The Bloomsbury Group’s predilection for “Living in squares...
and loving in triangles” is beyond cliché, but it’s still true that the sex life of its leading lady, Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), has aroused more interest than her art. Too “nice”, and too colourful, in the half century since Bell’s death , her art has too easily been dismissed, casting her as the freewheeling foil to her intellectually intimidating, and altogether more formidable sister Virginia Woolf. To be fair, it’s not just Bell who suffers this way – the Bloomsbury Group is currently enjoying a period of popularity, but attitudes to this uber-clique of poseurs wax and wane, and they are just as likely to be labelled trivial and decorative, as self-important elitists.
The scale of Vanessa Bell’s neglect is brought sharply into focus with MK Gallery’s new show, the biggest and most comprehensive survey of her career ever staged. Following Dulwich Picture Gallery’s landmark exhibition of Bell’s paintings in 2017, this show brings together more than 140 works, many rarely seen, that range from paintings and drawings, ceramics, furniture, advertising and book jackets. If that sounds like a lot, it is, and more so because she shifts distractedly from style to style.
The exhibition is arranged chronologically, and while in her student years she seems to have been forever looking around to see what everyone else was up to, at the end she paints with the restlessness of grief, brought on by .