Three figures are seated around a fireplace. Their postures suggest deep engagement in their discussion and ease in each other's presence. Paintings lean upon the mantelpiece. Armchairs are upholstered in dazzling shades of orange, purple and egg-yolk yellow. In Vanessa Bell's 1912 painting Conversation Piece, subjects that endured in her work across five decades are writ large: the human encounter, often examined through images of familial and social life, and the domestic environment, within which the fine and decorative arts emerge as favoured subjects for the brush.
Though feted as 'the most important woman painter in Europe' by the Burlington Magazine in 1923, questions of Bell's artistic merit have long dogged her legacy. Her devotion to depicting the people, places and things of domestic life and her enduring attraction to colour and pattern have seen Bell discredited in some quarters. By 1964, the assessment of one critic that hers was a 'lavender talent' seemed to linger, his barb redolent with the whiff of the hobbyist – and significantly female – painter.
Bell's position in the Bloomsbury Group has proven equally as problematic as these questions of subject and style. The affiliation has meant her work has typically been understood as a crucial aspect of British modernism. Yet it has also degraded her work, for some, to period set dressing for Bloomsbury's much-mythologised antics: a visual shortcut to an early-twentieth-century bohemianism performed by a privileged few.
More recently, art historians such as Grace Brockington and Hana Leaper have asked what it might mean to take Bell on her own terms. And similarly, an exhibition at the MK Gallery – the largest ever solo show of Bell's work – argues for her artistic importance by revealing her robust commitment to questions of form and colour, representation and abstraction. As this show makes clear, she left behind a number of remarkable works that pushed against contemporary expectations of what painting could be. Whether in modernist masterworks such as Studland Beach (c.1912), or in the naturalistic portraits of her later years, she conveyed a remarkable depth of feeling.
For her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, discussing an exhibition of Bell's work held in 1930, emotion was Bell's calling card: 'The room is charged with it. There is emotion in that white urn; in that little girl painting a picture; in the flowers and the bust'. Her paintings, she went on, 'claim us and make us stop. They give us an emotion. They offer a puzzle.'
Painting, as Bell's biographer Frances Spalding has put it, ran 'like a rod of steel through her life, an unbending core of conviction'. Upon commencing private tuition at Arthur Cope's South Kensington school in 1896, she was immediately bewitched by the 'grubby, shabby, dirty world of art students' that she found there: 'In their company one could forget oneself and think of nothing but shapes and colours and the absorbing difficulties of oil paint.'
Bell's training continued at the Painting School of the Royal Academy in 1901, where she was tutored by John Singer Sargent. In a letter to a friend, she noted his critique of 'anyone [...] trying for an effect regardless of truth' – a dictum that would find new form in her own lifelong belief that all painting was meaningful so long as it gave honest shape to the painter's ideas.
Such notions also shaped Bell's way of living: unfettered conversation, or 'free talk', was a vital tenet of modern life, held in revered contrast to the Victorian mores that had shaped her upbringing. Her emancipation from those was complete when, in October 1904, following their father's death, Bell and her siblings moved from the family home in Kensington to 46 Gordon Square in London's then démodé Bloomsbury.
No longer bearing responsibility for domestic duties, life took on a radical sense of possibility: 'it seemed as if in every way we were making a new beginning', she later reflected, emphasising particularly the freedom 'to have one's own rooms, be master of one's time'.
Bell could now apply herself to painting undisturbed. By 1905 she publicly exhibited her first work and, in 1909, the crystalline Iceland Poppies (c.1908–1909) was shown at the New English Art Club. With its cool palette and enigmatic suggestion of narrative, it must have rung out through the gallery with lucid clarity.
Upon seeing it, artist Walter Sickert was prompted to write to Bell, 'I didn't know you were a painter. Continuez!' By 1922, his tone had changed: she was no longer a tyro to be playfully encouraged, but a master of the medium, which 'ben[t] beneath her like a horse that knows its rider'.
Through the first decade of the twentieth century, Bell gradually became acquainted with the work of her French contemporaries, both in reproduction and occasionally through exhibitions. It was, however, an exhibition held in 1910 at London's Grafton Galleries, titled 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' – organised principally by her friend, and later lover, Roger Fry – that proved seismic to Bell's thinking about painting. She experienced 'a sudden pointing to a possible path, a liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself', newly discovered upon encountering works by artists such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse.
Here, in one electrifying moment, Bell was liberated from an art education that instructed students, as she drily recalled, to 'draw for seven years – learn anatomy and chemistry and the use of the stump'. Bell had long-held instincts for the bold, simplified forms and psychologically charged colours of Post-Impressionism, as one of her earliest surviving landscapes, Cornish Cottage (c.1900), attests. But a commitment to colour, composition and form was now newly empowered to take precedence over belaboured accuracy.
Comparison of Iceland Poppies with another still life made just five years later, Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece (1914), reveals a near-evangelical conversion. We no longer encounter a legible group of objects arranged before us. Instead, we must crane upwards to disentangle a complex mass of coloured blocks and curves, executed in newly visible, structural brushwork. The still life has become a site of absolute experimentation.
Landscape and portraiture underwent the same profound reckoning. Bell later described her work of this period as an attempt 'to change everything into colour. It certainly made me inclined to destroy the solidity of objects' – an imperative visible in the flattened patterning of a work such as Landscape with Buildings (c.1912).
In a group of four startling portraits dating from 1912, Bell chose to portray Woolf deprived of facial features. Despite – or perhaps because of – this act of erasure, her character seems more keenly felt. As Spalding has commented, though a seeming anathema to the portrait genre, the choice 'promotes the imaginative power of gaps, elisions and silence through the intrusion of the abstract into the visual world'. It was here, perhaps, that Bell came closest to sharing in her sister's modernist project of depicting the inner life.
Post-Impressionism was, for Bell, tightly knit to her guiding values of honest self-expression. 'It was as if at last one might say things one had always felt instead of trying to say things that other people told one to feel', she would later explain. 'Freedom was given one to be oneself.'
In 1913, she began work on A Conversation (1913–1916), a painting which rings out like a manifesto for this ethos in both its form and subject. Its reduced, direct forms and startling passages of bright colour are enlisted to express the corresponding liberation of the conversation that it depicts.
The painting was first shown at the Omega Workshops, which Bell had co-founded in 1913 with Fry and Duncan Grant, who would become a lifelong creative partner and would father her daughter Angelica in 1918.
At the Workshops, furniture, ceramics and textiles were produced, unsigned, by a wide group of artists including Wyndham Lewis, Dora Carrington and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, with the intention of allowing (in Fry's words), 'free play to the delight in creation in the making of objects for common life.'
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) (attributed to) and Duncan Grant (1885–1978) (attributed to) 
Among Bell's most significant designs were those for geometric rugs which, as Christopher Reed has argued, paved the way for a small group of abstract works on canvas, made in late 1914. Credited as the first purely abstract works produced in Britain, the four paintings and papier collés are perhaps the most striking testament to 'the painter's world of form and colour', that Bell spoke of as her lifelong domain.
Yet for all their innovation, these works remained private experiments, with Bell soon returning to representation. ('One discovered that one was, after all, in love with nature', she would later recall.) However, in a series of incisive portraits of Mary Hutchinson, David Garnett and her formidable self-portrait (shown above), all made in the following year of 1915, the graphic patterning of her abstract idiom forms the sitters' mise en scene. The two seemingly opposed worlds of abstraction and representation unite with a compelling force.
The First World War extinguished much of Bell's pre-war experimentation. In key with the return to order on the continent, Bell recalled that 'the excitement and the joy had gone. The hostility of the general public was real now; no longer a ridiculous and even stimulating joke'. Her painted output gradually took on a new realism, evident in the comparison of Landscape (c.1915), a magnificent meditation on the swirling, near psychedelic reflection of vegetation in a pond, with the tamed expression of the same subject, made in 1923.
Yet it was during the war years that Bell began one of her greatest creative projects in the decoration of Charleston – the Sussex farmhouse that would remain hers and Grant's home for the rest of their lives. There, they began the ongoing project of painting walls and furniture in variegated opposition to the 'dreariness of the universal khaki' for which she remembered the war years.
From the 1920s onwards, Bell's tendency to paint that which she found 'at my door' became more pronounced. Many of her paintings from this period are tightly bound by a sense of interiority, with views of Charleston's gardens often seen through windows and doors. The instinct was compounded following the devastating loss of both her son Julian in 1937 and Woolf in 1941, after which Bell's refuge became evermore the canvas.
Interior with Duncan Grant (1885–1978)
1934
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) 
Nonetheless, Bell and Grant travelled to Europe throughout her later decades, particularly to France and Italy where the light and colour provided a spur to her work. While in Asolo in Italy in 1955, she wrote with exhilaration that 'everything is colour and definite and exciting'.
Bell continued painting until the last years of her life, including a self-portrait in which she meets the viewer's eye with the candour that had marked her approach to life.
Earlier in her career, Bell had questioned those who 'think that an artist is quite capable of telling you a great deal about the sitter besides what they feel about his shape and colour. They think that his past, present, future, his whole relationship to the universe in fact, can be conveyed by the way in which his head droops on his shoulder.' Though Bell was inclined to disagree, looking at this work, we might claim her ability to do just that.
Chloe Nahum, researcher and art historian
'Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour' is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes until 23rd February 2025
This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation
Further reading
Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira (eds), Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, exhibition catalogue, Milton Keynes Art Gallery, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2024
Grace Brockington, 'A "Lavender Talent" or "The Most Important Woman Painter in Europe"? Reassessing Vanessa Bell', in Art History, vol. 36, no. 1, 2013
Grace Brockington and Claudia Tobin, 'In Focus: Abstract Painting c.1914 by Vanessa Bell', Tate, 2017
Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops, Secker & Warburg, 1983
Lia Giachero (ed.) Vanessa Bell, Sketches in Pen and Ink, Pimlico, 1998
Regina Marler (ed.), Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, Bloomsbury, 1993
Sarah Milroy and Ian Dejardin (eds), Vanessa Bell, exhibition catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2017
Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983
Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, Paul Mellon Centre, 2000
