Vanessa Bell takes centre stage at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Somewhat shockingly, this is Bell’s first major monographic exhibition and it sets out to present her as a pioneer and progressive. We encounter her work at its most radical and exciting, predominantly in the period of intensified experimentation during the 1910s. She emerges at the vital centre of Bloomsbury’s artistic network, her scope and range demonstrated across different genre and media.  Bell’s experiment in pur..

Tobin, Claudia

English

OpenEdition

 
Miranda
Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone /
Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-
speaking world 
14 | 2017
Early American Surrealisms, 1920-1940 / Parable Art
Vanessa Bell 
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 February – 4 June 2017
Claudia Tobin
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/10070
DOI: 10.4000/miranda.10070
ISSN: 2108-6559
Publisher
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
 
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Claudia Tobin, “Vanessa Bell ”, Miranda [Online], 14 | 2017, Online since 18 April 2017, connection on 16
February 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/10070 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/
miranda.10070 
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International License.
Vanessa Bell 
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 February – 4 June 2017
Claudia Tobin
1 Vanessa Bell takes centre stage at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Somewhat
shockingly, this is Bell’s first major monographic exhibition and it sets out to present
her  as  a  pioneer  and  progressive.  We  encounter  her  work  at  its  most  radical  and
exciting, predominantly in the period of intensified experimentation during the 1910s.
She emerges at the vital centre of Bloomsbury’s artistic network, her scope and range
demonstrated across different genre and media. 
2 Bell’s experiment in pure abstraction in late 1914 and early 1915 is often overlooked or
considered apart from her figurative work. However, she pushed the simplification of
form and use of non-naturalistic colour to its limits in both painting and in decorative
design,  venturing  further  into  pure  abstraction  than  many  of  her  European
contemporaries  at  this  time.  In  the  wake  of  the  1910  and  1912  Post-Impressionist
exhibitions, which featured modern European painters including Cézanne, Matisse and
Van Gogh, Bell found new freedoms in form and colour. As she later recalled, she was
impelled to ‘destroy the solidity of objects’ and revelled in their dissolution into colour.
1 This  exhibition  is  a  rare  opportunity  to  see  works  made  at  the  peak  of  her
experimental phase. In Room 2 we encounter Abstract Composition with its bold colour
contrasts  and  authoritative  central  black  square,  alongside  Composition,  a  textured
geometric collage which reveals her affinity with the papier collé techniques employed
by Picasso and Braque. 
3 The exhibition aims,  and rightly so,  to show Bell  alone and on her own terms.  We
should not forget however, that collaboration was central to her project. Bell worked
closely with Duncan Grant creating innovative designs for the Omega workshops, the
interior design company that she co-founded with the art historian Roger Fry in 1913.
If  the  Omega  designs  and  printed  linens  feel  as  fresh  and  contemporary  as ever,
England was not ready for them, and the workshops saw an untimely end to operations
in 1919. They ‘would have succeeded in any other European country’, Fry lamented.2
Bell’s printed linens testify to her place alongside - even as a forerunner - to women
designer contemporaries in Europe, such as Sonia Delaunay.
Vanessa Bell
Miranda, 14 | 2017
1
4 Bell’s adeptness as an ‘innovative home-maker’ and ‘bohemian mother’ is emphasised
throughout the exhibition narrative. Whether in Bloomsbury or Sussex she created an
atmosphere in which creativity could flourish, and tolerance prevailed. This does not so
much counter associations of Bell and the domestic, but it does offer a broader sense of
what this might mean. Her portraits cast a light at once critical and celebratory on her
artistic and literary circle. She is revealed as an acute observer of gesture and posture,
perhaps most strikingly in the elliptical, blurred rendering of features in her portraits
of  her  sister,  Virginia  Woolf.  Her  apparent  resistance  to  hierarchical  distinctions
between the decorative and fine arts is also well demonstrated : we encounter printed
linens, paintings, and book cover designs, alongside works from later decades, which
testify  to  her  integration  of  Omega  products  into  the  spaces  of  the  home.  The
hallucinatory scale and heightened colour of Tea Things is reminiscent of Paul Nash’s
surreal depictions of objects, but it captures the spirit of Bell’s domesticity – vibrant,
daring, and irreverent in its transformation of the everyday. 
5 The non-linear chronology of  this  exhibition feels  appropriately modernist,  but the
thematic  arrangement  of  works  from  disparate  periods  sometimes  disrupts  the
possibility of tracing nuances in Bell’s stylistic evolution. Nevertheless, the third room
is persuasive in its organisation around her contribution to the genre of still life. We
move from the quiet control and understated eloquence of Iceland Poppies (c. 1908-9) to
the kaleidoscopic exuberance of Oranges and Lemons (1914). On the opposite wall, in the
large and enigmatically titled The Other Room, the familiar background blocks of colour
hollow  out  a  striking  central  emptiness,  which  contributes  to  the  sense  of
estrangement  between  three  immobile  figures  who  almost  become  still  lifes  in
themselves. Matisse’s presence is keenly felt here and elsewhere. Bell had visited his
studio in the spring of 1914 and admired his work in the years leading up to this period
– but  this  was  no simple  case  of  imitation.  Her  strongest  works  see  her  absorbing
French modernism and making it her own. 
6 The tension between intimacy and estrangement charge many of  the works in this
exhibition.  In  the  final  room,  A  Conversation captures  a  moment  of  rapt  intimacy
between  three  women.  It  was  suggestive  to  Woolf,  who  imagined  a  version  of  the
painting ‘in prose’. On the opposite wall is Bell’s celebrated Studland Beach. It is one of
her most emotionally eloquent works with its stretch of empty beach and sky and the
rigid isolation of the standing figure, back turned away from the viewer, as if on the
threshold of a transformative encounter. Often heralded as the beginning of Bell’s most
experimental period, the painting is seen here alongside preparatory works, revealing
her process of radical simplification. Placed at the very end of the exhibition, it made
me want to retrace my steps.
NOTES
1. Vanessa Bell, letter to Roger Fry, 19 September 1923, in Regina Marler (ed.). Selected Letters of
Vanessa Bell. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 1994, p.272.
Vanessa Bell
Miranda, 14 | 2017
2
2. Roger  Fry,  “The  Present  Situation,”  unpublished  lecture,  1924,  King’s  1/111.  Quoted  by
Christopher Reed in Bloomsbury  Rooms:  Modernism,  Subculture,  and Domesticity.  New York:  Bard
Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2004, p.111.
INDEX
Mots-clés: abstraction, couleur, Omega workshops, arts décoratifs, peinture
Keywords: abstraction, colour, Omega workshops, decorative arts, painting
Subjects: British painting
AUTHORS
CLAUDIA TOBIN
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge and a Research
Associate at Jesus College
Vanessa Bell
Miranda, 14 | 2017
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