A Place Called Space: Vanessa Bell - A World of Form and Colour. Part 2

Vanessa Bell - A World of Form and Colour. Part 2

at MK (Milton Keynes Gallery)

This is the second post on this exhibition. You can see the first part here

I am going to reproduce the introdution from the first part so that each post can stand independently, but if you have already seen it, then skip the introdution and go straight to the photographs..

We went to to Milton Keynes (you can see my post on the town here ) especially to see this exhibition. It's the largest ever display of work by Bell and it was fantastic. There were some paintings that I was hoping to see which were not part of the exhibition, particularly Strudland Beach, but it did not matter, as there was so much wonderful work there to see. There is a post on Strudland Beach which you can see here . You can also see all three versions of that iconic painting here .

Bell was a pioneering modernist. Her work was at the forefront of British abstraction, but she also produced many portraits, still lifes and landscape paintings. At the same time, she created conditions in which artists could flourish. This involved organising the Friday Club for artists to meet and co-founding the experimental design collective, Omega Workshops.

She was also an important part of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century. Collaboration formed an essential part of Bell's approach to art, including with her sister, Virginia Woolf, and the artist Duncan Grant with whom Vanessa Bell's all-encompassing approach to art found its ultimate expression in Charleston, the farmhouse they shared in East Sussex.

Vanessa Bell was born into a wealthy literary family living in Kensington, London. She studied art in South Kensington and at the Royal Academy Schools. Following the death of her parents, Bell moved, together with her siblings, to 46 Gordon Square in the unfashionable Bloomsbury area where she rejected Victorian attitudes and sought a radical new way of living. She began the Friday Club where male and female artists were regarded as equals and exhibited together.

Through these events she developed relationships with her future husband, the critic Clive Bell, as well as her life partner and collaborator, the artist Duncan Grant and other members of what became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Travel around Europe introduced Bell to the Old Masters, especially in Italy, the continental avant-garde in Paris and various folk traditions. Houses rented in Sussex provided spaces for Bloomsbury artists and authors to meet and work together. In 1910 Bell met the painter and critic Roger Fry whose exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists was deeply influential. She recalled: 'here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself'.

Still Life with Coffee Pot, 1916-17, (oil on canvas)

Coffee was a marker of freedom for the Bloomsbury group, with Virginia Woolf writing that shortly after moving to Gordon Square: 'We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins... we were going to paint; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o'clock. Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial'.

Bottles on a Table, 1915-17, (oil on canvas)

The Madonna Lily, 1915-17, (oil on canvas)

The realistic colours in this painting, compared to those of, for example, Oranges and Lemons (1914) show Bell moving away from abstraction. Much later, when her son Quentin asked her why she had made her work more naturalistic, she replied that she 'had come to the conclusion that nature was much richer and more interesting than anything one could invent'.

Still Life with Wildflowers, 1915, (oil on canvas)

Translation of Velazquez's Infanta Margareta, c.1940, (watercolour and gouache on paper)

Bell studied and copied the Old Masters throughout her life, contributing five paintings to Roger Fry's Copies and Translations of Old Masters exhibition at the Omega Workshops in 1971.

Of Velazquez she noted: 'One never seems to get tired of looking at him. Hisw colour is most surprising... some of the paintings here are almost dazzling, bright blues and all sorts of the gayest colours, almost like Renoir'.

Translation of Rembrandt's Lady with the Lap Dog, undated, (pencil and ink on paper)

She noted that Rembrandt's 'colour is more lovely than one could imagine'.

Study for stage set, 1925-30, (watercolour)

Bell designed several stage sets.

Alfriston, 1931, (ink on paper)

From the 1920s Shell-Mex commissioned artists to design posters to encourage a newly mobile public to explore the British countryside in their cars. In 1929 Bell was commissioned to create a painting which could be reproduced by colour lithography. She chose a view of the village of Alfriston and depicts the church and river in a pointillist style.

Interior with the Artist's Daughter, 1935-36, (oil on canvas)

* * *

Later in life Bell endured a series of tragedies: the death of Roger Fry, (1934); her son Julian moving to China before dying in the Spanish Civil War, (1937); her Fitzroy Street studio and much of her early work being destroyed by a bomb (1940); the death of her sister Virginia Woolf (1941); developing breast cancer (1944); and the death of her friend, the economist John Maynard Keynes (1946). Nonetheless, she continued to exhibit widely, was commissioned to produce church murals in Sussex and travelled frequently in France and Italy.

Other than scenes from her travels, during this period Bell's subjects were usually found close to Charleston and she produced many still lifes and portraits of generations of her family and friends. In recording her domestic environment, Bell celebrated her home as a place of creativity and freedom in contrast to the conformity and restrictions of her youth. Bell's life and work were characterised by her insistence on doing things on her own terms: 'I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me... If you cannot accept as I seem to you to be, then you must give me up, for I have no intention of confessing my sins or defending my virtues'.

Flowers on a Balcony, (oil on board)

Bell uses colour to merge the balcony table with the water behind and sky above, unifying the composition and creating a flatness on which the circles of the red flowers and rectangles of the buildings sit like abstract forms. Movement is also created in the dynamic shape of the shadow of the vase and the diagonals of the stems on the left.

West Pier, Brighton, East Sussex, 1955, (oil on canvas)

Early in her career Bell used beach scenes as a set for paintings focused on the relationships between figures, with the beach and sea used as flat patches of colour and compositional devices to provide diagonals. Later in life, her attention turned to architectural structures they housed, with this painting, showing the now ruined West Pier at Brighton. Its shadow on the water and the boat mast provide the strong vertical and horizontal elements characteristic of Bell's painting. Two seated figures are alost hidden to the left of the boat.