Bloomsbury’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant Show Opens at Tate Britain
Tate Britain’s exhibition brings together the work and intertwined lives of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The display examines their engagement with modern art, though a review argues that the paintings lack the force of the artists’ personal histories and the European works that influenced them.
Tate Britain in London is presenting an exhibition on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, a flaccid roam through Bloomsbury’s intertwined lives and paintings that a review finds less compelling than the artists’ personal histories.
The display considers the cohabiting artists’ relationship with modernism and the Bloomsbury Group’s interest in art. The review argues that Bell and Grant’s work does not establish them as pioneers of British art, despite their exposure to influential European painting.
Art and influence
Grant’s 1913 portrait of George Mallory is among the works discussed. A caption focuses on the nude figure’s erotic undertones, while the review points out that the sitter was the mountaineer who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in 1924; his frozen body was rediscovered there in 1999.
The review also questions how the exhibition presents the artists’ engagement with French modernism. Grant’s portrait of Mallory, it says, closely follows the style of Georges Seurat, who died in 1891.
Bell and Grant encountered modern art not just in exhibitions and magazines but at home, where they lived with works that shaped their thinking. In 1918, economist John Maynard Keynes hid a Cézanne still life of seven apples in a hedge near the artists’ country home, Charleston, because he could not drive it up a muddy lane.
Once Keynes brought the painting to the house, the group admired it. The review notes that the Cézanne is not included in the Tate Britain exhibition, nor is Picasso’s early Cubist still life, Pots and Lemon, which Bell’s husband, art critic Clive Bell, bought in 1911.
Lives beyond the paintings
The exhibition arrives as interest in the Bloomsbury Group’s feminism and queer lives has grown. The review points to a West End play about Keynes’s relationships and visitors’ interest in the affair between writer Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst.
It argues that biography cannot make the paintings more compelling, describing Bell and Grant’s work as detached and passionless. Grant’s 1920s views of the South of France, it says, borrow modern styles while retaining the feel of traditional holiday paintings.
