In 1932, the historian Kenneth Clark commissioned a ceramic dinner service from the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. But he got something different: 48 plates, each painted with a portrait of a famous woman, from the Queen of Sheba to Greta Garbo. (Plus two bearing the images of the artists.)
The “Famous Women Dinner Service” is a central feature of the exhibition “Vanessa Bell, a World of Form and Color” at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes through Feb. 23.
“It’s of the great works of feminist art of the 20th century,” said Anthony Spira, the director of MK Gallery, who co-curated the exhibition with the head of exhibitions, Fay Blanchard. “We are familiar with Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party,’ but this is hardly known.”
That’s perhaps because Bell wasn’t just the sister of Virginia Woolf, but the linchpin of what became known as the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of friends and lovers who included Grant, Woolf and her husband Leonard, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell, the critic Roger Fry, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the writer Lytton Strachey. The fame of the group, and of Charleston, the Sussex house where they gathered and resided, has meant that Bell is rarely considered an important artist in her own right.
“A World of Form and Color,” the largest and most comprehensive display of Bell’s work to date, aims to redress that by featuring more than 150 artworks, including rarely seen paintings as well as drawings, ceramics, furniture, textiles and book covers.
“We are taking her work out of the domestic context it is often seen in at Charleston, and putting it in a formal, large-scale white cube gallery in a very modern city,” Spira said. “It’s a very different way of showing Vanessa Bell’s work; we are keen to bring a contemporary perspective to help contextualize it.”
Bell, he added, had never been sufficiently acknowledged for blazing a trail for women artists through her embrace of European modernism, exploration of abstraction and work across different media.
The exhibition takes a roughly chronological approach, but first introduces us to Bell’s family and friends through her early portraits of her father, sister, husband and sons. There are also standout early pieces: the 1908-9 “Iceland Poppies” (“I didn’t know you were a painter. Continuez!” wrote the artist Walter Sickert after seeing it); and “Nursery Tea” (1912), a large painting with blocks of color and a spare compositional form suggesting a new stage in her artistic development. In the next room, the floating, geometric wedges of color in “Abstract Painting” and “Abstract Composition,” both created in 1914, suggest “she was trying to create a kind of visual music,” Spira said.
The exhibition shows “how strong Vanessa Bell is in the 1910-14 period, bold and almost minimal, streets ahead of anything you would have found at the Royal Academy at that time,” said Frances Spalding, the author of “Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist.” Later, Spalding added, “she reverted to a more representational style, but with a powerful intelligence behind it.”
The rooms that follow show a subsequent decade of engaged, often experimental work as Bell tries out pointillism in a portrait of Roger Fry; composes a paper mosaic of two women tending to a child; collages newspaper, oils and pastels in “Still Life”; and experiments with pure abstraction and rich color.
Although Bell moved away from abstraction in her paintings, she pursued it avidly in the rug designs she created for patrons and for the Omega Workshops, which she co-founded with Grant and Fry, partly to help young artists receive commissions for furniture, fabrics, carpets and other household items. (“Omega products were a shocking intrusion upon the English love of prettiness,” Spalding writes in her Bell biography.)
“Omega was a period of great experimentation,” said Blanchard, the co-curator, noting the connections between some of the paintings Bell created during this period, like “A Conversation,” and her abstract designs. “She was one of the first British artists to experiment with abstraction — but no one knew.”
In Bell’s time, Spalding pointed out, there were limited opportunities for female artists to exhibit. “The fascinating thing, looking back, is how slow it is for women to get real notice and attention,” she said. There was a tendency to regard women as an inferior species, Spalding added.
The diversity of Bell’s work also probably didn’t help, Spira said: “Nowadays people work across whatever art forms they want; then it was probably seen as dilettante-like rather than curious and exploratory.”
After Bell moved to Charleston in 1916, together with Grant (her lover despite his homosexuality) and David Garnett (Grant’s lover despite his heterosexuality), her creativity exploded, as seen in the exhibition’s paintings, ceramics, decorative screens and furniture.
Grant and Bell turned the house into a complete work of art, painting every surface and piece of furniture. In turn, Bell wove her domestic environment into her paintings. The social historian Virginia Nicholson, Bell’s granddaughter, remembers sitting for portraits by Bell and Grant during family holidays. “That whole environment was a bit taken for granted, none of us thought it was of art historical importance,” Nicholson said. “We just knew that art was something our family did.”
The exhibition’s final room shows the more somber paintings of Bell’s later years, marked by the death of her son Julian in the Spanish Civil War, and her experience with breast cancer. A late self-portrait from 1958 is quietly beautiful in its contrasting deep-toned colors and portrayal of a woman both wary and resigned.
The show makes a compelling case for Bell’s importance as a pioneering 20th-century female artist, even as it illustrates the uneven nature of her work. But Bell also matters, Spira said, “because she democratized a creative practice by paying attention to everything; the domestic, the mundane. It doesn’t sound radical, but it was.”
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