Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour – an 'expansive' exhibition

The 'sweeping' show features over 140 works from paintings to ceramics

Interior with the Artist's Daughter by Vanessa Bell.
The sidelined Bloomsbury member is at long last made the 'main character' in her own story
(Image credit: Charleston Trust)

As a leading light of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell is by no means an obscure figure, said Florence Hallett on the i news site. Yet though she was an accomplished painter, Bell (1879-1961) is more commonly remembered as "the freewheeling foil to her intellectually intimidating, altogether more formidable sister Virginia Woolf". Her art, "all too easily dismissed" as too "nice" and too "colourful", has often attracted less interest than her sex life.

The scale of this "neglect" is made clear by this new exhibition in Milton Keynes, the "most comprehensive survey of her career ever staged". The show features more than 140 works, including not just paintings and drawings, but ceramics, furniture and even designs for adverts and book jackets. It presents Bell as a restless artist who shifted "distractedly from style to style", variously embracing the techniques of her tutor, John Singer Sargent, post-impressionism and avant-garde abstraction. Can it bring about a reappraisal?

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