Vanessa Bell: The World of Form and Color – an extensive exhibition

As a leading Bloomsbury Group star, Vanessa Bell is by no means an obscure figure, Florence Hallett told Bloomsbury Group magazine. I’m the news website. However, although she was an accomplished artist, Bell (1879–1961) is more often remembered as “the loose antithesis of her intellectually formidable and generally more formidable sister Virginia Woolf.” Her art, which was “too easily dismissed” as too “beautiful” and too “colorful”, was often of less interest than her sex life.

The extent of this “neglect” is illustrated by a new exhibition in Milton Keynes, “the most comprehensive survey of her career ever mounted”. The exhibition features more than 140 works, including not only paintings and drawings, but also ceramics, furniture and even designs for advertising and book covers. It presents Bell as a restless artist who “switched abstractly from style to style”, variously using the methods of her mentor John Singer Sargent, post-impressionism and avant-garde abstraction. Could this lead to overestimation?