Bell, Vanessa

The Waves

Vanessa Bell, née Vanessa Stephen, (born May 30, 1879, London, England—died April 7, 1961, Firle, East Sussex), British painter, designer, and founding member of the Bloomsbury group who was known for her colourful portraits and still-life paintings and for her dust-jacket designs.

Bell was born into a Victorian upper-middle-class literary family, daughter of literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and the older sister of writer Virginia Woolf. Her mother—the former Julia Duckworth (née Jackson), who was 14 years younger than her second husband—died suddenly when Bell was only about 16 years old. Bell began to study drawing a year later in 1896 at Arthur Cope’s School of Art in Kensington. From 1901 to 1904 she studied under painter John Singer Sargent at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. When her father died in 1904, Bell and her siblings moved out of their parents’ house in Kensington to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Soon after moving there, Bell organized the Friday Club (1905), a painting and social club, which met and exhibited together until about 1920, though Bell resigned from the group in 1914.

In November 1906 her younger brother Thoby—to whom she had been very close and many of whose Cambridge classmates had become her close friends—died of typhoid fever after a trip to Greece. Short of three months after Thoby’s death, she married his friend Clive Bell, soon to be a noted English art critic, and the two formed the Bloomsbury group, which gathered together Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, and younger brother, Adrian, writer Lytton Strachey, novelist E.M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant, economist John Maynard Keynes, and others. In 1910 Bell visited the first major exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting in England, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” organized by modern art critic Roger Fry. After seeing the work of Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and other leading Modernist painters, Bell’s painting took a turn toward abstraction, and her compositions relied on more-simplified forms. Examples of her paintings betraying the influence of Post-Impressionism include Studland Beach (1912), Abstract Painting (1914), and, from somewhat later, The Tub (1917).

In 1911 Bell started an extramarital affair with Fry, and though she had broken it off by 1913—leaving Fry feeling spurned—the two remained intertwined socially and succeeded in collaborating on matters of art. In 1912–13, for instance, Bell’s work was exhibited in the “Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition,” organized by Fry in London. Bell and Fry, along with Grant, then founded an artists’ cooperative for the decorative arts, the Omega Workshops, in 1913 (closed 1919). Led by its founders, the workshop emphasized bold colours and simple designs for their textiles, pottery, clothing, furniture, and interior schemes. Bell, who tried her hand at most of the workshop’s trades, was particularly gifted in textile design and soon became known for her interior designs as well.

In 1914 Bell began a relationship with Grant, one that would last, in some form, the rest of her life, though he was homosexual and maintained relationships with men throughout that time. The two moved with Bell’s two sons (from her marriage to Clive Bell) and Grant’s lover, writer David Garnett, to Charleston House, near Sussex. In 1918 Bell gave birth to a daughter (conceived with Grant), whom they named Angelica. Bell and Grant created elaborate interiors at Charleston. They painted original frescoes on the walls and doors, painted the furniture, hung their own paintings and drawings throughout the house, and decorated further with Omega textiles and pottery. The house became a hub of artistic and literary activity for the Bloomsbury circle.

Bell had her first solo exhibition in 1922 at London’s Independent Gallery and exhibited her work regularly at galleries throughout the city. She also exhibited with the London Group (founded in 1913 to counter the traditionalism of the Royal Academy; joined by Bell in 1919) and with the London Artists’ Association after its founding in 1925.

Bell and Grant collaborated on projects such as a commission for the RMS Queen Mary (never created) and the murals of Berwick Church in Sussex (painted during World War II with her son Quentin and her daughter, Angelica). She also worked with Grant designing sets for ballets during the 1930s. However, Bell worked most steadily on dust-jacket designs for Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press (founded in 1917), for which she established the house design style. Bell designed all of her sister’s book covers.

Though Bell’s art work was somewhat forgotten (even in the artist’s lifetime) and was sometimes thought to have been overshadowed by that of Grant, interest in her work resurfaced with the 1976 publication of Bloomsbury Portraits by Richard Shone. Since then her paintings and textiles have been included in solo exhibitions and in others related to the Bloomsbury circle. In the 1980s Charleston House was restored after having fallen into disrepair during the previous decades. Though the house and gardens opened to the public in 1986, the house and its extensive collection of art and artifacts continue to be restored in the 21st century.