As a leading light of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell is by no means an obscure figure, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. Yet though she was an accomplished painter, Bell (1879-1961) is more commonly remembered as “the freewheeling foil to her intellectually intimidating, altogether more formidable sister Virginia Woolf”. Her art, “all too easily dismissed” as too “nice” and too “colourful”, has often attracted less interest than her sex life.
The scale of this “neglect” is made clear by this new exhibition in Milton Keynes, the “most comprehensive survey of her career ever staged”. The show features more than 140 works, including not just paintings and drawings, but ceramics, furniture and even designs for adverts and book jackets. It presents Bell as a restless artist who shifted “distractedly from style to style”, variously embracing the techniques of her tutor, John Singer Sargent, post-impressionism and avant-garde abstraction. Can it bring about a reappraisal?
The show is certainly “expansive”, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. The first room sets the scene, presenting “an ensemble of essential characters” Bell depicted in her works: her father, the man of letters Leslie Stephen; her husband, the art critic Clive Bell; her sons Julian and Quentin; and, of course, Virginia Woolf.
We then plunge into the avant-garde works that have led some to describe her as a “pioneer of British modernism”: inspired by Matisse and Picasso, works such as “Abstract Painting” (c.1914) and “Composition” (1914) are “geometric experiments on canvas” that sometimes evolved into designs for textiles. Yet Bell was a very “impressionable” painter, and her imitation of fashionable styles brings out the “overwhelming mediocrity” of much of her own work. Indeed, it’s tempting to think that without her Bloomsbury connections, we might remember her as “just another South Kensington hobby painter”.
I disagree entirely, said Hettie Judah in The Guardian. Female artists have always “been condemned as copyists rather than drivers of innovation”, and Bell’s “openness to inspiration” is often interpreted as weakness. Yet she was no plagiarist. We see her experimenting with all manner of materials and techniques: she plays “delightedly” with pointillism in a portrait of her collaborator Roger Fry, experiments with collage in 1914’s surprising “Still Life (Triple Alliance)”, and relishes the freedom that working in the “lesser” decorative arts brought her.
At Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse she rented with the painter Duncan Grant, the two artists “summoned beauty on a shoestring”, painting “colours and patterns over every surface”, daubing “whimsical figures” onto panels and chests: here, we see doors and screens from the house. This show, a “sweeping expanse” of Bell’s art, at long last makes her the “main character” in her own story.
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. Until 23 February