Vanessa Bell is often best remembered for the creative milieu she cultivated, but a new exhibition of her work makes a case for her as a groundbreaking artist.
In 1932, the historian Kenneth Clark commissioned a ceramic dinner service from the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. But he got something different: 48 plates, each painted with a portrait of a famous woman, from the Queen of Sheba to Greta Garbo. (Plus two bearing the images of the artists.)
The “Famous Women Dinner Service” is a central feature of the exhibition “Vanessa Bell, a World of Form and Color” at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes through Feb. 23.
“It’s one of the great works of feminist art of the 20th century,” said Anthony Spira, the director of MK Gallery, who co-curated the exhibition with the head of exhibitions, Fay Blanchard. “We are familiar with Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party,’ but this is hardly known.”
That’s perhaps because Bell wasn’t just the sister of Virginia Woolf, but the linchpin of what became known as the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of friends and lovers who included Grant, Woolf and her husband Leonard, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell, the critic Roger Fry, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the writer Lytton Strachey. The fame of the group, and of Charleston, the Sussex house where they gathered and resided, has meant that Bell is rarely considered an important artist in her own right.
“A World of Form and Color,” the largest and most comprehensive display of Bell’s work to date, aims to redress that by featuring more than 150 artworks, including rarely seen paintings as well as drawings, ceramics, furniture, textiles and book covers.
