Vanessa Bell has seduced me. She has offered nothing fancier than bottles and a bowl, by a window that looks out on terracotta roofs and wooded hills. The frame of the window runs just inside the frame of the painting, squeezing the table and its contents into a narrow strip. The stout blue flask is clear as a Cornish sky in May, the delicate stoppered bottle the colour of a midsummer sea. Beyond the claustrophobia of the room lie buildings licked with all the rich red pinks of a rose garden.
She was aptly named, Bell. At her best, her colours ring with clarity – chiming one against the other yet held distinct. She luxuriates in it, but the spaces she conjures are lived. This is not a mere still life, but a space for bodies, a home. For all its tonal richness the constraints of the interior space also delineate Bell’s position: a young mother, gazing through the window into a world through which she cannot move with freedom.
Is Vanessa Bell the most famous artist whose work you barely know? Offhand, I can picture only a few paintings – a wistful late self-portrait beneath a broad straw hat, a tender early sketch of her sister Virginia Woolf, a wild and fleshy portrait of David “Bunny” Garnett, his face pink and hair flaming from farm work. Thanks to her associations – with the Bloomsbury Group, the Omega Workshops, Charleston House – Bell is unquestionably a “name”, but one whose life always threatens to eclipse her art.
Bell has seemed condemned to play a supporting role in the story of her own life – as hostess, inspiration, lover, mother. Her art is most familiar as fragments illustrating other people’s stories: Woolf’s, Bell’s partner, Duncan Grant’s, and Roger Fry’s, the friend (and sometime lover) with whom she and Grant ran the Omega Workshops. Roughly chronological, A World of Form and Colour is the largest exhibition to focus on Bell alone. More than 60 years after her death she has finally acquired main character energy.
Across the tumult of the early 20th century, Bell opens herself to change and experimentation. Her impeccable early portraits have the fresh clarity of her tutor, John Singer Sargent. Away from the canvas, Bell was already an independent spirit, organising a progressive Friday Club for artists and writers.
In 1910, Roger Fry held the first of two London exhibitions of post-impressionist painters including Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh. The new art provoked both ridicule and outrage. Bell, already radicalised, thrilled to the pictorial possibilities.
Her most dynamic and energised work came in the decade that followed. She played delightedly with pointillism in a portrait of Fry (in her words, painted in the “leopard manner”), and experimented with collage in 1914’s surprising Still Life (Triple Alliance). Great expanses of rich colour entered her paintings, as the space within them became shallower. The rectangle of a canvas or board was a zone of freedom that contrasted with the restrictions that lay beyond, even for a wealthy woman such as Bell. In Nursery Tea (1912), she portrays the domestic structure that allows her to paint: two nursemaids in crisp aprons ministering to Bell’s children in their highchairs.
Greater pictorial freedom came in 1913 through the Omega Workshops, for which Bell designed rugs and textiles. Dabbling in “lesser” decorative arts was transgressive, but it opened Bell to pattern and abstraction, the power of line and colour. That freedom infects her paintings – in A Conversation (1913-16), three women tower like a mountain range of dark overcoats, their angular faces tilted intently towards one another.
In 1916, Bell rented Charleston farmhouse in Sussex with her two sons (a daughter was born in 1918), Grant and his lover Garnett, conscientious objectors both, whose war years were spent in manual labour. Bell and Grant summoned beauty on a shoestring – colours and patterns over every surface, whimsical figures painted on to panels and chests. Included here are doors and screens from Charleston itself, as well as a trio of portraits in which the house performs as much as a character as the sitter.
Historically, female artists have been condemned as copyists rather than drivers of innovation, and Bell’s openness to inspiration taken as evidence to condemn her. The sweeping expanse of her work here instead offers more useful ways in which we might appraise and celebrate Bell.
Her modernism was not only pictorial. There are three fabulous male nudes (a radical subject for a female painter) for which the sitters were Grant’s lovers. Her late works are situated in a painted world of her own creation: Still Life with a Bowl of Medlars (1953) shows fruit she has grown on a patterned table top she has painted. Artists today like to talk about conceptual “world building”. Bell lived it.
A World of Form and Colour is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 19 October until 23 February
