Vanessa Bell: it’s hard to escape the Bloomsbury member’s overwhelming mediocrity

This comprehensive exhibition highlights that the artist and sister of Virginia Woolf was a product of the Bloomsbury Group hype-machine

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The MK Gallery’s new exhibition, Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, is the “largest ever survey” of the artist’s work. Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), alongside her sister Virginia Woolf, was a founding member of the notoriously bohemian Bloomsbury Group. This exhibition charts the artist’s progress from her earliest known portrait through her dalliance with abstraction and onto her experimentation with multi-media via textiles, furniture and ceramics. 
A World of Form and Colour is expansive in its scope, with over 130 artworks on display in Milton Keynes. The difficulty inevitable in exhibiting such a large number of works is organisation. The curator has taken a meanderingly chronological approach to Bell’s oeuvre, with the exception of the first room, the Cube Gallery, wherein an ensemble of essential characters are introduced through Bell’s works: her father and noted abolitionist, Leslie Stephen; sister, Virginia Woolf; husband and art critic, Clive Bell; and sons, Julian and Quentin. 
The next room contains the works for which Bell is most highly regarded as a painter and pioneer of British Modernism. In many ways, the style of the works on display is the manifestation of Bell’s relationship with fellow painter Roger Fry and the impact of Fry’s 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Legend has it, however, that the art critic of the Daily Telegraph was so horrified by the show in 1910, that he threw his catalogue on the floor and stamped on it in a fit of rage. 
Bell saw things differently. In her own words: “here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself.” The exhibition was groundbreaking for Bell and inspired some of her most avant-garde work, a small selection of which was exhibited in the 1912 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition alongside Matisse, Picasso and Braque. The radical shift in Bell’s style, prompted by her encounter with the Post-Impressionists, is exemplified by her laboriously named geometric experiments on canvas – Abstract Painting (c. 1914) and Abstract Composition (1914) – and by her markedly more interesting designs for Lady Hamilton’s rugs.
The highlight of the exhibition is a room dedicated to Bell’s decoration and design projects. In 1913, Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant co-founded the Omega Workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square. The studios created furniture, textiles and ceramics that attempted to interrogate the barriers between fine and decorative art. Enthusiasts of Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group’s favourite East Sussex farmhouse, will marvel at the assemblage of painted door panels, mantelpieces, tile-designs, and the hilarious ‘Famous Women Dinner Service’.
The entropic concentration of Vanessa Bell’s works in the MK Gallery space reveals how impressionable she was as a painter; her canvas a rather foxed mirror reflecting the artistic movements of the greats of her time. The sensation of overwhelming mediocrity in her style is compounded by the fact that the hang of the exhibition is, at times, but not entirely, jarring in its attempts to be illustrative of the developments in her style. Paintings of flowers are grouped with other paintings of flowers, nudes with nudes – these groupings often seem to illustrate no more than compositional coincidences.
While the MK Gallery’s show accomplishes a significant feat in bringing together a large body of work in a unique modern space, it seems to have fallen prey to the nagging desire of the British art world for a compelling female Post-Impressionist genius to call their own. Much like her sister, Vanessa Bell is a product of the Bloomsbury Group hype-machine and any attempts, such as this one, to celebrate her as a great artist in her own right, are bound to fall short. Without the Bloomsberries behind her, one wonders what her fate could have been… perhaps just another South Kensington hobby painter.
From Oct 19; info: mkgallery.org
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