Vanessa Bell Research Articles

The Novel and the Problem of New Life

The Novel and the Problem of New Life

POST-IMPRESSIONISM AND VIRGINIA WOOLF S EXPERIMENTATION WITH LITERARY FORMS

Virginia Woolf as one of the leading figures of modernist literature was in pursuit of challenging the so-called limitations of form in fiction. Triggered by the intellectual discussions in the Bloomsbury Group, formed by a group of intellectuals and artists in England, she attempted to redefine literary form by reorganizing her fiction to oppose the painters in the group who believed that literary form is restricted because of the nature of language. Influenced by her discussions with post-impressionist artists such as Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, Woolf acknowledged that artistic creativity is intermingled by “a myriad impressions” of an “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” with its own peculiarities and dissonances. Similarly, post-impressionism rejects objectivity as a necessity in realist painting and embraces spiritualism and personality in artistic expression. Knowing that literature is not solely composed of abstract ideas, Woolf even tested new printing techniques. In her novels, not only content and narrative techniques but also the norms regarding physical organization of a book are challenged. Therefore, Woolf greyed the lines between form and content by rendering the book itself as a fragmented material. Consequently, this paper aims to discuss Woolf’s experimentalism in her selected works as a modernist attempt to blur the borders of the two edging literary components—form and content—by looking into the influences of post-impressionist art on her fiction.

‘Patti Smith, Bloomsbury, and the Afterlives of Modernist Objects’

This essay focuses on the photographs of Patti Smith that were shown at the Dulwich Picture Gallery's exhibition titled ‘Legacy: Photographs by Vanessa Bell and Patti Smith’ (London, February 8 to June 4, 2017). It tracks the parallel resonances between Smith and Bloomsbury with respect to ideas concerning the inseparability of materiality, emotion, and the body. The essay argues that Smith's photographs of ‘Bloomsbury objects’ convey that the immaterial can only be expressed through the material, a paradox that is key to understanding how such objects function as spiritualized relics that both highlight and supersede the dominion of the everyday.

Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine

<i>Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the</i> Dial <i>Magazine</i>

Review: Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect

Review: <i>Eileen Gray, Designer and Architect</i>

Things Woolfian

Things Woolfian Kat Meads (bio) Attics often give shelter to what shouldn't be preserved. Rediscovered in a crinkly, yellowed state, my dreadful 1973 term paper written for Professor Frank Ryan's honors class on the "search for unity" in Virginia Woolf's novels, nephew Quentin Bell's then-new biography my only secondary source. Throughout the thirty-two pages, Professor Ryan diligently circled my (numerous) typos: Click for larger view View full resolution —but gave up correcting the error of my block paragraph quotation marks early in the game, likely worn out by the task. On the title page, in slanting blue script, he posed these questions: Do you imply that V.W. found unity in death? Was she "ripe" and "ready for death" in a Nietzschean sense? Any relationship between V.W's art, her life and death, and Freud's Thanatos as dominant over Eros in 1930s? Did V.W. feel that England was dying in 1930s? Although I accumulated points for "handling the themes" of "male/female dichotomy," "art and its limitations," "love and its limitations," "madness," and "death," Professor Ryan signed off with another question: Could more have been done with silence?—a question time has plumped with irony. Why can't we Woolfians stop gabbing about Virginia? As early as 1974, in her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick already bemoaned Bloomsbury rehash: "The period, the letters, the houses, [End Page 135] the love affairs, the blood lines: These are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again." Should the reading public need reminding in 1978, that banner year for Woolf studies and publications, John Hillaby announced in a New Scientist article that "the Woolf hunt" was "still under way." In a 2015 review of Viviane Forrester's Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, reviewer Suzanne Berne used up some of her own word count to re-ask: "To the hundreds of books that have been written about Virginia Woolf, why [Berne's italics] add another? More to the point, why aren't her own books enough?" Worthy questions, both. Also questions that ignore the attractions of spectating a turf war composed of interpretive skirmishes, internecine bickerings, and revelations regarding who aligns with which side and why. As Jacqueline Rose reminded in her review of Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf, closest rival—in terms of influence—to Quentin Bell's 1972 account: "It is always worth asking of any biography, with whom in the story, if anyone, does the biographer identify?" ________ Thus far no Virginia Woolf biographer has identified with Sir Leslie Stephen—writer, scholar, expert mountaineer, Shreckhorn first-ascenter, Dictionary of National Biography editor. What's intriguing, from the biographical standpoint, is the similarity of his portrayal in books, essays, and criticism devoted to his daughter. About Sir Leslie's personality there seems to be neither undue argument nor abundant sympathy. A prickly, whiny, sulky man, often overwrought and constantly overly demanding of his family's attentions and concern. A patriarch soaked in self-pity, the perpetually weeping widower. A stepfather who deeply resented Stella Duckworth's leaving his household for marriage and a household of her own. A breadwinner "with an irrational fear of ending his days in the poorhouse," his operational standard a "melodramatic tyranny" (Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf). A fellow who excelled at enacting a "Victorian widower's hysterical helplessness" (Janet Malcolm, "A House of One's Own"). In penning the Mausoleum Book—"purportedly a letter to his children to memorialize their dead mother," scoffed reviewer Virginia Hyman—Sir Leslie, once again, managed to make it all about Sir Leslie. After pledging "simply to write about your mother," the memoirist amends: "In order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself." During his lifetime, Sir Leslie was obeyed—but not without resentment. After his death, Vanessa "dreamt on more than one occasion that she had murdered him," reports Frances Spalding (Vanessa Bell). Short of murdering him, Vanessa appears not to have expressed undue sorrow when she, Thoby, Adrian, and Virginia were freed of his rule and presence...

Cézanne's Gravity by Carol Armstrong

Reviewed by: Cézanne's Gravity by Carol Armstrong Lucy Whelan Cézanne's Gravity. Carol Armstrong. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 280. $65.00 (cloth). If there is a single artist who defines the tendency of histories of Western modern art to cling to a teleological timeline—in which art evolves steadily from realism towards the freedom of abstraction—that artist is surely Paul Cézanne. In the decades after his death in 1906, artists, art historians, and critics such as Clement Greenberg placed him at the origin of that lineage, dubbing him the "most copious source of modern art."1 For Greenberg especially, this status was primarily due to the apparent emphasis Cézanne's tactile brushstrokes gave to the flatness of the [End Page 204] canvas support, that Greenberg retrospectively cast as the primary origin of modern painting's self-reflexive way of pointing to itself and the specific conditions of its medium. According to this narrative, Cézanne's flatness would eventually find its teleological endpoint in the rectangles of color produced by (overwhelmingly male) abstract expressionist artists after the Second World War. This account of modernism has been critiqued and disrupted over the last four decades, yet still it seems indelible: modernism in its paradigmatic form, with Cézanne at its head, remains as temporally linear as it is spatially flat. Carol Armstrong's stimulating and beautifully written study offers a bold reappraisal of this rectilinear view of modernism, insisting on alternative possible folds in its history while simultaneously recovering the warped strangeness of Cézanne's work. It does so primarily through a series of pairings, sometimes groupings, of Cézanne with various twentieth-century writers, painters, and thinkers that followed him: Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Albert Einstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, R. D. Laing, Greenberg, and Helen Frankenthaler. The reason for these pairings is not simply in order to trace Cézanne's reception, but rather in order to see him refracted by a plurality of perspectives, all of which reveal a different painter from the one shaped retroactively by art history's desire for linearity. In this way, Armstrong advances a "heterochronic" model for approaching art through multiple and overlapping timelines that builds upon recent work in the field (20). Art historians countering traditional linear chronologies with more complex temporalities include Mieke Bal, Michael Ann Holly, Alexander Nagel, Amy Powell, and, most pertinently here, Keith Moxey. Yet Armstrong's book is to my knowledge the first to bring this approach to modernism. By focusing on such a complex painter as Cézanne, she offers a powerful demonstration of how taking a heterochronic approach to time enables us to treat artworks as agents, rather than products, of history. For as she shows, Cézanne's works have more than enough material and intellectual presence to be capable of eluding linear, pre-ordained art historical narratives. Armstrong's quest to retrieve Cézanne's strangeness likewise expands and builds on a wealth of writing on the artist produced in recent decades. Art historians have explored his work's curious form of sensitivity to the visual world, its sensuous physicality, its peculiar erotic charge, uncanny non-humanity, and apparent lack of "finish," and these and other topics weave lightly in and out of this study. That said, it would be possible for readers approaching this book from outside of nineteenth-century art history not to realise how much authors such as Yve-Alain Bois, T. J. Clark, Tamar Garb, and Aruna D'Souza have already successfully refocused discussions around Cézanne away from the Greenbergian model that Cézanne's Gravity positions itself so assertively against. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, however—indeed Armstrong's own beautifully observed study of Cézanne's watercolors from 2004 is among the best of this literature—and as the first study to counter Greenberg's emphasis on the artist's flatness so directly, Cézanne's Gravity merits positioning itself as transformative in this sense. In any case, writing on Cézanne already forms a large part of this study, in that its first, third, and fourth chapters...

Vanessa Bell’s Attic studio at Charleston: Its History, Impact and Future

The artist, Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), used the attic studio at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex for the last twenty years of her career. Her son felt that Bell’s move to a studio at the top of the house was linked to her reclusive nature, but the original plans for the studio indicate more complex reasons. The most important factors may have been the need to provide extra working space and to accommodate Bell’s family who sought refuge at Charleston ahead of the Second World War. Initially, Bell had planned a large new studio on the ground floor, but she economised by creating three smaller studios, including one in the attic, away from visitors and domestic demands. Working in the attic studio, Bell created subtle compositions and searching self-portraits that often incorporate the room’s physical characteristics. Reappraising Bell’s achievements during these years provides a more balanced picture of her late style, which has sometimes been clouded by a narrative of withdrawal and inferred decline. Returning the studio to a museum space open to the public would help preserve Bell’s legacy by allowing visitors to immerse themselves in her final working environment.

Oriental Bloomsbury

The multiple and occasionally contradictory response of Bloomsbury to the Orient is the focus of this essay which also considers the reverse: the Orient's response to Bloomsbury and the promotion of their texts in the East. From Roger Fry to G. L. Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell, the Orient became a source of aesthetic interest and problematized politics. French Orientalism and Proust initially corroborated the experiences of Woolf in Constantinople and Leonard Woolf in Ceylon, soon to be revised by new views of Imperial authority. Yet Bloomsbury and the Orient artistically depended on each other, at one point Fry scolding Bloomsbury and England that ‘we can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look at the art of China’. And look they did, from attending museum shows to collecting Oriental art and furniture, while adopting Oriental fashions – and, when possible, traveling to China and Japan marked by visits by Bertrand Russell, William Empson, and Harold Acton. The response of individual Bloomsbury writers to the Orient mixes curiosity and jealousy. To her nephew Julian Bell, teaching at Wuhan University, Woolf wrote that ‘you are much to be envied. I wish I had spent three years in China at your age’.

Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters' Arts, The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Syracuse University Press, 1988, xv+376pp. / Mary Ann Caws, Women of Bloomsbury, Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington, Routledge, 1990, xiii+218pp.

Diane Filby Gillespie, The Sisters' Arts, The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Syracuse University Press, 1988, xv+376pp. / Mary Ann Caws, Women of Bloomsbury, Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington, Routledge, 1990, xiii+218pp.

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell takes centre stage at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Somewhat shockingly, this is Bell’s first major monographic exhibition and it sets out to present her as a pioneer and progressive. We encounter her work at its most radical and exciting, predominantly in the period of intensified experimentation during the 1910s. She emerges at the vital centre of Bloomsbury’s artistic network, her scope and range demonstrated across different genre and media. Bell’s experiment in pur...

Virginia Woolf: A Portrait by Viviane Forrester

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf: A Portrait by Viviane Forrester Drew Patrick Shannon Viviane Forrester. Virginia Woolf: A Portrait. Trans. Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. 247 pp. While a biography may be free in some ways to break certain narrative rules—one can always begin with the subject's death, for instance—in general it must follow a chronology, introduce its subject to readers unfamiliar with the material, and situate its subject in a historical context. Such rules may not apply to literary portraiture, a form that can show its subject at skewed angles, in odd colors, and with clearly visible brushstrokes. The late Viviane Forrester has produced something much in the latter vein in Virginia Woolf: A Portrait. First published in France, it won the 2009 Goncourt Prize for biography and appears now in an English translation by Jody Gladding. Based almost entirely on primary sources, the book assumes a certain degree of knowledge of Virginia Woolf on the reader's part and proposes to delve deeply into Woolf's psyche to rescue her from what Forrester sees as the unsavory influences of the people who surrounded her. But, as with any portrait, the book reveals perhaps more about its author than its subject. Arranged in five parts, Forrester's book argues for the concept of Virginia "alone" and aims to present her as a gallant, misunderstood figure in need of a much more focused depiction (3). But then Forrester somewhat oddly examines Woolf in light of the major figures and events in her life: her husband Leonard; her family and her childhood in Hyde Park Gate, Kensington; her sister Vanessa Bell; the other members of the Bloomsbury Group and the writers Katherine Mansfield and Vita Sackville-West; and, finally, death itself. Forrester's writing attempts to follow the model set by Woolf in some of the autobiographical writings that appear in Moments of Being as well as the witty, urbane, conversational tone set by Woolf in her best essays and in A Room of One's Own. There are many rhetorical questions scattered throughout the text, most of which ask the reader to ponder how Woolf herself fits into the swirling mix of personalities and often unpleasant events. "What is the weight of a life?" and "What entangled Virginia?" (3), Forrester asks; she provides a running commentary on the length of time it will take before Woolf drowns herself in the River Ouse. While there are moments of elegance—indeed, of poetry—in Forrester's prose, at times the sentences appear clotted and dense and verb tenses often shift from past to present for no discernible reason; sentence fragments and single words stand alone, as if to shock the reader into stillness. One assumes that Gladding reproduced this as accurately as possible from Forrester's original French. The effect, while sometimes beautiful, quickly becomes tiring and cloying. [End Page 597] More problematic than style is Forrester's stance on the other figures in Woolf's life and, ultimately, on Woolf herself. By the fourth page of the book, Forrester launches into an attack on both Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell; the former is accused of marrying Virginia solely for personal gain (he hated life in colonial Ceylon, and Virginia, requiring much care, could serve as a reason to return to Britain) and the latter is attacked for having produced a two-volume biography of his aunt that simply perpetuated the myths of sexual coldness put forth by Leonard. Bell in particular is attacked relentlessly; he is mentioned over twenty times in the text, typically with condescension if not outright contempt. (Forrester appears to have had issues with Bell since their joint 1973 appearance on a radio program she was producing on—as she puts it—"guess who?" [19].) Troublingly, many of Forrester's arguments about Bell were current in the mid-to late 1970s, and many of the same points were made much more clearly and effectively by Ellen Hawkes Rogat in her 1974 essay "The Virgin in the Bell Biography." Many of Forrester's contentions about Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Quentin Bell, Leslie and Julia Stephen, the Duckworth brothers and their sexual misconduct, and the other...

Dressing modern identity: Victorian style re-imagined in the Angelica Garnett Gift

Abstract This article discusses recent finds in the Angelica Garnett Gift of 8000 previously unseen works of art by Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, donated to The Charleston Trust in 2008. The Charleston Trust cares for Charleston House, the Sussex home of Bell and Grant, and the collection of their and their contemporaries’ artworks. The Angelica Garnett Gift has emphasized the overlooked importance of dress to the work and lives of Bell and Grant and calls for more attention on the sartorials of Bloomsbury. This article aims to spark discussion in this understudied field, focusing on two examples found in the Gift, which reinterpret and reclaim the Victorian styles of the top hat and the fan to express possibilities of modern identity. These works interrogate how dress can negotiate experiences of both gender and modernity while also revealing understudied artistic and design processes, for Duncan Grant with the Omega Workshops and Vanessa Bell later in life. The style of the Bloomsbury Group continues to inspire designers today who find their modernist dress equally suitable to express the contemporary moment.

“Suicidal Mania” and Flawed Psychobiography: Two Discussions of Virginia Woolf

The first discussion concerns Virginia Woolf's attempted suicide in September 1913 and her recuperation from the attack of mental illness that provoked it. The main focus is on the interest and advice of Roger Fry, who was closely involved with Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, and whose wife, the artist Helen Fry, had a long history of mental illness that invites comparison and contrast with that of Virginia. When Virginia was convalescing, and a new nurse was required for her, Roger approached the medical superintendent of the hospital in which Helen was a patient. The letters exchanged between the two are made known for the first time. The second discussion concerns Virginia's and Leonard Woolf's visit to Greece with Roger and his sister Margery Fry in 1932, and specifically a photograph taken while the party was in Athens. The recent contention of Maggie Humm that the common error of identifying the location as the Acropolis originated with Virginia, and that her alleged misidentification is psychobiographically significant, is refuted.

Still Life in Motion: Mortal Form in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Late in the evening on March 28, 1918, a government car rolled to a stop at the bottom of a lane near the town of Lewes, in east Sussex, and deposited a single passenger and a quantity of luggage. passenger, John Maynard Keynes, had just returned from Paris, where he had helped the National Gallery to acquire thirteen works by major European artists at the sale of the estate of Edgar Degas, which proceeded despite the wartime bombardment of the city. In fact, the sounds of the exploding shells from Big Bertha had depressed prices at the auction to such an extent that Keynes able to purchase a few items for himself, and he returned to England with all of this artwork in tow. Unable to carry it all up the lane to Charleston farmhouse, though, he paused to hide a parcel in the hedge near the (Bell, Cezanne). Then, with his more manageable burden, he began to walk toward the house, where, upon his arrival, he declared to the great surprise of its inhabitants, If you'd like to go down to the road, you'll find there's a just behind the gate (Grant). (1) As Vanessa Bell told Roger Fry in a letter she wrote the following week, this eccentric greeting caused a bit of upheaval: We had great excitements about the pictures. Maynard came back suddenly and unexpectedly late at night, ... and said he had left a by the roadside! Duncan rushed off to get it and you can imagine how exciting it all was (212-13). excitement over the painting in the hedge still reverberated years later, and the event lent its title to a collection of reminiscences about Bloomsbury, A in the Hedge, in which Quentin Bell suggested that surely there ought to be some little monument, a small obelisk, a pillar or at least a post. After all, there cannot be many other English hedgerows which have actually housed a Cezanne (136). But in 1918, the excitement over the manner of the painting's arrival soon gave way to the thrill of examining a up close and in color. It had been six years since the last Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery, and at that time, no private collection in England included a painting (Caws 99); none to be seen, as Quentin Bell explains, except in black and white photographs, usually very bad, in avant-garde magazines (138). Little wonder, then, that Vanessa Bell wrote to Roger Fry with such enthusiasm about the small still life, entitled Pommes [Fig. 1]: The is really amazing and it's most exciting to have it in the house. It's so extraordinarily solid and alive (213). (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] When Virginia Woolf saw the painting a few days later, once it had been brought into London, she noted the same liveliness, writing about it at length in her diary: There are 6 apples in the picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres [sic] their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity. To Roger & Nessa, moreover, it a far more intricate question than this. It a question of pure paint or mixed; if pure which colour: emerald or veridian; & then the laying on of the paint; & the time he'd spent, & how he'd altered it, & why, & when he'd painted it--We carried it into the next room, & Lord! how it showed up the pictures there, as if you put a real stone among sham ones; the canvas of the others seemed scraped with a thin layer of rather cheap paint. apples positively got redder & rounder & greener. (3) (Diary 1. 140-41) Here Woolf emphasizes the painters' overwhelming attention to the details of Cezanne's craft, and at the same time that she gently mocks her sister and her friend, she also poses somewhat disingenuously as a naif. This day in April 1918 far from the first time that Woolf had viewed Post-Impressionist painting. She had attended both of Fry's exhibitions and had even dressed as a Gauguin picture with Vanessa for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition Ball (Froula 15). …

Terrific Books for Summer Reading

Now that classroom doors at schools everywhere have closed until fall, we’re delighted to recommend a diverse cross-section of books for children of all ages to enjoy during the long, lazy days of summer. Young readers are sure to find something here to relish and pore over while school is out. The featured picture books offer a parade of colourful characters, from ballerinas to penguins, and themes that will make you laugh out loud, while others deal with difficult life events like those covered in Really and Truly, where a boy tries to communicate with his grandfather as his memories are being robbed by Alzheimer’s. One of the most enjoyable picture books of the year is Dave Whamond’s Oddrey for its charming illustrations and timeless message of misfit children who overcome challenging events or circumstances. For those who are looking for a picture book about sibling relationships, Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf is an excellent choice; it is a beautifully rendered and poignant story about sisterly differences and depression. It is a beautifully rendered tribute to real-life sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, who were members of an early twentieth-century group of influential writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. There are also many excellent novels for teenagers, including several absorbing stories that promise to hook otherwise reluctant readers. The final installment in The Boy Sherlock Holmes series is highly recommended for its nail-biting story of the boy Holmes’ final case. We also recommend Karen Armstrong’s The Rising for young adults interested in urban fantasy, romance, and supernatural themes. The variety of reads in this issue is truly impressive, and we hope this issue will inspire you to encourage children of all ages to read every day this summer. Best wishes, Robert DesmaraisManaging Editor

Virginia Wolf by K. Maclear.

Maclear, Kyo. Virginia Wolf. Illus. Isabelle Arsenault. Toronto : Kids Can Press, 2010. Print. Vanessa awakes one morning to find her sister, Virginia, transformed. Virginia is not herself. She has become furtive and embittered, snippy and distinctly wolfish. While Isabelle Arsenault's illustrations have a consistent prettiness and amiable levity, the ambiguous and slightly sinister nature of Virginia's' transformation is undeniable. Kyo Maclear's narrative balances how children will interpret the change that has come over Virginia and Vanessa's attempts to return her sister to herself and how adults will understand the allusions to depression and alienation. Virginia is literally - in the context of a child's understanding and the illustrations - a wolf in an archetypal little girl's dress. She is also genuinely frightening in the depths and intensity of her withdrawal and this gives Virginia Wolf a lovely little frisson of fairy tale dread. Vanessa perseveres in trying to redeem her sister and rescue her from her dour transformation. It is creativity, honesty of self-expression and love that eventually reestablish the sister's rapport. As Maclear elegantly conveys, accompanied by an inspired and expressive page design, “Down became up. Dim became bright. Gloom became glad.” Inspired by Maclear's creative interpretation of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the story can be enjoyed at many different levels. The reader can certainly intuit how much the writer and artist enjoy each other’s work and are relishing the imaginative potential of their subject matter. The layered complexity of the text is enriched by the intuitive collaboration between artist and writer evident in the evocative text and toothsomely vivid illustrations.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda Roche Matilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud.

A ‘Lavender Talent’ or ‘The Most Important Woman Painter in Europe’? Reassessing Vanessa Bell

Art HistoryVolume 36, Issue 1 p. 128-153 Original Article A ‘Lavender Talent’ or ‘The Most Important Woman Painter in Europe’? Reassessing Vanessa Bell Grace Brockington, Grace BrockingtonSearch for more papers by this author Grace Brockington, Grace BrockingtonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 January 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2013.00949.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume36, Issue1February 2013Pages 128-153 RelatedInformation

Notes from the Field: Contingency

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsLinda ConnorLinda Connor, professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and founder of PhotoAlliance, has had her photographs exhibited nationally and internationally. Her book Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor was published in 2008. Among other honors, she received the Society of Photographic Education's Honored Educator Award in 2005 [San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94133, Lindaconnor@earthlink.net].Giovanna BorradoriGiovanna Borradori is professor of philosophy at Vassar College. She is a specialist of Continental philosophy, the aesthetics of architecture, and the philosophy of terrorism. Her last book, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, was a “philosophy best-seller,” which appeared in eighteen languages [Department of Philosophy, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12604].Marcia BrennanMarcia Brennan, associate professor of art history and religious studies at Rice University, teaches courses on modern art, mysticism, and the medical humanities. She is the author of several books, including Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum, and a forthcoming study on the visual culture of the end of life [Department of Religious Studies, MS 15, Rice University, PO Box 1892, Houston, Tex. 77251–1892, mbrennan@rice.edu].Mary Ann DoaneMary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Femmes Fatales, and The Desire to Desire. In 2007, she edited a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign” [Department of Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, 6216 Dwinelle Hall, no. 2670, Berkeley, Calif. 94720–2670].Angus FletcherAngus Fletcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York). His books include A New Theory for American Poetry; Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare; and a newly expanded edition of his Allegory (Princeton University Press) [The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016].Peter GeimerPeter Geimer is professor of art history at the Freie Universität Berlin. His publications in English include “Picturing the Black Box: On Blanks in 19th Century Paintings and Photographs,” Science in Context (2004) and “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2007) [Freie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Koserstrasse 20, 14195 Berlin, Germany, peter.geimer@fu-berlin.de].Gloria KuryGloria Kury, PhD, is director of Gutenberg Periscope Publishing. Before serving as executive editor of arts and humanities at Penn State University Press from 1999 to 2006, she taught art history at Vassar College, New York University, and Yale University [Periscope Publishing, Ltd, 150 West Hutchinson Avenue Cottage, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15218, gjkury@gmail.com].Mark LedburyMark Ledbury is Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. The author of books and articles on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art, he is currently completing his latest project, “An Eccentric History of History Painting” [Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia, mark.ledbury@sydney.edu.au].C. Brian RoseC. Brian Rose is James B. Pritchard Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and curator-in-charge of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum. He was an academic trustee (1994–2000), first vice-president (2002–6), and president (2007–11) of the Archaeological Institute of America [Mediterranean Section, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, roseb@sas.upenn.edu].Frances SpaldingFrances Spalding is an art historian, critic, and biographer. Her books include British Art since 1900, a centenary history of the Tate, and lives of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Stevie Smith. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art [Department of History of Art, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, U.K., Frances.spalding@ncl.ac.uk].Chris SpringChris Spring is an artist and a curator of the African Galleries, the British Museum. Among his publications are Angaza Afrika: African Art Now (2008), African Art in Detail (2009), and African Textiles Today (2012). His work in Africa included support for Triangle artists' workshops in Mozambique, Ghana, and Nigeria [Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the British Museum, London WC1B 3DG, U.K., cspring@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk].

Julian Bell: from Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War

Julian Bell explores the life of a younger member, and sole poet, of the Bloomsbury Group, the most important community of British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century, which includes Virginia Woolf (Julian's aunt), E. M. Forster, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry. This biography draws upon the expanding archives on Bloomsbury to present Julian's life more completely and more personally than has been done previously. It is an intense and profound exploration of personal, sexual, intellectual, political, and literary life in England between the two world wars. Through Julian, the book provides important insights on Virginia Woolf, his mother Vanessa Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group. Taking us from London to China to Spain during its civil war, the book is also the ultimately heartbreaking story of one young man's life.