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She who dared: Vanessa Bell at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
The work of the influential artist will be showcased in its first major retrospective in London this February
The legacy of Vanessa Bell is often explored within the context of her relationships to those around her. Sister to Virginia Woolf, wife of art critic Clive and a central figure of the influential Bloomsbury Set, a loose group of intellectuals, writers and artists which counted economist John Maynard Keynes and painter Roger Fry among its ranks, her own artistic influence is often underplayed.
This is set to change, as a new exhibition, the first major solo retrospective of her work, opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south-east London. Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) will bring together around 100 oil paintings alongside fabrics, photographs and other archival material to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the constant evolution of her style.
It opens with her portraiture, widely considered her most well-regarded works, with depictions of, among others, her sister, writer Giles Lytton Strachey and poet Iris Tree, as well as her own self-portrait from the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Together they showcase her progressively daring use of bold colour and forays into abstraction, placing her at the vanguard of British art.
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Focus then turns to interior design, as the exhibition explores her role as a housewife and mother, contrasted against her rejection of traditional Victorian standards of women. Bell's creativity manifested itself in her experimentation with the decorative arts, seen in her reimagining of her farmhouse at Charleston, East Sussex, in addition to her work with the Omega Workshop, a design enterprise founded by the Bloomsbury Group in 1913 that enabled members to create, produce and sell their own works. It is her forward-thinking exploration of the female subject that informs the final display: among the landmark pieces shown will be Tents and Figures and Studland Beach, as well as two later self-portraits.
Linking two revolutionary figures of their respective times, a concurrent exhibition at the gallery brings together Bell's photography albums, featuring pictures of her childhood in St Ives, with a series of polaroids taken by musician Patti Smith. The latter captures the remains of Bell's life at her Charleston farmhouse in a striking set of black and white images, inspired by Smith's long-standing fascination with the Bloomsbury Set.
"No British artist of Bell's generation so instinctively understood and reflected the radical new artistic developments unfolding in Paris," says Ian AC Dejardin, co-curator and director of Dulwich Picture Gallery. "Her resolute deskilling, her vibrant embrace of colour, the sheer brutality of her brush-strokes - as if hacking at the canvas with the brush - and her bold rejection of traditional notions of the beautiful, are truly brave and can astonish even today."
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from 8 February to 4 June 2017, £14; dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
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