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

凡妮莎·贝尔（1879-1961）是对国际现代主义做出原创性贡献的欧洲重要艺术家。她在英国开创了前卫艺术的使用，对欧洲大陆的艺术做出了明智的绘画反应。历史学家们没有对她批判的、世界主义的实践给予足够的描述，而是把注意力集中在她所谓的英国人、非传统的朋友和人们所认为的不可思议上。贝尔是布卢姆斯伯里派的波西米亚人，有着复杂的私生活，也是一位沉默寡言的画家，她的画“不会背叛她”（引用她的妹妹弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的话），这使得人们不愿仔细研究她的艺术。与她同时代的其他画家以及伍尔夫相比，她仍然黯然失色。伍尔夫经过漫长的运动，确立了他们的重要性，因此被封为圣徒。我关于贝尔的“实验作品”的项目将改变我们对她的看法。书中认为，她的作品对现代艺术做出了创新的贡献，这不仅是由于她对欧洲前卫艺术的熟悉，也是由于她自己的发展逻辑。假设她的艺术构成了对现代主义批判性辩论的尖锐干预，它将争辩说，她与她的文学同事进行了一次视觉对话，通过她1914年激进的抽象绘画来测试形式主义的极限，并在缺乏传统叙事的情况下探索视觉表现的情感影响。我的研究的这一方面有助于最近关于二十世纪早期艺术家和评论家之间竞争的文字和图像研究的辩论。这也使贝尔和伍尔夫之间的关系复杂化，因为我认为贝尔通过形式和省略来传达性格的方法预示了伍尔夫后来发展的文学技巧。我对贝尔的研究挑战了英国艺术研究的议程，否定了它对民族传统的强调，并强调了在20世纪初塑造英国艺术的国际网络。民族主义思想已经主导了人文学科，从根本上塑造了学科：我们专注于国家学校，主要艺术家被小心翼翼地保护为国家财产，无论他们的生活和艺术实践多么国际化。我将把贝尔作为一个更广泛的研究案例，考虑到那个时期国际主义思想的活力，艺术社区的世界性，以及国家之间文化边界的渗透性，即使是在民族主义兴起的时代。贝尔作为一名英国艺术家，尽管她对她的国家和她对欧洲艺术的反应是矛盾的，但她的身份证明了在国家学校强加的条件之外思考的重要性，朝着对文化认同的更灵活和包容的理解。我将把我的讨论植根于对贝尔艺术作品的近距离视觉分析，发展一种语境的、历史的分析，而不是传记式的轶事。她的作品主要在英国和美国的博物馆和画廊展出。英国的地点包括伦敦画廊（考陶尔德美术馆、泰特美术馆、国家肖像画廊、维多利亚与阿尔伯特博物馆）、剑桥的菲茨威廉博物馆、查尔斯顿信托、苏塞克斯、谢菲尔德的城市艺术画廊和利兹大学艺术收藏。美国的地点包括纽约（现代艺术博物馆和大都会艺术博物馆），耶鲁大学英国艺术中心和史密斯学院艺术博物馆。贝尔自己的作品的档案收藏，我将参考收藏在泰特英国，国王学院，剑桥，苏塞克斯大学，和皮尔庞特摩根图书馆，纽约。在项目的写作阶段，我将在布里斯托尔大学工作，那里有我的导师Elizabeth Prettejohn教授的支持，还有一个活跃的跨学科研究社区。

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.