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By Margie MacKinnon
Originally published in Restoration Conversations magazine
Autumn / Winter 2024 - Issue 6
Vanessa Bell, 1912, Conversation Piece, University of Hull © Estate of Vanessa Bell, DACS 2024
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) is best known as a painter and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of English artists, writers and intellectuals which was influential in the first half of the twentieth century. She was born into a well-to-do literary and artistic family. Unusually, her parents encouraged her and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, to follow their own intellectual pursuits (while her two brothers studied at Cambridge). On the death of both parents, the four siblings moved to the then unfashionable Bloomsbury area of London, where they were intent on creating a new, freer way of living, after leaving behind the “gloom and depression” of their Victorian family home in Kensington.
Bell was also a founder member, along with artist and critic Roger Fry and painter Duncan Grant, of the Omega Workshops, a project that combined artists’ studios and public showrooms with a view to incorporating the principles of modern art into the design of furniture, fabrics and household accessories. During the two world wars, Vanessa and other members of the group sought refuge in Charleston, a farmhouse in the Sussex countryside. It was not just her home but the embodiment of her artistic practice. Her life and her art were inseparable. Every visitor to Charleston was a potential model, every surface a potential canvas.
Ahead of the opening on October 19 of the exhibition ‘Vanessa Bell – A World of Form and Colour’, Restoration Conversations sat down with Fay Blanchard, Head of Exhibitions at MK Gallery, to discuss the artist and the renewed interest in her work and legacy. The exhibition, her largest-ever solo show, includes drawings, paintings, ceramics and furniture.
Restoration Conversations: What was the impetus for the Vanessa Bell exhibition?
Fay Blanchard: I think it is part of a general, sector-wide attempt to redress the balance in terms of the gender split of artists that have been exhibited [in the past]. Everyone is looking at ‘who are the female artists that have not had the recognition they deserve?’ Around the time of the Second World War there was quite a big backlash against Bell’s work. At that time, the more angsty style of [Francis] Bacon and [Lucian] Freud became popular. And then it moved on to the abstraction of Victor Pasmore and [Patrick] Heron, and then you’ve got pop coming in. Bloomsbury didn’t align with any of those things and, in comparison, looked as if it wasn’t particularly avant garde. And I think also there was a lot of snobbery around it, that feeling that the art wasn’t socially engaged enough, and that it didn’t follow the accepted trajectory of modernism.
Festival of the Garden, Charleston, 2024, ph. Lewis Ronald
Then, more recently, there’s been a huge re-evaluation of Bell’s work and of Bloomsbury more widely. An academic called Christopher Reed published an important study looking at Bloomsbury as a subculture that created their own space where they could live in a different way within the dominant culture, rather than as a group with a manifesto to change the world. There have also been younger academics such as Rebecca Birrell and Claudia Tobin who have been looking at female artists not through the male-dominated accepted story of modernism but looking at the work on its own terms and [in Bell’s case] thinking that what she was doing was quite radical. She was taking traditionally female subjects but then presenting them in a radical new way.
RC: More specifically, why is MK Gallery doing this show? Many of the paintings and objects can be seen at Charleston, Bell’s home in Sussex which has been preserved almost exactly as it was at her death in 1961.
FB: With a lot of our historic shows, we like to take things out of one environment and put them in another to see how they get on; with George Stubbs, for example, we were taking paintings out of stately homes, putting them in a white cube gallery and actually looking at them as paintings. After visiting Charleston, I had the same thought about taking Bell’s works out of the house where it is impossible to disconnect them from the artist’s life. I wanted to see these paintings as paintings in a contemporary gallery space with great lighting to see them afresh.
RC: The show, which comprises over 120 pieces, includes almost an equal balance of paintings and decorative and other objects. Part of the Omega Workshops project was to blur the distinction between fine and applied art. Does the exhibition reflect this?
FB: Yes, that’s how we are approaching it. For example, her designs for rugs very directly lead up to her working in painted abstraction, so that’s how we’re telling the story. With the other design items, we are not seeking to recreate Charleston as that would be impossible … and naff. So, what we’re doing instead is taking a lot of the items from Charleston and presenting them alongside the paintings [in which they appear] to show that the house was a never-ending project but also a kind of muse. I don’t know if that’s been done before, to present the paintings with the items from the house.
RC: You are curating the show and creating a plan for the exhibition while waiting for the works on loan to be delivered to the gallery. How much is likely to change when you actually have the works in front of you?
FB: When you have decided on the kind of narrative that you want to tell, that generally doesn’t change enormously in the middle of installing the show. But there are always surprises. There are always things that are bigger, or smaller, than you think. There may be paintings you intended to put together, but the frames look awful together. Sometimes what worked on paper doesn’t work in the space …
Vanessa Bell, Iceland Poppies, 1908-09 © estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved
DACS 2024. CHA/P/468, Charleston. Photograph © The Charleston Trust
RC: Do you have a particular favourite object or painting in the exhibition?
FB: There are a few that I am really fond of. One is Iceland Poppies (1908-09). Bell is renowned as a colourist but I don’t think her work as a colourist very early in her career is that well known. The range of grays is so well handled, and then that pop of the red poppy is absolutely gorgeous. I can’t wait to see that in the context of the later works and how she comes back to that in other pieces. Another painting which I’ve never seen in real life that I’m excited we are including is Nursery Tea (c.1912). She very deliberately pushed herself to work in a bigger scale. It was a real statement piece for her, because it’s a painting of children and nursemaids. It is a subject associated with a domestic space and a domestic scale, but she just blows it up to gallery scale, with these flat areas of colour and blank faces. It is a completely unsentimental depiction of childhood.
RC: Vanessa Bell’s relationship to her garden has recently been examined in the ‘Gardening Bohemia’ exhibition at the Garden Museum in London. Does the garden at Charleston feature prominently in her work?
FB: Yes, there are lots of paintings of the garden. Very often she’s inside the house looking out into the garden, or she’s bringing the garden into the house. The plants in her still lifes are still growing at Charleston, and she has her favourites – red hot pokers and artichoke flowers appear over and over again, sometimes in a way that you think there might be some symbolism there.
RC: Do the gardeners at Charleston refer to the paintings to continue the sort of planting that Vanessa had there?
FB: Yes. During the First World War they had to make the garden a vegetable garden. Afterwards, Roger Fry redesigned it, and it became primarily a flower garden. The Charleston gardeners still have some of the original plans to be able to maintain it as it was. And a huge amount of Vanessa’s photography was taken in the garden.
RC: Are there photographs in the show as well?
FB: Yes, they are wonderful, but she didn’t use them as the basis of paintings. She was a prolific photographer, but it was a very individual practice. Alongside all the usual family shots, there are some which are more artistic or experimental. A lot of the time she was recording the plays they put on and the fancy dress. The impression you often get in the official photographs of Vanessa Bell is that she is quite stern. And in these photographs, they’re all messing around with the children and the dogs, they’re laughing … I really wanted to bring that side of Charleston into the show.
RC: Bell has been described as having been overshadowed by other, better-known members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. Has she finally emerged from that shadow?
FB: Virginia actually brought more light onto Vanessa and the rest of the group during their lifetimes. Having a catalogue essay written by Woolf would bring greater audiences to Bell’s work. And it didn’t hurt that Bell’s closest friend, Roger Fry, and husband, Clive Bell, were the leading critics at the time, both of whom were putting emphasis on the work of the group. The two sisters were definitely competitive, although they apparently deliberately set out from a young age not to do the same thing. Virginia was words, Vanessa was images. After her death, Virginia’s reputation continued to grow whereas Vanessa was sidelined in her own lifetime. But before that, Virginia would have been a huge asset to have on your team.
RC: In her canvases, Bell creates spaces so skilfully – walls, colours, upholstery, carpets and ceramics – we feel as if we are stepping into her world. Conversely, stepping into Charleston (the house) feels like entering into one of her canvases. Can you think of another artist whose art so intimately reflects her life?
FB: There are quite a few examples of artists who made their home into a total work of art. And there are people like Niki de Saint Phalle, with her Tarot Garden where she lived in one of the sculptures. In Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City, she surrounded herself with things from her artwork, but didn’t make the house into one of her artworks. The closest thing I can think of is Monet’s garden. But I can’t think of any other example of an artist creating their house as an artwork and then going back to it as a sort of inspiration and a muse to then paint. Rebecca Birrell argues that Bell made Charleston a subject of her work because it was a consciously radical move to present this female led space from a female perspective and in a modernist avant garde technique. And maybe that’s why Vanessa Bell not only created Charleston, but then recorded it over and over again in her paintings, because it just feels like a celebration. She seems to be saying, “this is where we’ve come from – the ‘gloom and depression’ - and this is where we are now – this light-filled, pattern-filled, free environment that we’ve made.”
Calliope Arts is providing support to the exhibition through the Vanessa Bell Circle of Friends.
The exhibition ‘Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour’, curated by Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira, is on at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes from 19 October 2024 to 23 February 2025.
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