seems to epitomise Bloomsbury at its best: an engagement with life, an intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm, a love of talk. Perhaps, rather than an artistic movement, this was above all a (small) social experiment, characterised by a determination to redefine family and private life - and to give good parties. And, if a note arrived by afternoon post inviting me to dinner with Virginia Woolf, I have to confess I'd jump at the chance.

The Art Of Bloomsbury runs at the Tate Gallery, London, until January 30th 2000; Art Made Modern: Roger Fry's Vision of Art is at the Courtauld Gallery until January 23rd; Bloomsbury Portraits are at the National Portrait Gallery until January 30th; a season of films, Celebrating Bloomsbury on Screen, is at the National Film Theatre until December 30th