The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise

The artist Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, the wife of Clive Bell, is enjoying the limelight this year as an exhibition of her work travels the country. Hot on its coat-tails comes Wendy Hitchmough’s beautifully illustrated new study of Bell’s life and art. As the former curator of the painter’s home at Charleston, Hitchmough writes with insider knowledge, supported by an armoury of scholarship: the bibliography alone stretches to 14 pages and the notes to 45.

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Somewhere within this carapace is a uniquely original and talented artist struggling to get out – a true radical whose story was one long, rolling sequence of experiments in leading as creative a life as possible within or without the constraints of her time. Bell was a role model for many, whose art, clothes, aesthetic and decorative sensibility continue to inspire generations of would-be bohemians and whose impact never dims.

She was naturally more reserved than her sister Virginia, later Woolf. She expressed herself in painting, not in words. Was it the patriarchy, the ‘bombastic, male-dominated field of British modernism’ that sidelined her, forcing her into the shadows? Her work was often confused with that of her long-time partner Duncan Grant, largely because they worked as well as lived together, and her reticence was greater than his. Previously unpublished letters are harnessed in an attempt to put her point of view, though they add little but detail. She remains as elusive as a sphinx behind a blizzard of curatorial facts about works finished or not, exhibited or not, and often questionable claims about them.

I was alarmed to read, for instance, of Bell’s only known sculpture, an unassuming if stylised depiction of the Madonna and Child, that it ‘traces the outline of a vulva with the woman’s head, shrouded by her blue hooded gown, in the place of a clitoris’.