Vanessa Bell, the mother of British modernism

New Statesman​

6 hours ago

One of artist Vanessa Bell's earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell 'which I liked best, my father or my mother.' Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be 'jumping around naked' in the bathroom. Bell's preference was for her mother. Woolf, meanwhile, analysed her own feelings before choosing their father. Bell was 40 when she recalled the incident in a letter: 'Such a question seemed to me rather terrible – surely one ought not to ask it… If one could criticise one's parents, what or whom could one not criticise? Dimly some freedom of thought and speech seemed born.'
The conversation was a 'turning point' in the sisters' relationship, writes Wendy Hitchmouth in a new biography of Bell. Vanessa and Virginia had begun to plot an escape out of their strict Victorian upbringing into the realm of the provocative.
The role of the home looms large in Vanessa Bell, The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale University Press). Hitchmouth is more familiar than most with Bell's best-known residence, the pastel-hued Charleston House in the Sussex Downs: she was the curator there for 12 years. This is her second book on the early 20th-century group of artists, writers and thinkers in as many years, following 2023's The Bloomsbury Look, and in it she puts Bell on a new podium: not as the overlooked sister of Woolf's or lover of artists Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but as the mother of British modernism.
It's a bold move, not least because – as Hitchmouth intricately unpicks throughout the biography – Bell spent her lifetime hiding her light under a bushel. But this, Hitchmouth convincingly argues, was all part of the plan. Woolf and Bell grew up in the stiff gloom of Hyde Park Gate, against a backdrop of academia, mourning and suggested childhood sexual abuse. But while they escaped it for still-radical lives dedicated to writing, art, polyamory and beauty, Bell maintained and manipulated certain trappings of Edwardian womanhood to further her career and fuel her lifestyle.
One of the many portraits of Bell by Duncan Grant depicts how she is remembered by art history. She lies in a hammock next to the pond at Charleston. At her feet lies a man, reading and a boy, her middle child, Quentin, rocking her. Bell and Grant's daughter Angelica, her youngest, pulls a small toy dog along the garden path, barefoot. Her eldest child Julian is alone in a rowing boat in the distance. Bell, in a pink dress and headscarf, has her feet and arms crossed, her head back, gazing into the distance; part-hippy mum, part exhaustion, both central and removed from it all. She was the big sister nicknamed 'The Saint' by her siblings, who raised the Stephens children after their mother and step-sister died. The woman who nursed Woolf during her well-reported depressions. The mother of three, who couldn't stop her daughter from unwittingly marrying her real father's former lover.
All of these biographical details are attended to in Hitchmouth's biography, but what they are revealed as a facade to a woman whose determination and dynamism was overlooked. Hitchmouth transcribed some 1,500 unpublished letters from Bell to dig into the minutiae of effort that lies behind the gatherings, exhibitions and publications that make cultural movements happen. The ordering of the canvas and the booking of venues, the sending of invitations and liaising with picture editors, the arranging of models and wooing of cultural grandees. Bell did it all, and then said the men she worked among were responsible for it.
There were reasons for this, Hitchmouth explains: 'In the public domain, Vanessa's upbringing instilled in her an enduring semblance of passivity.' When Leonard Woolf – who would later marry Virginia – first met the sisters during a visit to their brother Thoby at Cambridge, he recalled that 'they hardly spoke'. The Stephens sisters may have come from enough money to enable their creative freedom after their parents' premature deaths, but they carried the gendered baggage their male contemporaries didn't. As Hitchmouth writes: 'Vanessa internalised the prejudices that limited her career.' Perhaps this is why, even in her own words (Bell was a vivid and witty writer, although she denied this), she shrugged off her efforts. Perhaps she was just self-effacing. Probably both.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
In Bell's memoirs, the weekly late-night bohemian she hosted at Gordon Square in her early twenties, effectively forming The Bloomsbury Group, are described as happening when 'one or two of these friends began to drift in'. But she had made invitations and introductions, she had purposefully shaken off the strictures of Victorian socialising for whisky and biscuits at midnight. She hung pictures strategically in the hallway, knowing the impression they would make.
Bell did the same with The Friday Club, the Omega Workshops (comparing the running of them, entertainingly, to 'ordering dinner'), painterly gatherings at country houses in Sussex and Studland and the South of France and, of course, Charleston. Bell not only hosted the Bloomsbury Group, she invented its ways of being and brought it together, and over the decades that work was forgotten. Hitchmouth also demonstrates the convoluted mechanics of Bell getting away with living the personal life she wanted. Her in-laws never visited Charleston, where she lived with Grant, because they assumed she and Clive had a normal marriage.
The past decade has seen art history attempt to re-establish Bell; The Dulwich Picture Gallery retrospective in 2017 was her first – she died in 1961. A subsequent, more recent, show at Milton Keynes gallery reached the pages of the New York Times. It feels, now, that we are comfortable in naming her among the first British artists to play with abstractism.
Still, Hitchmouth is insistent on Bell's pioneering approaches: she writes that Bell made cut-outs before Matisse and dripped paint before Pollock. Her abstract paintings appeared while Mondrian was still a Neo-Plasticist. Nobody, Hitchmouth claims, had coloured walls like she had before. As for Woolf's much-feted room of one's own? Bell got there first by setting up their sororal home to have a separate living and working space apiece. Sometimes these proclamations of invention are so smuggled into a text rich with names and dates and artworks that I wondered if they deserved more bolstering.
What is undeniable is that the hundreds of works she made alongside other artists, first through the Omega Workshops – where work was deliberately anonymous – and then later through her decades-long partnership with Grant, was mostly unattributed. Grant outlived Bell and, in her wake, entertained art dealers, collectors and historians, some of whom encouraged him to retrospectively sign pieces that could have been made by either of them, sometimes in biro. With it, Bell's efforts were made invisible.
Woolf wrote the forewords for Bell's 1930s solo shows. In one of them she interrogated the patriarchy that both had worked to navigate throughout their careers. After working through the contradictions of Bell being both masculine and feminine, interested in children but 'equally interested in rocks', able to make clothes but also being a fan of nudity, Woolf concludes that Bell is 'not a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and with her hands shelling peas'. It's a passage that demonstrates both the deep and complex affinity the sisters shared and the enormity of Bell's creative output and ways of being. It's this enormity that Hitchmouth's biography struggles with; sometimes we lose sight of who Bell was as a woman under the abundance of her achievements, the many people she was connected to, the homes and exhibitions and artworks she created.
Huge life events are glimpsed: Woolf's affair with her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, and Vanessa's revelation of Virginia's letters about it to Woolf's husband, for instance. The death of Bell's beloved son Julian during the Spanish Civil War. We learn that Quentin's infant illness prevented Bell from exhibiting at a history-making exhibition in Paris, and provided an important connection in her relationship with Roger Fry ('he knew what it felt like to have one's baby ill'), but not on how it affected her more broadly. I was curious as to where the children were, and how Bell felt about them, as she bounded from home to home, lover to lover, experiment to experiment. Hitchmouth's biography is revelatory about the strength and compassion of sisterhood between Woolf and Bell – which for so long has been positioned as an uneven rivalry – but I was left hankering for more of the intimacy of their letters.
And it is through Woolf's eyes that we get the best understanding of Bell as a person. Not as a saint or a painted matriarch or a lover, but a woman, clever and conniving to make not just a life of modernity, but a movement. And through this cacophony of letters, connections and history, Hitchmouth gives Bell back the identity Woolf remembers her sister having. That of the person who, as a child 'scrawl[ed] on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. 'When I am a famous painter – ' she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way.'
Related