Tom Williams

Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired

The least-loved Bloomsburyite, known for his womanising and Nazi sympathies, also introduced us to post-Impressionism, says Mark Hussey

Portrait of Clive Bell by Roger Fry, c. 1924. Credit: Alamy 
issue 24 April 2021

Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf and friend of Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, he is often depicted as a witness to historical events rather than a participant in them, a sort of modernist Forrest Gump. At best he is a dilettante with good taste who didn’t quite belong with the intellectuals of Bloomsbury; at worst he is a womaniser with Nazi sympathies who took advantage of Virginia Woolf. In this useful book Mark Hussey lets him take centre stage and delivers a far more nuanced portrait.

Bell liked to play up to his bad reputation — describing himself as ‘made for…nimble sallies, champagne-drinking’ — and throughout his open marriage to Vanessa he conducted numerous affairs. Intellectually, though, he could more than hold his own with the Bloomsbury group and, as Hussey tells us more than once, even if he was not invited to join Strachey and Leonard Woolf in the Apostles, he left Cambridge with a better degree.

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