When the modernist writer Virginia Woolf saw A Conversation, a painting by her elder sister Vanessa Bell, she wrote a fan letter. For this nuanced vision of three women talking, Woolf called Bell “a short story writer of great wit,” and admitted to sibling envy for the unusual, even radical, picture. A Conversation is now the centerpiece of “Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art,” opening today at the Courtauld Gallery, in London.
Her sister aside, Bell’s fan club remained limited for a long time. While other members of the Bloomsbury group became stars in their fields—John Maynard Keynes in economics, Lytton Strachey in biography, Duncan Grant in art, and Woolf in literature—Bell is known more as a member of the group, according to Rachel Sloan, curator of the Courtauld exhibition, than as a major artist in her own right.
