Vanessa Bell - Self Protrait c1958. The Charleston Trust © Estate of Vanessa Bell

I recently took a trip to Milton Keynes to see a fine exhibition of the work of Vanessa Bell. (‘A World of Form and Colour’ is at the MK Gallery until 23 February.)

Bell was a painter and designer whose natural curiosity prompted her to experiment in multiple styles and media. A leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, she rejected the staid conventions of her middle-class upbringing and the art establishment, and enthusiastically embraced modern thought and practice. Hers was a truly creative life.

‘If you could say what you like about art, sex or religion, you could also talk freely… about the ordinary doings of daily life… Life was exciting, terrible and amusing, and we had to explore it, thankful that one could do so freely.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Stephen was born in 1879 into a wealthy Victorian literary family. Raised and educated in her Kensington home, she attended a local art school and then studied painting under John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy.

‘When I got into the grubby, shabby, dirty world of art students at South Kensington, I wanted nothing else in the way of society. They were separate entirely from my home life and so a great relief. They knew no more about my private life than I about theirs, and in their company one could forget oneself and think of nothing but shapes and colours and the absorbing difficulties of oil paint.’
Vanessa Bell

Following the death of both her parents, in 1904 Vanessa moved, with her sister Virginia and her two brothers, to Gordon Square in unfashionable Bloomsbury. The change of scene felt liberating.

‘It was exhilarating to have left the house in which there had been so much gloom and depression, to have come to these white walls, large windows opening onto trees and lawns, to have one’s own rooms, be master of one’s own time, have all the things in fact that come as a matter of course to many of the young today, but so seldom then to young women.’
Vanessa Bell

In Gordon Square Vanessa set up the Friday Club, where male and female artists were treated as equals and exhibited together. The house also became a focus for the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia and fellow writers Lytton Strachey and E M Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the civil servant Leonard Woolf and the critic Roger Fry. It was in this milieu that she met another critic, Clive Bell, whom she married in 1907.

‘We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins – we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Bell at Charleston © The Charleston Trust

In 1910 Fry organised the first major exhibition of Post-Impressionist art in England. Having seen the work of Manet, Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, Vanessa’s painting turned toward abstraction, and she embraced simplified forms, flattened perspectives and bright colours.

‘Here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa painted still lifes and landscapes; elegant interiors and floral displays. She depicted her friends and family relaxing at home - reading, writing, sewing and drawing.

Her two sons are having tea with their nursemaids, Saxon Sydney-Turner is playing the piano, and three women are deep in conspiratorial conversation. A housemaid with a broom surveys the study, a woman in a white shift leans over her washstand, and Virginia is trying on some fancy dress.

Vanessa was endlessly experimenting. She painted Fry in a pointillist style (what she called ‘the leopard technique’). She created cubist-inflected landscapes that echoed Cezanne. She borrowed the dark outlines of Gaugin. She explored collage and pure geometric abstraction.

‘You have to try and express your feelings about things in line. It must be sensitive, everywhere – nowhere must it become mechanical.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961), A Conversation, 1913-16 © Estate of Vanessa Bell

In 1913 Vanessa, Fry and Grant founded an artists’ cooperative, the Omega Workshops. In defiance of the conventional barriers between the fine and decorative arts, and of traditional formality, they designed furniture, textiles, accessories and ceramics with simple forms and bold colours. Objects were presented anonymously and sold unsigned.

Dorothy Parker famously observed that the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.' Certainly, their romantic ties were complicated. Vanessa and Clive both took lovers throughout their lives. In 1914 she began an enduring association with Grant, who was gay and continued to have relationships with men. The couple installed themselves, with her two sons and Grant’s lover David Garnett, in Charleston Farmhouse in the Sussex countryside. And in 1918 they had a daughter, Angelica, whom Clive raised as his own child.

'I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think.'
Vanessa Bell

At Charleston Vanessa and Grant hung their own paintings and drawings, and added Omega textiles and pottery. They painted walls, doors, screens, tables and fireplaces – joyous, colourful designs, created with loose, spontaneous brushwork, combining flowers, nudes, circles and abstract elements. The house was a living art installation, a social experiment.

‘There is a language simply of form and colour that can be as moving as any other and that seems to affect one quite as much as the greatest poetry of words.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa’s creativity was boundless. She and Grant received commissions to decorate society homes. They worked together producing ballet sets, church murals and the Famous Women Dinner Service, which included 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history. She also designed an image of Alfriston village for a Shell-Mex ad, and all of Virginia's books jackets.

Though Vanessa had been born into privilege, her life was touched by tragedy. In 1937 her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 her Fitzroy Street studio was destroyed by a bomb – and much of her early work was lost with it. The following year Virginia took her own life.

Nonetheless Vanessa continued to paint. In 1958 she depicted herself wrapped in a green shawl, wearing a broad-brimmed straw sunhat. She regards us through horn-rimmed glasses. She has lived a life of creative freedom and independent thought. Her relationships have been mocked, her work has been diminished, but she is unconcerned.

‘I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me… If you cannot accept me as I seem to you to be, then you must give me up, for I have no intention of confessing my sins or defending my virtues.’
Vanessa Bell

In 1961, Vanessa Bell died at Charleston and was buried in the Firle Parish Churchyard.

'I won't try to stop you
When you speak of the past.
Doubt is over now
And I can join in when you laugh.
Fascination makes us ask for more
Than we'd like to know.
I needn't explain.
I think you know.
Reassure me when my heart's
Not bold enough to bear her name.
If you were in my shoes,
And scared, I would do the same.
And though I may ask,
There's no need for past details.
For though I may laugh aloud,
My courage fails.
Did you know?’

Everything But the Girl, ‘Fascination’ (T Thorn)

No. 501