Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was an avant-garde artist associated with the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury Group. She was often overshadowed by her more famous sister, Virginia Woolf, and the group’s unconventional lifestyles. Dorothy Parker famously said of the Bloomsbury Group that they ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles’. Bell was a prolific artist, creating paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture, designs for murals, advertising, and book covers. The largest-ever survey of Bell’s work has just opened at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes ahead of a planned show of her work at Tate in 2026.
Bell was often radical. She was at the forefront of British artists making non-objective work, although they were purely experimental and not exhibited or sold during her lifetime, as in Abstract Painting c1914. She created a dinner service with Duncan Grant that included fifty hand-painted Wedgwood ceramic plates with portraits of famous women. This was forty years before feminist artist Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party 1974-79, an installation artwork consisting of thirty-nine elaborate place settings on a triangular table featuring historical and mythical women. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were commissioned in 1932 by art historian Kenneth Clark and his wife Jane to create a fine dining service. The pair created the service, including fifty hand-painted Wedgwood ceramic plates of famous women. The women they depicted came from across the world, from ancient history to the contemporary and included Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Siddal, Helen of Troy, Anna Pavlova, Sapho, the Queen of Sheba, Christina Rossetti and Queen Victoria. Art historian Hana Leaper believes that the selection of women depicted ‘vigorously crafted identities and statuses at odds with the mores of their historical epochs. Some were professionals; lots were lesbian, bisexual or had unconventional sexual relationships .. the lives of a majority of these women reflect the new sexual politics at the heart of Bloomsbury’s understanding of humanism’. The complete set of fifty plates is on show at the exhibition. Judy Chicago has written an essay on the dinner service in the catalogue.
Vanessa Bell’s story begins with her being part of a literary family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an author and historian, and her mother, Julia Duckworth, was the niece and model of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. They were visited by prominent artists, including Edward Burne-Jones, G F Watts and William Rothenstein. When Bell attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1901, she was taught by John Singer Sargent. While studying at Cambridge University, her brother Thoby met Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell (who she married) and Lytton Strachey, who visited the family regularly as part of Thoby’s Thursday ‘at homes’. In turn, Vanessa founded and ran the ‘Friday Club’ for artists to discuss their work, listen to lectures and organise exhibitions. It is here she met Duncan Grant and, subsequently, Roger Fry.
Roger Fry was a well-respected art historian, critic, and artist. In 1910, he put together the pioneering exhibition Edouard Manet and the Post-Impressionists, a term he coined to describe the works of contemporary European artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne, who were all included in the show. The exhibition was a pivotal moment in British modernism. Bell was introduced to their vividly coloured works with bold brushstrokes, which greatly influenced her work. The second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912 included Matisse, Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, Frantisek Kupka and Kandinsky. In 1913, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant established the Omega Workshops, a design initiative similar to Morris & Co., introducing hand-painted furniture, ceramics, and textile designs with the radical aim of breaking down the separation between fine and applied art.
Vanessa Bell, Nursery Tea c 1912 Private Collection, courtesy Anthony Mould Limited photo ©Artlyst 2024Her work from the years before the First World War shows how much the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions influenced her. Landscape with Buildings c1912 has Cezanne’s palette of pale oranges, greens and browns and the blocks of Braque’s early cubist works. Design for a folding screen: Adam and Eve 1913-14 bears more than a passing resemblance to the figures in Matisse’s The Dance, the first version of which was exhibited at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Matisse is evident again in Street Corner Conversation c1913, which features large blocks of colour and black outlines. However, I don’t think she understood the science behind pointillism as the portrait of Roger Fry 1912 just has dots painted over it. One unusual painting from this period is Nursey Tea c 1912, the largest painting Bell had made, representing a new way of working. It shows her two young sons, Julian and Quentin, and their nursemaids. The conventional domestic scene is given a modernist twist with its large areas of flat colour and abstracted faces, although it highlights Bell’s privilege by showing her domestic help.
During the First World War, the Bells moved to Charleston, Sussex, along with Duncan Grant and his then-lover David Garnett. They were pacifists and conscientious objectors, and moving to Sussex allowed them to work on the land to escape prosecution. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant transformed Charleston into a living, breathing work of art. The show includes the painted doors to Duncan Grant’s bedroom at Charleston.
It also includes screens, small furniture, ceramics, book illustrations, and sketches for commissioned interiors, showing the scope of Bell’s talents. Later works are more traditional but cosy domestic scenes of seated figures reading or corners of rooms by windows. The selection of works is impeccable. The wall notes are thorough and informative. Duncan Grant’s and Vanessa Bell’s output is often uneven, but here, Bell shines. Her love of producing art in all its forms is evident.
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes 19 October 2024 – 23 February 2025
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