In 1905, the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf (both still known by their maiden name of Stephens) had just moved to a house at 46 Gordon Square in the area of London known as Bloomsbury. Their domineering father had died the year before, their mother almost a decade earlier, and the Stephens siblings were embarking on a new life of independence and creativity. Among the frequent visitors to the new house were friends of their brothers from Cambridge, a crowd of young artists and thinkers who would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, after the lifelong fellowship that their Gordon Square meetings inspired. Perhaps the closest and most fruitful of these connections was between Vanessa and her fellow-painter Duncan Grant, who were introduced in the autumn of 1905 and whose romantic and creative partnership would continue until Vanessa's death in 1961, lasting through her marriage to another man, Clive Bell, and numerous other involvements both personal and professional. In the wake of a resurgence in the popularity and critical appreciation of Bell and Grant's work over the last decade or so, an exhibition at Kensington gallery Piano Nobile has brought together pieces which represent the various facets of their collaboration, from early, experimental paintings to the interior objects which would become indelibly associated with the Bloomsbury name.
The pair reached an apogee in their artistic innovations in the early years of the 1910s, influenced by the riot of colour and abstraction on display in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition which took London by storm in 1912. The avant-garde works on display from giants like Matisse, Cezanne, and Picasso, alongside that of Wyndham Lewis, Eric Gill, and fellow Bloomsberry Roger Fry, had an immediate impact on the work of both Bell and Grant. Grant's 1913 painting Tents, for instance recalls the brushwork of Cezanne. As Richard Shone points out in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, this radicalism in painting was entirely concordant with the radicalism of their personal life. The spectacular wooden panel Standing Nude with Bird, for example, was based on a daring nude photograph of Bell's friend Molly MacCarthy, one of a series of nude photographs of friends taken around that time.
Molly also makes an appearance in a collage by Vanessa made around the same time, when Molly was allegedly having an affair with Vanessa's husband Clive Bell. The collage is remarkable in being made entirely from cut paper, a likely first in British art at the time and probably influenced by a visit to Picasso in Paris in 1914, where Vanessa had the opportunity to see that artist's Cubist collages.
Although Vanessa's place among the avant-garde would not last long beyond this period, the pair were already making their marks in other areas. In 1916 they had bought an unassuming farmhouse in East Sussex called Charleston, and it became a retreat for Bell, Grant, Bell's two sons, along with Grant's lover Duncan Garnett and various visitors connected with Bloomsbury, whether close relations like Clive Bell and his companion Mary Hutchinson, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, or distinguished friends like T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes (who came so regularly he was given his own room).
Charleston was an outlet for Bell and Grant's interior design talents, which had already been at the fore in their work with Roger Fry's Omega Workshop, which had been set up in 1913 and produced textiles, furniture, murals, and glass which aimed to blur the boundary between fine art and decorative design. One of the beauties of the Piano Nobile exhibition is its situating paintings and artworks next to ceramics and furniture produced by the pair in a small, intimate setting. As the gallery's director Matthew Travers points out, both Bell and Grant had a casual attitude towards their pieces; they were meant to be lived with rather than worshipped, and the exhibition gives the sense of just how that would have felt.
After the death of Vanessa's son Julian in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Vanessa began to withdraw from public life. The exhibition brings together some of the notable works from the period immediately before that, however - the highlight being an extraordinary collection of dinner plates commissioned by Kenneth Clark in 1932 as part of a dinner service, which has been largely out of view ever since. Each dinner plate - there are 50 - features a different famous woman, from Sappho to Greta Garbo. This feminist project was surely not what Clark expected, but stands as an impressive - and beautiful - monument to the Bloomsbury Group's social progressiveness and prolific creativity.
From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant 1910-1934 is on at Piano Nobile, 129 Portland Rd, Holland Park, London W11 4LW until April 28th. For more information email info@piano-nobile.com or call +44 (0)20 7229 1099. The exhibition is available to view Monday - Saturday 11am - 4pm or by appointment.
MAY WE SUGGEST: The interiors of Charleston: the house the Bloomsbury Group turned in to a living work of art
