Re-discover Vanessa Bell, the colourful painter and sister to Virginia Woolf whose life and work played a pivotal role in Bloomsbury and beyond
“Nessa has all that I should like to have,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1908. Nessa, as she was known to her friends and family, was, Woolf’s elder sister, a painter, designer, wife, mother, and lover. In Woolf’s eyes she was “the Saint,” her character akin to “a bowl of golden water which brims but never overflows”.
Walking into the London Grafton Galleries in 1910 , Bell saw a path for herself. The exhibition overwhelmed her, but also served as a dramatic validation of her work. In the second exhibition, which ran in 1912, Bell would appear alongside the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Gaugin. Her extraordinary output of work has long been neglected, and now, finally, The Dulwich Picture Gallery has provided Bell a space apart from her Bloomsbury identity in the first major retrospective of her work. “I think she might have been better off, even better known, if she hadn’t been part of the [Bloomsbury] group,” says co-curator, Sarah Milroy.
One of the most exciting aspects of the Dulwich exhibition is its inclusive attitude towards Bell’s artistic output, incorporating all the dimensions of her creative canon, from textiles and furnishings to the famous book jacket designs she produced for Woolf at The Hogarth Press. “It’s entirely out of my head” she told Fry, “[I] like to paint out of my head”, and described herself as “certainly an Impressionist”.
These exciting snapshots into Bell’s life find an unlikely admirer and ally in the iconic Patti Smith, who has created a photographic reply to Bell’s vivid depictions of Bloomsbury life. Smith’s haunting portraits of the rooms and objects that Bell and her Bloomsbury friends left behind evoke the dramatic void of time where, in Smith’s words, “everything has significance”, and contrast movingly with the crowded liveness of Bell’s life where art was part of the everyday.
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