2023-08-25 03:01:18
Intermittently, Vanessa Bell’s name appears, disappears, and reappears; sometimes, on the occasion of new exhibitions or books that value her pictorial legacy; others, the majority, as a footnote to the biography of her sister, Virginia Woolf, one of the most brilliant and necessary writers of the last century. From France, a recent example: Double V was recently published, a weighted novel by the writer Laura Ulonati who puts herself in Bell’s shoes following wondering what it would have been like to have the author of Orlando and A Room of One’s Own as a younger sister, being outshone due to her genius, relegated -already from her tender youth- to the background.
In a volume that is not intended to be strictly biographical, the French woman recreates the possible unholy thoughts of the painter, imagining probable tensions with Virginia; without neglecting, of course, the tender side of the bond, the frank esteem and mutual support. “They had a sincere admiration for each other,” says Ulonati, who also recalls that, for her practicality and sense of duty, Woolf nicknamed Vanessa “the Saint”, and noted regarding her: “Until she was fifteen, she was sober and austere, the most reliable and always the oldest”.
Young Virginia and Vanessa
circles that close
With her mother dead and her father immersed in the cult of the deceased, Vanessa has the obligation to be the head of the family. After her father died in 1904, the sisters -Stephen, as their maiden name- finally moved to the bohemian neighborhood of Bloomsbury, in London, where their new, disruptive family is taking shape. In other words, the Bloomsbury Circle, a famous group of artists, philosophers and intellectuals who had a decisive influence on English cultural life at the beginning of the 20th century, made up of luminaries who, as is well known, charged once morest Victorian limitations, both moral and aesthetic. , capturing their freedom of spirit and thought in a variety of fields: painting and literature, yes, but also music, economics, applied arts, without forgetting the same intimate life… “They lived in squares, they painted in circles and they loved in triangles”: thus Dorothy Parker would famously characterize this group of unconventional friends, who counted in their ranks the economist John Maynard Keynes, the painters Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, the critics Clive Bell (Vanessa’s husband) and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia).
On the left, The Other Room, a painting from the late 1930s. On the right, the cover of Mrs Dalloway designed by Bell, from 1925.
Vanessa’s sentimental story, recounted so many times, is more colorful than many soap operas: in 1907 she married the aforementioned Bell, with whom she maintains an open relationship. They have two children and never divorce; and despite not living together in the mid-10s, they remain close friends. She takes several lovers; Fry, among them. And then to the handsome young Grant, with whom she moved to the famous Charleston house in 1918, where they collaborated artistically for years. They are not alone in this now legendary property in Sussex, which they decorate and intervene from end to end: they live with David Garnett, Duncan’s lover. Despite having a predilection for boys, by the way, Duncan Grant gets Vanessa pregnant, and the epilogue of this eggplant is starred by the girl, Angelica, their daughter who, now older, falls in love and marries Garnett; that is, with the former filito of her biological father, sentimental “rival” of her mother.
Portrait of Virginia, by Vanessa, 1912
References and influences
A flowery detail, in short, in the biography of a “complex woman”, “ruthlessly candid” and “fiercely independent”, as well as a super talented artist, as described by the British art historian Frances Spalding in her acclaimed book Vanessa Bell , from 1983, one of the first and most complete works focused on the life and work of VB. In its pages, Spalding talks regarding Bell’s great intelligence and maturity, his enviable sense of humor and irony, emphasizing, on the other hand, how “in the naturalistic paintings of his mature years, the world of appearances became reproduced with sympathy and feeling, never exaggerated in pursuit of sensationalism. The state is always contemplative, the result of a quiet concentration.
Studland Beach, 1912, Vanessa Bell
Because beyond the romances, there is the valuable work of someone who studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1899, who had a second artistic awakening in 1910 following witnessing a post-impressionist art exhibition. Paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso have a strong impact on her, and she sees in them “an indication of a possible path, a sudden liberation, a stimulus to feel for myself”, in her words. It is this display that is said to give Vanessa Bell a kind of license to pursue line and color almost to the point of abstraction, in a stage of experimentation that is ahead of her contemporaries in Britain. According to specialists, she incorporates the lessons of Fauvism and Cubism into her still lifes and landscapes, or she superimposes pure geometric shapes. And though she returns to figuration in 1915, the impact of this period lingers, present in the composition and innovative use of color in her later pieces.
Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915. Vanessa Bell
Bell was also innovative in her attempt to blur the lines between fine and applied art, co-directing with Fry and Grant the “Omega Workshops,” whose modernist products ranged from furniture to stained glass and mosaics, as well as vibrantly hued textiles that they revealed Vanessa’s distaste for sober Victorian designs. She also created the original covers for most of her sister’s novels and essays, capturing – in her loose, elliptical, suggestive style – something of the rhythm of Virginia’s prose…
Having said what has been said, perhaps the last great solo show devoted to her work was Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), staged in 2017 by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, whose curatorship team then asserted that it was “the first important retrospective” on the artist. For the occasion, they presented more than a hundred pieces of their authorship, including paintings, decorative papers, ceramics, textiles, the covers of Woolf’s books, among other works that allowed us to discover the many facets of Vanessa, who explored the portrait, nature dead, the landscape; she moved fluently -as has been said- between the fine and applied arts; she was at the forefront of her contemporaries in moving closer to abstraction…
Abstract Painting, 1914, Vanessa Bell
A fascinating legacy
The exhibition, in short, covered his extensive career, from his early paintings as a student at the Royal Academy at the beginning of the 20th century to his final self-portraits, shortly following he died in 1961, confirming what, at that time, was said by the writer and historian Virginia Nicholson, her granddaughter: “Being so prolific, her work is disparate, but in her best moments, my grandmother was able to combine grandeur and simplicity in fascinating works.”
Of course, since then, there have been other -counted- exhibitions that have recovered part of his work, already with a shared poster. Such is the case of the ambitious exhibition in homage to Virginia Woolf that, some time ago, was presented at the Tate St. Ives, a coastal branch of the London museum in Cornwall, with the presence of more than 80 artists. Or, an exhibition that deserves special mention, From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, from 2018, where the English public was able to see for the first time a dazzling and pioneering series that was decades ahead of the emblematic Judy Chicago’s feminist Dinner Party: a set of hand-painted plates by Bell and Grant featuring portraits of 50 stunning women from history, including the Greek poet Sappho, Egyptian queen Cleopatra, Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, writer Charlotte Brontë, the actress Greta Garbo…
Why both Vanessa and her rich and varied work continue to be relegated to the background? Her granddaughter was asked some time ago. And Nicholson’s theory is simple: she believes that certain prejudices persist that place her as “a snobbish, elitist woman, who drank champagne in her tower, something that might not be more wrong. At the end of the day, it all boils down to what do people of art expect: does she seek anger and protest, or does she delight in everyday virtues and the pleasures of sensuality?
Vanessa (Stephen) Bell pintando a Lady Robert Cecil, 1905
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