Vanessa Bell spent her life surrounded by famous people, and has come to be remembered primarily as Virginia Woolf’s sister. But she was one of the most interesting characters of her day and – from the look of this exhibition – one of its finest artists too. This is her first major retrospective, which just goes to show.
She lived and worked within the sexually fluid Bloomsbury Set, painting a group of brilliant posh people who all collaborated and shagged each other. She was excellent at capturing people in creative contemplation: writing, reading, thinking – even (shock horror) knitting. The best pieces here present a clash of tweedy refinement and brash sensuality. Her gaze is sympathetic, accepting, tolerant of whatever the sitter presents her: how very Bloomsbury.
Artistically, too, Bell tried everything. There are forays into abstraction and Braque-style cubism; her naked male forms have a Degas flavour. Even when these forays are derivative they’re still very good. But she is at her best when doing straightforward Post-Impressionist portraits of her muckers, from John Lennon-esque Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, who actually invented the term Post-Impressionism.
Also included in the ticket price is some modern icing for your cake. Musician and poet Patti Smith began visiting Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat Charleston, in Sussex, in 2003, and created a project based on turn-of-the-century photography, including Bell’s. You can see it displayed alongside Bell’s own work. She begins at Charleston with photos of Bell’s bed, books and brushes, then moves on to the possessions of other English creatives, from Keats’s bed to Sylvia Plath’s grave. Beach shots in Brighton echo Bell’s own beach outing in 1910 – documented here – which became her 1912 masterpiece ‘Studland Beach’. A fine, contemporary edge to a great exhibition.