Carrie Lee
In the midst of a radically changing world, Vanessa Bell painted her life, used her privilege to foster artists and had lifelong relationships with key artistic and intellectual figures that changed our cultural landscape. She began the Bloomsbury group with her sister Virginia Woolf and with friends and lovers who believed that a group of like minded souls could work together and forge a path to a freer and better way of living. Many significant members such as Maynard Keynes the economist and Roger Fry the art critic and acclaimed pioneer of British modernism were lifelong supporters and often stayed with other key Bloomsbury members in a large country house called Charleston.
There is an English feeling of the comforts of home and a naive cosiness in her paintings which record everyday experience of nature, reflections, flowers, windows, doorways, interiors, people and objects. At the same time there can be a directness and a restrained exuberance of colour and shape. In her early days as an artist her paintings were included in a number of key exhibitions alongside the likes of Cezanne and Matisse both of whom she greatly admired and from whom she drew influence. Her close friend Roger Fry staged the first ever post-impressionist exhibition of 1910 to a dubious London audience. It was the first glimpse of this new style of painting in England and it created huge consternation and yet had high impact at the same time. This was a period before the post-impressionists were accepted and their work appeared inaccurate, careless and nonsensical to most. Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group admired and supported the post-impressionists turning away from realism. They wanted this different kind of reality in art, one that expressed feeling and perception through form and colour.
A sketchy post-impressionist style can be seen at times in Bell’s work as well as experiments with outlining which she admired in Gauguin and Van Gogh. She used flat blocks of colour in the manner of Cezanne to create vague and sometimes blanched interiors and landscapes. At other times she used vivid impressionistic colour. Her faces were often hidden or simply blanks.
Interior 1912 is a quiet, still scene of two people completely absorbed in painting with a framed doorway and garden beyond. Soft beautiful colours create a peaceful, private scene with the outside glowing vaguely beyond. Not all of her paintings convey this quiet still interiority. Leaning a little towards abstraction, it conveys an expression of that private yet communal creativity and industriousness that was at the centre of her purpose.
Bell lived through two world wars as well as the Spanish Civil War which claimed her son, yet no overt political stance is apparent. Even so, Abstract Painting 1914, was radical and at the forefront of modernism. It follows the grid pattern used in interior design preparation .
Composed of a cluster of rectangles and two floating islands on a ground of vivid yellow, it is the antithesis of her representational paintings of interiors that reveal layer on layer of space and depth such as a hallway that leads to a framed window with a landscape beyond. Working in the flat abstract perhaps required Bell to use a craft based approach. However, she created a complete abstract image and that was indeed radical. It is not for example a painting of a vase of flowers becoming abstracted but it is utterly and purely abstract, possibly the first ever produced in the UK.
Whether her few abstract works, which were largely for personal experimentation, represented a conscious break from realism or were an experiment in design or even possibly both we can’t be sure.
Bell’s painting pushed ideas and her creation of a space for innovative thought had a lasting impact. The Bloomsbury group established the Omega workshops to create designs and produce contemporary objects for commissions giving opportunities for artists, designers and makers of craft. This spirit of industry, creativity and collaboration is still seen in some approaches to art education today, as is the emphasis on feeling, experimentation and in the periodic re-emergence of craft and design.
Milton Keynes Gallery until 23 February 2025 in partnership with Charleston and Jerwood Foundation