On Tuesday I ventured about an hour south of Bloomsbury, taking two connecting tube lines, and a bus out of Brixton before reaching my final destination, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in the quiet and mostly residential neighborhood of Dulwich in South London. I had taken this roughly one hour journey, traveling through various neighborhoods and boroughs of London, to visit an exhibition on Vanessa Bell, an artist who is best known for her membership in the notorious “Bloomsbury Group,” and who lived and worked just a stone’s throw away from the Pickwick (where students on the London Program always live) about one hundred years ago.
Vanessa Bell is probably best remembered as the older sister of novelist Virginia Woolf, however, she was an extremely talented and innovative artist in her own right. Unlike her sister’s literary medium, Bell was a visual artist, producing an impressive and diverse body of work that includes paintings, collage, interior design, woodcuts, photography, as well as book jacket designs for all of her sister’s major publications. The exhibition “Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)” displays the breadth of Bell’s work. Through the paintings in this collection, you can trace the influence of major art movements of the early twentieth century. Most of Bell’s paintings were especially influenced by the post-impressionist movement in France, and the influence of Matisse was especially evident. Before visiting this exhibit I had only heard of Vanessa Bell in relation to Woolf or other members of the Bloomsbury group, and had never heard her art discussed alongside other visual artists of the period. After seeing her work I was particularly astounded by this fact. I thought the exhibit was excellent, and I was blown away by the beauty and innovation of Bell’s work. I was particularly impressed by the experimentation of many of her works, especially her Abstract works, which were among the first abstract pieces produced in England, and which were created over twenty years before the first exhibition of British Abstract art was displayed (“Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)”).
Many of Vanessa Bell’s pieces on display were her portraits of other members of the “Bloomsbury Group,” a circle of artists and intellectuals based in the Bloomsbury neighborhood in the early twentieth century that included famous figures like Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Woolf. Vanessa Bell was a central figure in organizing and maintaining this group, which not only produced an impressive body of experimental art and progressive politics, but which embodied an acceptance of taboo non-monogamy, homosexuality, and open sexual expression. It was amazing to see her portraits of the figures who once loomed so large in the neighborhood where we are living in London, and whose legacy is still present on the numerous blue commemorative plaques decorating the buildings in our neighborhood.
The museum had an additional, but much smaller, exhibit featuring the photography of Vanessa Bell as well as photography of the American musician, writer, and artist Patti Smith. Both exhibits are open through June 4th.
-Maggie Goldberger, ’19
Works Cited
“Vanessa Bell (1879-1961),” Dulwich Picture Gallery, http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/2017/february/vanessa-bell-1879-1961/
