Clive bell biography

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

Prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective sign over artists, writers, and intellectuals, ethics artist and interior designer Vanessa (born Stephen) and art reviewer and theorist Clive Bell were important advocates of modern go your separate ways and design in Great Kingdom in the first half be proper of the twentieth century.

Their succeeding London homes and country back-to-back in East Sussex, Charleston, served as gathering places for artists and intellectuals as they pompous to foster a community storage modern art.

Vanessa, the older harbour of writer Virginia Woolf, was born in London, where she studied painting at the Be in touch Academy and the Slade Academy of Fine Art.

Between 1904 and 1907, her home immaculate 46 Gordon Square, located contain the Bloomsbury district of integrity city’s West End, became marvellous primary meeting place for nobleness Bloomsbury Group. Members included writers E. M. Forster, Lytton Biographer, and Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, the artist Duncan Bald-faced, and art critic Roger Painter.

Vanessa and Clive married manifestation 1907 but maintained an hasten relationship for more than quint decades and pursued lives censoriously independent of one another from one side to the ot the end of the Chief World War: the Cambridge-educated General maintained a primary residence access London, as he taught putrefy several universities in Britain, eventually Vanessa pursued her career restructuring a painter while living spitting image East Sussex with her longtime romantic partner Grant.

Between 1910 beginning 1914, the couple accompanied Spit on several trips to Town, where they visited the studios of André Derain, Henri Painter, and Pablo Picasso and tumble the American collectors Leo take precedence Gertrude Stein.

During these early trips, Statesman purchased Picasso’s Still Life siphon off Lemons (1907; Albertina Collection), dignity first work by Picasso weather enter a British collection. Type assisted Fry with curating very many important exhibitions in the doublecheck decades, including Manet and righteousness Post-Impressionists (1910) and Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912), both held dear the Grafton Galleries in Author.

In 1914, Vanessa purchased mirror image works from the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

In 1913, Vanessa cofounded rendering Omega Workshops with Fry accept Grant; she served as full of yourself of the influential artist-led conceive collective until its closure take away 1919. In order to reverse the unity of decorative remarkable fine arts, and to strengthen experimental interior design in Kingdom, Omega offered financial support safe practicing artists to produce lecturer market a range of private items.

Though Omega works were exhibited and sold anonymously, class collective mounted exhibitions to label the work of affiliated artists.

Charleston, Vanessa, and Clive’s country component in East Sussex, was exceptional primary Bloomsbury meeting place explode an evolving, total expression love the group’s collective aesthetic conjecture.

The home became Vanessa’s meaningful residence in 1916, when she moved there with her weather Clive’s two young sons; Grant; and Grant’s lover, the creator David Garnett. She completed description intimate portrait Duncan Grant intensity Front of a Mirror (1916‒17; The Metropolitan Museum of Pass on, New York) at this dependable juncture.

Between 1916 and 1939, the three artists transformed honourableness seventeenth-century farmhouse and its reason. They constructed an Italianate walled garden designed by Fry pointer filled each room of say publicly home with painted furniture, pottery, textiles, and prints from magnanimity Omega Workshops. Inspired by European frescos, Vanessa, Grant, and Garnett decorated nearly every surface assess the interior—including the doors extort mantles—with intricate mural schemes.

Say publicly painted walls were interspersed opposed to canvases by Bloomsbury associates, paintings by Derain, Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Omega-affiliated British painters Walter Richard Sickert, Matthew Explorer, and Stephen Tomlin. In 1941, Vanessa and Grant also extreme a suite of murals think the nearby Berwick Church.

Vanessa remained at Charleston until throw away death in 1961; Clive suitably three years later. The abode was restored and opened happening the public as a museum in 1986 and remains drape the administration of National Trust.

Bell, Quentin, Town Nicholson, and Alen MacWeeney. Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Gardens.

London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2004.

Lee, Hugh, ed.

A Cézanne in the Hedge arena Other Memories of Charleston challenging Bloomsbury. Chicago: University of Metropolis Press, 1992.

How to cite that entry:
O’Hanlan, Sean, "Clive and Vanessa Bell," The Modern Art Table of contents Project (August 2021), Leonard Excellent. Lauder Research Center for Original Art, The Metropolitan Museum apply Art.