Vanessa Bell's 'Experimental Works', 1912-1917

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Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was a major European artist who made an original contribution to international modernism. She pioneered the use of avant-garde techniques in Britain, developing an intelligent painterly response to art from the Continent. Historians have failed to give an adequate account of her critical, cosmopolitan practice, instead dwelling on her supposed Englishness, unconventional friends, and perceived inscrutability. Bell's reputation as a Bloomsbury bohemian with a complicated private life and as a wordless painter whose pictures 'do not betray her' (to quote her sister, Virginia Woolf), has discouraged close examination of her art. She remains overshadowed by other painters of her time as well as by Woolf, who have been canonised as the result of lengthy campaigns to establish their importance. My project on Bell's 'experimental work' will transform the way we see her. It will argue that her work made an innovative contribution to modern art, and that it was driven as much by its own developmental logic, as by her exceptional familiarity with the European avant-garde. Working on the hypothesis that her art constituted an acute intervention in the critical debate about modernism, it will argue that she conducted a visual conversation with her literary colleagues, testing the limits of formalism through her radical abstract paintings of 1914, and exploring the emotional impact of visual representation in the absence of conventional narrative. This aspect of my research contributes to recent debates in Word-and-Image studies concerning the rivalry between artists and critics in the early twentieth century. It also complicates the relationship between Bell and Woolf, as I argue that Bell's method of conveying character through form and ellipsis anticipated the literary techniques which Woolf later developed. My study of Bell challenges the agenda of British art studies, repudiating its emphasis on national tradition, and highlighting the international networks which shaped art in Britain in the early twentieth century. The idea of nationalism has dominated the humanities, fundamentally shaping disciplines: we specialise in national schools, and major artists are jealously guarded as national possessions, however international their lives and artistic practices. I shall present Bell as a case-study for a more expansive approach which takes account of the vigour of internationalist thinking in the period, the cosmopolitan nature of artistic communities, and the permeability of cultural borders between nations, even in an age of rising nationalism. Bell's status as a British artist, despite her ambivalence towards her country and her responsiveness to European art, demonstrates the importance of thinking outside the terms imposed by national schools, towards a more fluid and inclusive understanding of cultural identity.I shall root my discussion in close visual analysis of Bell's art works, developing a contextual, historical analysis which resists biographical anecdote. Her work is largely located in museums and galleries in the UK and USA. British locations include London galleries (the Courtauld, Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A), the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Charleston Trust, Sussex, the City Art Galleries, Sheffield, and the University of Leeds Art Collection. US locations include New York (the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the Yale Center for British Art, and Smith College Museum of Art. Archival collections of Bell's own writings which I shall consult are housed in Tate Britain, King's College, Cambridge, the University of Sussex, and the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. For the writing phase of the project, I shall be based at the University of Bristol, where I have the support of my mentor, Professor Elizabeth Prettejohn, and an active interdisclinary research community.