“Vanessa Bell, a World of Form and Color” Omega Workshops, 英法才女在漢清講堂 Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, 1912. Portrait of Berthe Morisot with a Fan. * Virginia Woolf: A Life in Two Places * The Bloomsbury Photographs (Yale University Press, 2024).

 

A Mainstay of the Bloomsbury Group, With a Show of Her Own

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.

“Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Color” features more than 150 artworks, including rarely seen paintings as well as ceramics, furniture and textiles. Credit...Rob Harris

By Roslyn Sulcas

Reporting from Milton Keynes, England

Nov. 8, 2024, 12:58 p.m. ET

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


Works from Bell’s “Famous Women Dinner Service,” including plates dedicated to George Eliot, top left, and Jane Austen, top center.Credit...

Rob Harrisin Milton Keynes through Feb. 23.

National Portrait Gallery

“Still Life with Plaster Head” (1947).Credit...Estate of Vanessa Bell, DACS; Charleston Trust

Image

“Bowl,” a small table or stool decorated by Vanessa Bell circa 1950.Credit...Charleston Trust

Although Bell moved away from abstraction in her paintings, she pursued it avidly in the rug designs she created for patrons and for the Omega Workshops, which she co-founded with Grant and Fry, partly to help young artists receive commissions for furniture, fabrics, carpets and other household items. (“Omega products were a shocking intrusion upon the English love of prettiness,” Spalding writes in her Bell biography.)

“Omega was a period of great experiment

Celebrated as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf was born #OnThisDay in 1882.
Many of her novels, notably Night and Day, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, pioneered the use of the interior monologue, or 'stream of consciousness' which is when a writer attempts to represent the multiple thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a character.
Her essay A Room of One's Own has become a classic of feminist literature, as it advocates that women need financial independence to achieve creative freedom. The domestic scene is apparent in this portrait by her eldest sister, Vanessa Bell, whom she lived with in London and later nearby in East Sussex.
If you want to find out more about Woolf and this depiction, why not join our #PortraitOfTheDay talk tomorrow at 12.30 in Room 24 on Floor 2.
Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, 1912 © National Portrait Gallery, London
國家肖像畫廊 3天 · 維吉尼亞·伍爾夫 (Virginia Woolf) 出生於 1882 年#OnThisDay，被譽為 20 世紀最有影響力的作家之一。 她的許多小說，特別是《夜與日》、《雅各的房間》、《達洛維夫人》、《到燈塔去》和《海浪》，都開創了使用內心獨白或「意識流」的方式，即作家試圖表達多重想法和情感。人物內心深處的感受。 她的文章《一間自己的房間》已成為女性主義文學的經典，因為它主張女性需要經濟獨立才能實現創作自由。在她與她一起住在倫敦的姐姐瓦妮莎·貝爾的這幅肖像中，家庭場景顯而易見後來在東薩塞克斯附近。 ⭐ 如果您想了解更多關於伍爾夫和這個描繪的信息，為什麼不參加我們明天 12 點 30 分在 2 樓 24 室舉行的#PortraitOfTheDay 講座呢。 🎨 Vanessa Bell 創作的《弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫》，1912 年 © 倫敦國家肖像畫廊



Portrait of Berthe Morisot with a Fan

- Édouard Manet. French ( 1832 - 1883 )

* Virginia Woolf: A Life in Two Places *

Sunday 17 November 2024, 11am

Clifton High School, College Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 3JD

Maggie Humm, Vice-Chair of the VWSGB, is speaking about Woolf, together with Harriet Baker, at the Clifton Literary Festival near Bristol.

Why are we so attracted to writers’ houses, as Woolf was? Why do we love seeing their ‘things’? A writer’s ‘things’ can include archives, inventories, lists, rooms, lanes, hauntings. The authors Harriet Baker and Maggie Humm will talk about the importance of place to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, in conversation with Helen Taylor. Harriet Baker’s new book is Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. Baker, who read English at Oxford and has a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London, has written for the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, the New Statesman, the TLS, Apollo and frieze. In 2018, she was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Maggie Humm is Professor Emeritus, University of East London and the author/editor of many academic books. She has published two award-winning novels, Talland House and Radical Woman: Gwen John & Rodin. Her new book is The Bloomsbury Photographs (Yale University Press, 2024).

Tickets £12, from Eventbrite at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/....../harriet-baker-and......