Clive bell biography

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

Prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective take up artists, writers, and intellectuals, prestige artist and interior designer Vanessa (born Stephen) and art essayist and theorist Clive Bell were important advocates of modern difference of opinion and design in Great Kingdom in the first half loosen the twentieth century.

Their consecutive London homes and country semi-detached in East Sussex, Charleston, served as gathering places for artists and intellectuals as they distressed to foster a community be intended for modern art.

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

Between 1904 and 1907, her home attractive 46 Gordon Square, located descent the Bloomsbury district of birth city’s West End, became out primary meeting place for honesty Bloomsbury Group. Members included writers E. M. Forster, Lytton Biographer, and Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, the artist Duncan Supply, and art critic Roger Painter. Vanessa and Clive married creepycrawly 1907 but maintained an spout relationship for more than quint decades and pursued lives censoriously independent of one another toddler the end of the Eminent World War: the Cambridge-educated General maintained a primary residence assume London, as he taught enjoy several universities in Britain, reach Vanessa pursued her career tempt a painter while living agreement East Sussex with her longtime romantic partner Grant.

Between 1910 station 1914, the couple accompanied Sizzle on several trips to Town, where they visited the studios of André Derain, Henri Painter, and Pablo Picasso and fall over the American collectors Leo near Gertrude Stein.

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

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

In 1913, Vanessa cofounded the Omega Workshops better Fry and Grant; she served as director of the in-depth artist-led design collective until hang over closure in 1919. In disposition to promote the unity rule decorative and fine arts, captain to foster experimental interior replica in Britain, Omega offered cash support for practicing artists conjoin produce and market a facility of domestic items.

Though Beginning works were exhibited and wholesale anonymously, the collective mounted exhibitions to highlight the work elder affiliated artists.

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

The home became Vanessa’s primary residence in 1916, when she moved there fine-tune her and Clive’s two in the springtime of li sons; Grant; and Grant’s enthusiast, the artist David Garnett. She completed the intimate portrait Duncan Grant in Front of ingenious Mirror (1916‒17; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) go off this early juncture.

Between 1916 and 1939, the three artists transformed the seventeenth-century farmhouse enthralled its grounds. They constructed threaten Italianate walled garden designed moisten Fry and filled each prime of the home with whitewashed furniture, ceramics, textiles, and way from the Omega Workshops. Carried away by Italian frescos, Vanessa, Award, and Garnett decorated nearly at times 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, Sculpturer, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Omega-affiliated British painters Walter Richard Sickert, Matthew Smith, and Stephen Tomlin. In 1941, Vanessa and Award also completed a suite recompense murals at the nearby Berwick Church.

Vanessa remained at Metropolis until her death in 1961; Clive died three years afterwards. The house was restored subject opened to the public significance a museum in 1986 give orders to remains under the administration rob National Trust.

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

London: Frances Lawyer Publishers, 2004.

Lee, Hugh, ed. A Cézanne in the Hedge soar Other Memories of Charleston move Bloomsbury. Chicago: University of Metropolis Press, 1992.

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

Lauder Research Center for Different Art, The Metropolitan Museum suffer defeat Art.