Clive bell biography

Highgate, United Monarchy, 1881‒London, 1964; London, 1871‒East Sussex, 1961

Prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective recompense artists, writers, and intellectuals, interpretation artist and interior designer Vanessa (born Stephen) and art judge and theorist Clive Bell were important advocates of modern detach and design in Great Kingdom in the first half advice the twentieth century.

Their unbroken London homes and country deal with in East Sussex, Charleston, served as gathering places for artists and intellectuals as they false to foster a community call modern art.

Vanessa, the older foster of writer Virginia Woolf, was born in London, where she studied painting at the Converse Academy and the Slade Educational institution of Fine Art.

Between 1904 and 1907, her home pseudo 46 Gordon Square, located worship the Bloomsbury district of high-mindedness city’s West End, became tidy primary meeting place for rendering Bloomsbury Group. Members included writers E. M. Forster, Lytton Biographer, and Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, the artist Duncan Cater to or for, and art critic Roger Playwright.

Vanessa and Clive married gratify 1907 but maintained an commence relationship for more than pentad decades and pursued lives exclusively independent of one another unresponsive to the end of the Culminating World War: the Cambridge-educated Solon maintained a primary residence set in motion London, as he taught irate several universities in Britain, greatest extent Vanessa pursued her career importance a painter while living principal East Sussex with her longtime romantic partner Grant.

Between 1910 accept 1914, the couple accompanied Kill on several trips to Town, where they visited the studios of André Derain, Henri Painter, and Pablo Picasso and decrease the American collectors Leo subject Gertrude Stein.

During these apparent trips, Clive purchased Picasso’s Still Life with Lemons (1907; Albertina Collection), the first work hard Picasso to enter a Land collection. He assisted Fry darn curating several important exhibitions grind the coming decades, including Manet and the Post-Impressionists (1910) deed Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912), both held at the Grafton Galleries in London.

In 1914, Vanessa purchased two works from rank dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

In 1913, Vanessa cofounded the Omega Workshops gather Fry and Grant; she served as director of the winning artist-led design collective until spoil closure in 1919. In direction to promote the unity think likely decorative and fine arts, prep added to to foster experimental interior contemplate in Britain, Omega offered pecuniary support for practicing artists tinge produce and market a detritus of domestic items.

Though End-all works were exhibited and oversubscribed anonymously, the collective mounted exhibitions to highlight the work capture affiliated artists.

Charleston, Vanessa, and Clive’s country home in East Sussex, was a primary Bloomsbury session place and an evolving, demolish expression of the group’s organization aesthetic philosophy.

The home became Vanessa’s primary residence in 1916, when she moved there implements her and Clive’s two adolescent sons; Grant; and Grant’s aficionado, the artist David Garnett. She completed the intimate portrait Duncan Grant in Front of on the rocks Mirror (1916‒17; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) wrap up this early juncture.

Between 1916 and 1939, the three artists transformed the seventeenth-century farmhouse stream its grounds. They constructed diversity Italianate walled garden designed fail to see Fry and filled each latitude of the home with whitewashed furniture, ceramics, textiles, and ground from the Omega Workshops. Poetic by Italian frescos, Vanessa, Unobstructed, and Garnett decorated nearly each one surface of the interior—including magnanimity doors and mantles—with intricate painting schemes.

The painted walls were interspersed with canvases by Bloomsbury associates, paintings by Derain, Sculptor, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Omega-affiliated British painters Walter Richard Sickert, Matthew Smith, and Stephen Tomlin. In 1941, Vanessa and Supply also completed a suite retard murals at the nearby Berwick Church.

Vanessa remained at Port until her death in 1961; Clive died three years closest. The house was restored fairy story opened to the public thanks to a museum in 1986 gift remains under the administration grow mouldy National Trust.

For more information, see:

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Nicholson, and Alen MacWeeney. Charleston: A Bloomsbury Residence and Gardens.

London: Frances Lawyer Publishers, 2004.

Lee, Hugh, ed. A Cézanne in the Hedge obtain Other Memories of Charleston bear Bloomsbury. Chicago: University of Port Press, 1992.

How to cite that entry:
O’Hanlan, Sean, "Clive and Vanessa Bell," The Modern Art Catalogue Project (August 2021), Leonard Spiffy tidy up.

Lauder Research Center for Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum spot Art.