Vanessa Bell

Published 13/03/2025

Vanessa Bell

To accompany its exhibition Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, organised in partnership with Charleston, the MK Gallery held a one-day conference at which experts and enthusiasts discussed the pioneering painter and founder member of the Bloomsbury Group

by NICOLA HOMER

Iceland Poppies (c1908-09), a remarkable still-life painting by Vanessa Bell, was discussed at a conference on 24 January, during a retrospective of the 20th-century artist at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The painting was the first work that Bell, sister of the author Virginia Woolf, exhibited at the New English Art Club in London. The work featured during an opening talk by Wendy Hitchmough, author of the forthcoming book Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical, on the artist’s family and the Friday Club, as part of the wider circle of the Bloomsbury Group.

The art historian Frances Spalding, whose excellent biography on Bell was published in 1983, considered the development of the artist’s picture-making, from academia to abstraction, and observed that Walter Sickert greatly admired Iceland Poppies. The curator Rebecca Birrell reflected on its depiction of a pharmacist’s jar, a green glass poison bottle and poppies, describing it as a vanitas painting, where objects are symbolic of the inevitability of death and earthly pleasures. Birrell observed that the central section of Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse (Time Passes) where furniture rests in an abandoned summerhouse, communicates a sense of loss in this tradition.

Hitchmough read from her new book: “Vanessa was one of the most radical and influential artists working in Britain in the first decades of the 20th century. She opened up professional opportunities for women, including her sister. She was one of the first artists in Britain to produce fully resolved abstract paintings and collages. She exhibited in London and Paris alongside artists such as Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, Thérèse Lessore, Paul Nash, and artists more closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group in the years immediately preceding the first world war.”

She continued: “Her abstracts were ambitious and deliberate contributions to an international visual dialogue about the future of painting. Vanessa’s fortitude and her determination as a pioneer were rooted in a succession of tragedies early in her life. She was born in 1879. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an eminent and well-connected figure in literary circles. He was a writer and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Stephen, had been the favourite model of her aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron.”

Hitchmough said that an important aspect of Vanessa’s work as a modernist woman was making collaborative, creative environments in which she could establish a reputation on her own terms and be seen as a professional. In 1904, Vanessa and Virginia travelled to Paris and Clive Bell took them to a bohemian cafe and introduced them to his friends. This, said Hitchmough, showed Vanessa an alternative culture in which female artists could live and work independently. Encouraged by the success of the Bloomsbury Group’s Thursday evenings, started by her brother Thoby Stephen and his university friends, Vanessa launched the Friday Club in 1905. Hitchmough explained: “She started the Friday Club, she later wrote, in a vain hope of creating something of the same kind of atmosphere here in London. Researching my book on Bell, it was interesting to see how often her achievements were credited to the men in her life … I had to dig into the detail to establish that it was very clearly Vanessa, with Virginia’s active support, who invented that club and made it work. Vanessa’s vision for the Friday Club was ambitious and progressive. It would hire rooms, organise annual exhibitions and create a forum where young radicals would meet and discuss the arts. It soon became a hub for emerging modernists.”

Hitchmough added: “Vanessa drew her Bloomsbury friends into the club as well as the artists that she had known from the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade. She invited Lytton Strachey and his sister Pippa, and they in turn invited Duncan Grant. Desmond MacCarthy gave a paper on art and later, when Vanessa and Clive met Roger Fry, and shared a railway carriage with him on the train from Cambridge to London, Vanessa followed that meeting up with an invitation to him to talk at the Friday Club. The club offered a professional platform that Vanessa could use to further her career as a modernist. The Friday Club defied social conventions by promoting serious discussion between men and women about the arts, regardless of gender and class. It nurtured Bloomsbury’s interest in modernism and visual culture, and it organised increasingly important exhibitions. Artists who would later contribute to the Omega Workshops, including Vanessa, Roger, Duncan, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, Winifred Gill, Edward Wadsworth and Paul Nash, all exhibited first with the Friday Club.”

Hitchmough concluded with a discussion of Iceland Poppies, which was exhibited with the New English Art Club and praised by the influential painter Walter Sickert. Woolf would later write an essay, Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), in which she argued for a close connection between the visual arts and literature.

Spalding called Iceland Poppies a highlight of Bell’s oeuvre. The art historian traced the artist’s changing awareness of picture-making, from her academic copying to her brief foray into pure abstraction, as seen in her important piece Studland Beach (c1912), now at the Tate. The painting followed Fry’s groundbreaking 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which introduced French modernist painting to the British public with works by artists including Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Spalding discussed the influence of one of her first teachers, John Singer Sargeant, which can perhaps be seen in a portrait of a Bloomsbury Group member, Saxon Sydney-Turner at the Piano (c1908), on display in the exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery. The portrait usually hangs in Charleston in East Sussex.

Spalding said: “When Vanessa Bell met Sargent at the Royal Academy’s School of Painting and Sculpture, he was at the height of his fame in this country. His parents were two Americans, who had chosen to live abroad, leading a nomadic, expatriate life and their son, John Singer Sargent, was born in Florence and grew up familiar with the cultural capitals of Europe. Exposed to art and culture from birth, Sargent attended art schools wherever he was living, and became such a consummate cosmopolitan that he easily gained portrait commissions of social elites, first in Paris and then in England, and finally in the United States … By the time he became one of Vanessa Bell’s tutors at the Royal Academy of Arts, his fame was similar to that enjoyed today by David Hockney. To see him standing at his easel in the life drawing room, his head flung back, his eyes staring intently, his drawing arm fully extended, must have added a note of undeniable drama to the life class.”

Spalding presented a self-portrait by Sargent, which Bell wrote about in 1902. Spalding said: “[Bell wrote:] ’Sargent is teaching most extraordinarily well at the RA.’ She continues: ‘He gives lessons that would apply to any paintings.’ Apparently, the drawing, by which I think she means the compositional design, is to be got entirely by painting thickly the different tones. ‘He generally tells me that my things are too grey, the one thing he is down upon is when he thinks anyone is trying for an effect, regardless of truth.’ Now, it seems that this is quite useful advice, I think, for the early stage in the painter’s career. And in the spring of 1904, soon after the death of her father, when Virginia and some of her siblings, took a holiday in Italy, and spent time with friends of the family in Florence, she visited the home of the writer Vernon Lee, and was delighted to see the small portrait [of Lee by Sargent], now in the Tate, hanging on the wall. It’s so vital, a formal yet memorable portrait. Sargent, having lived in Paris, was aware of the impressionists, and seems here to be striving for something of impressionist immediacy.”

The conference sketched in chapters of the artist’s life and work while exploring the social circles of the Bloomsbury Group to which she belonged. Darren Clarke, the head of collections, research and exhibitions at Charleston, described the house, a rural retreat for the Bloomsbury Group, which it acquired in 1916, and its heritage of the Omega Workshops, an experimental design collective, opened by Fry in July 1913, with Bell and Grant as co-directors, at Fitzroy Square in London. “Charleston is the enduring example of the influence of the Omega Workshops, where art is no longer confined by the picture frame on the wall, where colour, shape and line, textures and brushmarks, and soft enhanced surfaces, abstract patterns and floral motifs, modernist masterpieces and simple pots and ornaments happily rub along with each other, and it is Charleston that maintains the ideals and the philosophy of the Omega Workshops,” he said.

Connections existed between the group and the stage. Bloomsbury socialised with members of the Ballets Russes: the economist John Maynard Keynes married one of Diaghilev’s prima ballerinas, Lydia Lopokova. According to the art historian Sophie Pickford, Bell contributed works to ballet performances between 1928 and 1933, for example A Tschouvachian Wedding, staged at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge, in November 1928, shortly after the publication that year of Woolf’s novel Orlando, exploring narratives of gender, which members of the Bloomsbury Group were reading. Pickford said Woolf visited King’s College Cambridge and had lunch with George “Dadie” Rylands, an influential theatre director, which inspired her feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929). Pickford observed: “We’ve got some amazing creativity coming particularly from Bloomsbury women in 1928, focused around King’s and around Cambridge at that time, despite it being a very male-dominated place.”

Potted by Phyllis Keyes, decorated by Vanessa Bell, Music Room Vase, c1932. Ceramic, cast from an Italian or Spanish original, 22 cm x 13.5 cm x 13.5 cm, Charleston Trust. © Estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2024. Photo: Charleston Trust.

Spalding summed up what made the Bloomsbury Group so special. One of the remarkable things about it, she said, is how long it remained in existence: “Most groups are formed for a certain reason, to change something, to do something particular, and when that’s done, then they move on and separate, but Bloomsbury, because of its love of conversation, were always happy to meet each other.” She added: “Their radicalism is extraordinary.” A forthcoming book, Comrades in Art, reveals that when the Artists International Association began in 1933, Bell immediately joined its advisory committee and remained on it throughout the Spanish civil war. Spalding said: “She was much more involved than the rest of the family because of her son Julian going out to act as an ambulance driver and being killed very quickly. And she was involved with the things that they devised to raise money for children in Spain and so on. And she stayed on that advisory committee right through the second world war. She regularly exhibited in the Artists International Association’s exhibitions.”

In the afternoon, the themes of internationalism and radicalism connected the talks. Birrell discussed Bell’s still life works, for example Iceland Poppies and Still Life with Coffee Pot (c1916-17), featured in the exhibition, where the artist turned to the French painter Jean Chardin for inspiration. The art historian Grace Brockington delivered a presentation, entitled Talking About a Conversation (1913-16), situating the painting alongside social history, and art historian Hana Leaper focused on the Famous Women Dinner Service, commissioned by the museum director Kenneth Clark, in Dining With the Famous Women: A Legacy of Radical Hospitality.

Brockington, who specialises in connections between art and theatre, internationalism and literature, investigated Bell’s A Conversation, picturing a trio of women in conversation next to a window with a garden outside. In an analysis of conservation imagery, Brockington explored implications of Bell’s revisions of the painting, arguing they radically transformed the meaning of the painting, its resonance with contemporary debate and the significance it now holds, in relation to two themes of war and gender. Brockington characterised the work as an Omega painting and framed it as a conversation about the world of modern art: “This was the British avant garde at its most ebullient and experimental, before they were broken up by the declaration of war in August 1914.” Brockington observed Bell’s connection to the avant garde in a description of her short trip to Paris in March 1914, when she had the opportunity to see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein and suggested that it was a point of learning about “the representation of emancipated womanhood” for the artist. Yet by 1916, the darkening of the palette reflected societal change since the opening of the Omega Workshops and the first version of the work. Brockington made an intelligent appropriation of one of Woolf’s opinions of Bell’s work, which perhaps acted as a synecdoche for this strong character. “To wrap up, Bell’s Conversation is often celebrated for its inscrutability, for the way it portrays an engrossing conversation without giving any clues to its subject,” said Brockington. “And in a sense, the impossibility of narrating an image is the subject of this painting. As Virginia Woolf put it: ‘The puzzle is that while Mrs Bell’s pictures are immensely expressive, their expressiveness has no truck with words. No stories are told. No insinuations are made. The hillside is bare. The group of women is silent.’”