Slowly, effectively, the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes has been devoting ambitious shows to female artists whose work has been underappreciated. It’s a process that began in 2019 with a pioneering display about Paula Rego, and which has continued with examinations of the nanny turned street photographer Vivian Maier, and a tribute to the bottomless pit of art that was Laura Knight. Sooner or later we were always going to reach Vanessa Bell.
The show was inevitable because Bell (1879-1961) is the paradigm of the underappreciated female artist. Most of us have heard of her — she’s a noisy presence in the chronicles of British modernism — but few of us have rated her. We know about her chiefly because she was the sister of Virginia Woolf and a member of the artistic bonk-circle that was the Bloomsbury group. As with most of the Bloomsberries, the suspicion lingers that art was an excuse that brought them together, but bonking was the real glue.
This image of a moneyed bunch of artistes and flâneurs, expounders and poetasters, who shared a privileged upbringing and a fondness for jumping into bed with other people’s wives and husbands, has proved tough to shift. Everything about the Bloomsberries reeks of class advantage. Cambridge-educated, bankrolled by Mummy and Daddy, they had servants to cook their dinners and housemaids to do their washing. Of course they were artistic, but what else were they qualified to do?
Are we, therefore, ready at last to forgive these prickly class sins? Should we open our hearts to Bell? The MK Gallery thinks so and has mounted a survey that is the most generous ever gathering of her work and the most determined effort so far to position her as a profound presence in British art. Even the exhibition title, Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, appears determined to strike a sonorous note.
Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a wealthy scion of a distinguished intellectual family — Eton and Cambridge — who appears in her earliest painting from 1902 looking effortfully old masterish: dark, solemn, bearded. An impressionable young artist is pretending to be Rembrandt. Nothing wrong with that. We’ve all done it.
The next notable painting, a silvery still life of three poppies lying on a table with an urn and a medicine bottle — Iceland Poppies from 1908 — has her fast-forwarding through the pattern books to a phase of silvery grey impressionism of the kind favoured by James McNeill Whistler: impressionism-lite, full of whispery touches and enticing paleness. It’s a lovely bit of painting that bodes well for the rest of the show. Alas, it proves to be a one-off.
Having mastered whispery realism in the Whistler manner, another bit of fast-forwarding has her racing through an array of styles sourced in the example of the post-impressionists. “Which ones?” you may be wondering. All of them! Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, can all be seen having an impact on her in a potpourri of bright colours and scratchy brushstrokes.
In 1912 alone she attempted a dozen approaches: bits of pointillism, bits of fauvism, bits of expressionism, bits of the Nabis group. All are nibbled at like the contents of the sweets trolley at Fortnum & Mason.
In 1916 she moved to Charleston, the flowery Sussex cottage that is now a shrine to the Bloomsberries, and which has lent generously to this event. There she formed a ménage à quatre with her husband, Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and his lover David “Bunny” Garnett, who went on to become the husband of Bell’s daughter by Grant, Angelica: the Bloomsberries in a nutshell.
In between this romping she skipped through yet more modernist phases — a Picasso phase, a Matisse phase — before settling into a vague amalgam of all the above. Roger Fry — another lover — called her a brilliant colourist, and yes, she remains bright. But the colours seem to have their origin in French art rather than the nature on her doorstep.
To be fair, she is far from alone in trying to picture England as a location in the south of France. An entire generation of British artists pretended to be post-impressionists. Some of them are still at it today. It is probably a psychological condition rather than an aesthetic one: an escape from the rain, a flight from what you are to what you want to be. I’ll leave it to the Freuds to decide. What’s certain is that it turned Bell, for most of her career, from a painter of real things to one who looked away: who lived through two world wars, but seemed never to notice them.
Most of the show consists of painterly pleasantries: flowers in vases, views through the window. Her portraits are so busy chasing flatness, they give little sense of personality or mood. The interiors are cluttered and scratchy. The pink and bouncy nudes she paints for the houses of her rich friends are embarrassingly bad. Much of her work feels removed from the tangible, as if we are looking at it through a gauze.
She became an abstractionist briefly in 1914 and produced a beautiful arrangement of rectangles and squares. At the other end of her life, in 1958, she painted a self-portrait full, for once, of insight and mood. Thin, tired, worn-out, bleak — it’s a Vanessa Bell who finally feels corporeal.
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, to February 23
