Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour.

Until 23^rd February, Milton Keynes.

Transferring to Charleston at Lewes (the new gallery run by the Charleston Trust at Lewes) 26^th March -Sept 2025.

 

 

To be a woman artist in the mid twentieth century was not uncommon but to be one that was taken seriously was.  The question for women artists was: how did you step out of the strait jacket of ‘lady artist’ into the world of serious collectors, galleries; out of the here and now into eternity?

They knew what to avoid: flowers and babies.  The personal.  And it’s true.  Had Vanessa Bell continued painting delicate Icelandic poppies, even if arranged with medical vases, we would not have a retrospective at the Milton Keynes.  Like the Dulwich retrospective in 2017 the exhibition emphasises her experimentation: her glowing shapes out of haystacks, faceless objects making coherent space on canvas.  Exhibitions of her work are concerned to put her work in the context of modernism, to emphasise the experimental, to give her her rightful place in the history of modernism in British art.  Her creation of the ‘Friday Club’, an art discussion and exhibiting society, in 1905 was an important arena for the development of English formalist aesthetic theory.  Both Clive Bell and Roger Fry articulated these ideas in writing, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in paint.

Her later work was often dismissed by critics as ‘too domestic’, shutting out modernity.  But really, it seems to me, that these are some of her best works: paintings of family and friends in familiar surroundings.  This became her centre, reworking the familiar, giving it something of eternity.  This type of modernity, a radical reinterpretation of how to live, is not less modern because more personal.  Nor was it uncontested.  Art that is worth looking at evokes a variety of responses and those responses continue through time.  There are people looking now whose lives would have been impossible for the artist to have envisaged.  Looking at her work through the late 20th century lens of feminism and the 21st century celebration of queerness her domestic interiors can no longer be considered inferior to her experimentations with modernist ideas of form.  They are a radical exploration of different ways of living, different ways of being in the world, as lover, mother, friend, artist.  Her paintings of her lover/companion and his lovers, a delineation of new ways of being.  We all know those stories and the paintings retain those associations, an element Fry deplored in Victorian art and would deplore here.  Painting, he believed, should not reply on association or narrative, or even resemblance for its success.  But is it really so bad that the paintings create associations in the minds of the viewers?

I went to a Sargent exhibition recently at the Tate and had a sudden realisation that he was gay, and then there it was, that queer slant on the world in painting after painting.  It lit up the works, that recognition, stopped him being simply a society painter and gave him a resonance that for me, he had previously lacked.  Bell was taught by Sargent during her brief spell at the Royal Academy School and admired his work.  In her understated way with her paintings of chairs, flowers, of friends moving in and out; sometimes faceless, sometimes recognisable, she does the same.  She shows us that world of unacknowledged love.  And the work of making those interiors, which has been women’s work but is now their work, hers and Duncans: the wood basket with its acrobats, the covers on the chairs, stitched by Duncan’s mother, and outside, the garden they all kept; the garden where Keynes wrote Consequences of the Peace.  And there he is in Duncan’s portrait, writing, a board across his knees, looking up briefly from under his straw hat.  And that plump pink faced farm boy, David Garnet who is Duncan’s lover, who married their daughter 18 years later, (much to their distress), he’s on the wall too, not a thought of ‘Aspects of love’ in his head.

Art of any sort sets out to transcend death in some small way.  When we see markings on a stone from beyond our conception of time we feel the life of that person enter our life.  So when we make marks, on a canvas, on a page, we hope to enter other lives, to move them in the way that that marking, that work, moved us.  Does it matter how the work does this?  The colours, the shapes, the lines – the worlds within the frame – we enter when we stand in front of it.  But we are not simply looking we are bringing our own embodied minds with all their associations and emotions to bear on the act of looking.

This is not to say that form does not matter.  There is a small painting of hers called Interior (1940) that speaks to me.  It is not full of colour but rather subdued; an uncertain sky, a dim interior.  The motif, inside and out, near and far; the window frame, like the picture frame itself, marking the difference, is a favourite of mid 20^th century artists.  I find myself in agreement with Fry, that the subject matter is almost irrelevant, that a painting might succeed by giving up ‘all resemblance to natural form, [by creating] a purely abstract language of form – a visual music.’ It is not the view through the window that I am responding to, it is the loose blue marks on the wall that bring the lowering sky into the room; the small patch of vivid red, there for no representational reason but simply because a patch of red is needed.  The scene is transformed by paint, by the act of painting, into something beyond a view through the window.  And this is the transformation of life into art, this is what art does, and this is what this exhibition does.

Jenny Vuglar © 2025.