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The Arts Intel Report

Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour

Vanessa Bell, Interior with a Table, 1921.

Until Feb 23, 2025
Milton Keynes Gallery, 900 Midsummer Blvd, Milton Keynes MK9 3QA, United Kingdom

When the widower father of Vanessa and Virginia Stephens died in 1904, the house at 22 Hyde Park Gate was sold and the Stephens family moved to Bloomsbury, where life became bohemian. They began organizing meetings with artists and intellectuals—Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry—at their house in Gordon Square, and the circle of friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia would marry Woolf and go on to become an acclaimed novelist. Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell, and was a painter. Rejecting Victorian narrative imagery, she instead created distinctly modernist works with vibrant color palettes and an urge toward abstraction. This solo exhibition, the largest on Bell to date, presents her paintings, drawings, ceramics, and furniture. —Elena Clavarino