The first major solo exhibition devoted to the work of Vanessa Bell, the artist who created the country retreat for the Bloomsbury set and in the process almost buried her own reputation, opens this week at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.
“We’re not rescuing her from the Bloomsburies, that would be absurd, they were such an important part of her life – but we are letting her be seen in her own light, as the distinctive, important painter she was. It’s a long overdue tribute,” co-curator Ian Dejardin said.
The exhibition covers her long career as an artist, from student works in 1905 to her last self-portraits before her death in 1961, and includes many pictures that have spent decades in storage, and others that have always been in private collections.
“Of the many works we have borrowed from the Tate, only the one of Studland beach is regularly on the walls, the rest were all in storage,” Dejardin said. “We had lots of the family in for an early look – there are scores of them, all ravishingly beautiful, it’s in the genes – and they were running from wall to wall remarking on how many of the pictures they’d never seen before.”
The exhibition includes several tender portraits of her sister Virginia Woolf, and inevitably the tangled love affairs of the Bloomsbury set figure prominently, including portraits of her lovers. One shows the artist Duncan Grant reflected in a mirror: he said he realised she was in love with him when he noticed her staring at him as he shaved.
They shared Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex happily for decades and had a child, even though he was gay and a former lover of Bell’s brother Adrian. Their child, Angelica, went on to marry David Garnett, another of Grant’s lovers.
There is a baleful portrait of her husband Clive Bell’s lover Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of the writer Lytton Strachey, and more surprisingly a reclining nude overshadowed by giant poppies, which she painted as a bed-head for Hutchinson. “Either a supremely open-minded gesture or a sardonic jab at the lady in question,” said Dejardin and his co-curator Sarah Milroy.
The exhibition also marks Dejardin’s farewell to the gallery which was designed by Sir John Soane and celebrates its 200th anniversary this year as the first purpose-built public gallery in Britain. Dejardin has worked there for 19 years and run it for 12. He is leaving on Friday, with his partner Eric Pearson who designed the exhibition, and takes over in April as director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario.
“It’s a week of very mixed emotions,” he said. “I’m looking forward very much to the new job, but it will be almost unbearable to leave here – Dulwich is an extraordinary place.”
