Vanessa Bell Read online

  Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer, and a leading authority on Bloomsbury. She wrote an introduction to the subject, The Bloomsbury Group, for the National Portrait Gallery's Companion series, and has written biographies of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and of the poet Stevie Smith, as well as Vanessa Bell. For ten years she edited the Charleston Magazine. Her recent books include John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art and Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 2005. She was Professor of Art History at Newcastle University until 2015 and is now Editor of The Burlington Magazine.

  ‘Vanessa Bell emerges from Frances Spalding's sensitive and scholarly biography as an unexpectedly formidable figure [...] the central portrait is full and generous and it rings wonderfully true.'

  The Times

  ‘A compelling life, one worth telling, unusual in its social and intellectual contrasts, formidable in its cast of characters, poignant in its alternations of happiness and despair.'

  The Spectator

  ‘An excellent biography: it could hardly be bettered [...] she has brought Vanessa Bell back to life [...] As a chronicle of human entanglements, and of the ways in which they were resolved, it will have an enduring fascination [...] Vanessa Bell adds a new and indispensble dimension to our knowledge of Bloomsbury, and it is very much to be welcomed.'

  John Russell, The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Vanessa Bell the painter was as radical as Virginia Woolf the writer [. . . ] more so.'

  Fiona MacCarthy, The Guardian

  Tauris Parke Paperbacks is an imprint of I.B.Tauris. It is dedicated to publishing books in accessible paperback editions for the serious general reader within a wide range of categories, including biography, history, travel, art and the ancient world. The list includes select, critically acclaimed works of top quality writing by distinguished authors that continue to challenge, to inform and to inspire, These are books that possess those subtle but intrinsic elements that mark them out as something exceptional.

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  I envy painters, I think they are happy people. The painter lives with his craft the whole time: the visual world, which I adore, is always present, and the artist can always be thinking about his work, being inspired by light and so on [. . . ] Painting is an image of the spiritual life; the painter really sees, and the veil is taken away.

  IRIS MURDOCH Interviewed by John Haffenden

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Preface to New Edition

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  1 Always the Eldest 1879–1895

  2 Mrs Young's Evening Dress 1895–1904

  3 Changing Places 1904–1906

  4 Mr and Mrs Clive Bell 1907–1909

  5 Petticoats over Windmills 1910–1912

  6 Asheham 1912–1914

  7 Granite and Rainbow 1914–1916

  8 One Among Three 1916–1918

  9 At Home and Abroad 1919–1926

  10 Charleston in France 1927–1930

  11 High Yellow 1930–1934

  12 Between Bloomsbury and China 1935–1937

  13 Bitter Odds 1937–1945

  14 The Attic Studio 1945–1961

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  The chapter-heading illustrations were all designed by Angelica Gernett, specifically for this book.

  Unless otherwise stated, all paintings illustrated are by Vanessa Bell. These illustrations, when referred to in the text, are marked §.

  Vanessa Stephen, 1903 (photograph probably by Beresford)

  Sir Leslie Stephen

  Julia Stephen

  Vanessa, Stella and Virginia Stephen, c. 1896

  Lady Robert Cecil, 1905 (private collection)

  Saxon Sydney Turner, c. 1908 (private collection)

  Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry, 1911 (The Johannesburg Art Gallery)

  Roger Fry, 1933 (King's College, Cambridge)

  The Bathers, 1911 (private collection)

  Studland Beach, 1912 (Tate Gallery)

  Landscape with Haystack, Asheham, 1912 (Anthony d'Offray Gallery, London)

  Bathers in a Landscape, screen painted by Vanessa Bell for the Omega Workshops, 1913 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

  Table, pottery and cloth sold at the Omega Workshops. The cloth, entitled ‘Cracow', was designed by Vanessa Bell (Victoria and Albert Museum)

  Omega Workshops carpet designed by Duncan Grant (Victoria and Albert Museum)

  The entrance hall at Durbins, Guildford; wall decoration by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1914

  Vanessa Bell at Asheham

  The main hall at Durbins, showing Vanessa Bell's Woman and Baby in the top right corner

  Iceland Poppies, 1909 (Angelica Garnett; photo: Tom Buckeridge)

  Lytton Strachey, 1911 (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London; photo: Sydney W. Newberry)

  A Conversation, 1913–16 (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London; Fry Collection; photo: Gordon H. Robertson)

  Abstract, c. 1914 (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London; photo: Sydney W. Newberry)

  Mary Hutchinson

  Mrs Mary Hutchinson, 1914 (Tate Gallery)

  Iris Tree, 1915 (private collection)

  Quentin Bell, 1919 (Professor Quentin Bell)

  Adam and Eve, 1913 (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London)

  The Tub, 1918 (Tate Gallery)

  Woodcut frontispiece to Kew Gardens, published by The Hogarth Press, 1919

  The Tub, from Woodcuts by Various Artists, published by the Omega Workshops, 1919

  Two pages from the illustrated edition of Kew Gardens published by the Hogarth Press, 1927

  Dunoyer de Segonzac

  Vanessa and Angelica

  Clive Bell

  La Bergère

  Nine of Vanessa Bell's dustjacket designs for The Hogarth Press

  Judith Stephen, Mrs Uppington, Angelica, an unnamed woman and Grace Germany at Charleston

  Duncan Grant as a Spanish dancer

  Clive Bell and Duncan Grant

  Quentin, Angelica and Julian Bell

  Julian Bell (photograph by Lettice Ramsey, c. 1931–2)

  Vanessa Bell (photograph by Lettice Ramsey, 1932)

  The Nursery, 1930–2 (present whereabouts unknown)

  Interior with Two Women, 1932 (Keynes Trustees)

  Nusery Tea, 1912 (private collection)

  Design for a nursery, Omega Workshops, 1913

  Cotton fabric designed by Vanessa Bell for Allan Walton, 1933–4 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

  Berwick Church, showing Vanessa Bell's Nativity

  Vanessa Bell's Annunciation

  A corner of Angelica's bedroom at Charleston

  Vanessa with her grandchildren Julian and Virginia Bell, 1956

  Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream, Vanessa Bell and Claude Rogers, c. 1938–9

  Vanessa Bell, 1960

  Portrait of Aldous Huxley, c. 1929–30 (private collection; photo: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London)

  Henrietta Garnett, 1959 (Royal West of England Academy, Bristol)

  Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1959 (Royal West of England Academy, Bristol)

  The Open Door, Charleston, 1926 (Bolton Museum and Art Gallery)

  A corner of the dining room at Charleston, showing Jean Marchand's La Vil
le, bought by Clive Bell from the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition

  Vanessa Bell and her youngest grandchild, Cressida Bell, 1959

  Interior with a Table, St-Tropez, 1921 (Tate Gallery, London; photo: John Webb)

  Poppies and Hollyhocks, c. 1940 (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London; photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd)

  Interior with Housemaid, 1939 (Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead)

  Self-Portrait, 1958 (private collection; photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd)

  Preface to New Edition

  When I first began work on this biography I found in conversation with others that I had often to explain who Vanessa Bell was, with reference to her work as a painter, her relationship to Virginia Woolf and her role within the Bloomsbury Group. Today, such an introduction is rarely necessary: the mere names – Vanessa and Virginia – immediately conjure up in the public mind a pair of sisters, gifted and beautiful, who occupied a particular place within English social and cultural history.

  In the intervening years I have remained haunted by the facts surrounding Vanessa Bell's life. Nowadays this is an experience shared with many others, for Vanessa Bell has moved into a key position within the history of modernist art. Her paintings are hung in public art galleries and often lodge in the mind, while critical moments in her personal life continue to attract attention. Some of her remarks come whistling back from the past, striking one afresh with their rightness, their sanity, humour and depth of feeling. the growing distance in time between her and us only seems to enhance, among enthusiasts, a hunger to know more, to get closer, attain a familiarity, in a manner akin to that which noticeably accompanies the widespread fascination with Virginia Woolf. And in recent years, both sisters have been recreated in fiction and on the screen, gaining a posthumous life, in part through the imaginative efforts of others.

  But in those early years, as the history of Bloomsbury gradually unfolded, Vanessa Bell's position was very different. She at first seemed a largely silent figure. The enigma she presented left one wanting to know more. This was in the wake of two ground-breaking biographies: Michael Holroyd's two-volume life of Lytton Strachey and Quentin Bell's two-volume life of Virginia Woolf. In the first, the insistent focus not just on Strachey but also on the many subsidiary characters around him gave a new depth to the play of character in biography. In the second, Bell brought us closer to one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, unveiling for the first time the full narrative of Virginia Woolf's life. Suddenly Bloomsbury was out there in the public domain, arousing a mass of interest, admiration, criticism and debate.

  My interest had initially focused on the painter and critic Roger Fry. While researching and writing a book on his life and work, I read the correspondence between him and Vanessa Bell. Through this I glimpsed an inside view of Vanessa's life, large pockets of which still remained hidden and unknown. I made a bid to write her biography and was successful. This gave me access to a formidable archive, much of which had not previously been seen by other scholars. I wanted readers to hear her own voice and extracted plentiful quotations from her letters, especially from those she exchanged with her sister. This made my life of Vanessa Bell of particular interest to scholars of Virginia Woolf, and for a period it was widely cited in studies of her work. Later, in 1993, a selection of Vanessa Bell's letters were edited by Regina Marler. These added further to the wealth of information on Bloomsbury, by then in the public domain.

  Much has now been written on both sisters, by art and literary critics and historians, but no further biography of Vanessa has so far been produced. though she has been brought to life again by novelists and film-makers. As I write this foreword, a three-part television drama, based on Bloomsbury, Life in Squares, written by Amanda Coe and directed by Simon Kaijser, is about to be transmitted. Vanessa Bell has previously appeared in Stephen Daldry's film The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham's novel of the same name, though her part in this, played by Miranda Richardson, was relatively brief. But with novelists she has pipped her sister for attention. Susan Sellers's 2008 novel Vanessa and Virginia fictionalises the relationship of the two sisters by delivering a monologue told entirely through Vanessa's voice. And recently Priya Parmar, in Vanessa and Her Sister, invented a diary for Vanessa – something she never kept – with which to create an imaginative fantasy based on the early life of Bloomsbury, from 1905 to 1912.

  These films and novels stimulate fresh thought about the two sisters and Bloomsbury. If small facts are now and then historically incorrect, this does not greatly matter for they do not impede these fictional narratives. Less happy is the use of language. The vivid immediacy and appeal of both novels owes much to the decision to use present-day language and vocabulary. But certain words carry to the modern ear twenty-first century meanings. When one of the sisters, for instance, expresses hope for ‘success', what the present-day reader understands by that word is very different to what it meant to the original sisters in relation to their work. There is a distortion of values here, a misrepresentation.

  Biographies, too, have their limitations, but I hope this one will return the reader to the tone, texture and fabric of the period in which Vanessa Bell lived. Truth can indeed sometimes be stranger than fiction, and surprisingly exhilarating; and time spent in another age can free us from our own present day concerns and constrictions. A fuller introduction to my subject is found in the original preface, which follows. Here, all that I need add is my debt of gratitude to Tatiana Wilde for her enthusiasm for this book. My thanks go to her, to my agent Zoe Waldie, and to all at I.B.Tauris.

  Preface

  Vanessa Bell lived at the very centre of Bloomsbury and, though neither an intellectual nor a writer, held sway with her acuity, integrity, maturity and ironic sense of humour. In addition she had a gift for organization, bringing an element of creative risk to her management of practicalities. ‘How much I admire this handling of life,’ wrote her sister Virginia Woolf, ‘as if it were a thing one could throw about; this handling of circumstance.’⋆ When Vanessa left London for Studland, Asheham, Wittering, Charleston or Cassis, others followed, attracted by the atmosphere of tolerance and freedom which, with her easy control over domestic matters and her scorn of accepted conventions, she helped to create. Her hospitality is one reason why the disparate individuals who composed Bloomsbury continued to meet, to retain a group identity long after the circumstances that had helped shape their homogeneity had vanished. Vanessa remained a powerful, magnetic figure, made enigmatic by the impenetrable privacy that cloaked her deepest feelings; as her life progresses we find that, despite her tenacious belief in the need for honesty, or perhaps because of it, there were things she would not discuss.

  As a painter, she also commands attention. Her commitment to art never wavered; it runs like a rod of steel through her life, an unbending central core of conviction. Combined with her talent, it led her to play an important part within the history of English painting during the first thirty years of this century and a less central but still distinguished role as a colourist from the 1930s until her death. As an artist, she invites biography because her work is so intimately associated with her family, friends and surroundings; moreover, these surroundings had often already received the imprint of her personality in the decorations with which she and Duncan Grant transformed many interiors.

  In her art, as in her life, she displayed an ‘inviolable reticence’, as Virginia Woolf observed. In the naturalistic paintings of her mature and late years the world of appearances is reproduced with sympathy and feeling but never exaggerated or underlined in order to make the effect more stylish or dramatic. The mood is always contemplative, the outcome of quiet concentration. Vanessa Bell disliked story-telling in art; she shared the Bloomsbury belief that art only achieves unity and completeness if it is detached; she selected her subjects for the reflections, shapes, colours, patterns, lines and spatial relationships that they presented. Nevertheless her attitude towards her subjec
t matter is, I believe, more complex than this suggests. The recurrence in her oeuvre of certain motifs and themes, the prevalence of certain groupings and simple geometric shapes, suggests that they had for her a personal significance, even if this was unconsciously formulated. Vanessa Bell herself would have denied any conscious use of symbolism and argued instead that her subject was ‘this painter’s world of form and colour’.⋆ It is, therefore, surprising that she quite often turned to ‘subject’ pictures, large compositions in which the figures are grouped in such a way as to suggest narrative content. Moreover, even her still lifes, interiors and garden scenes rarely deal with ‘pure form’ but often seem deliberately arranged to arouse associations.

  I hope that this book will broaden understanding of the fabric of thought and feeling from which her art sprang. Critical analysis of her work has here been limited, necessarily, so as not to impede the narrative. A monograph on her entire oeuvre is needed to establish her full stature as an artist, and a more detailed examination of both her and Duncan Grant’s work before any clear account can be given of the two-way exchange between these artists, one which certainly enriched but may also have restricted their developments.

  My personal interest in Vanessa Bell grew in tandem with my commitment to Roger Fry. I first saw her paintings in any considerable number at the exhibition of her work put on by Anthony d’Offay at his gallery in 1973. Like many who visited that show, I was stunned by the audacity of her post-impressionist paintings, shorn of all detail or intrusive sentiment, boldly but sensitively composed out of blocks of sheer colour.† Not long after this, I began my research into the life and work of Roger Fry which culminated in the book Roger Fry: Art and Life (1980), a study that extended my knowledge of, among other things, his relationship with Vanessa Bell. Though their affair lasted only some two to three years, it was of major importance to them both. Roger, for his part, asserted: ‘Nessa I should be a real artist really truly and without doubt if I could draw you often because you have this miracle of rhythm in you and not in your body only but in everything you do. It means ease in all the things around you and in your relations.’⋆ When she withdrew from him, he endured prolonged suffering. She, on the other hand, more attracted, to her lasting benefit and inestimable tragedy, to the homosexual Duncan Grant, never forgot what Roger had taught her, for his magnanimous temperament and energetic pursuit of new ideas broadened her interests and increased her self-confidence. Their coming together marks a turning-point in Vanessa’s life, their relationship, though brief, having pivotal importance.