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

凡妮莎·贝尔（Vanessa Bell，1879-1961）是一位重要的欧洲艺术家，对国际现代主义做出了原创性的贡献。她率先在英国使用前卫技术，发展了一种对欧洲大陆艺术的智能绘画反应。历史学家们没有对她的批判性的、世界性的实践给予足够的描述，而是停留在她所谓的英国人、非传统的朋友和被认为的神秘莫测上。贝尔的名声是布卢姆斯伯里的波西米亚人，有着复杂的私生活，是一个无言的画家，她的画“不会背叛她”（引用她的妹妹弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的话），这阻碍了对她艺术的仔细研究。她仍然被她那个时代的其他画家以及伍尔夫所掩盖，伍尔夫因为长期的运动而被奉为圣人。我对贝尔“实验性作品”的研究项目将改变我们对她的看法。它将证明她的作品对现代艺术做出了创新性的贡献，这不仅是因为她对欧洲前卫艺术的特殊熟悉，而且也是因为她自身的发展逻辑。工作的假设，她的艺术构成了对现代主义的批判性辩论的一个尖锐的干预，它会认为，她进行了视觉对话与她的文学同事，测试形式主义的限制，通过她的激进抽象画1914年，并探讨在没有传统的叙事视觉表现的情感影响。我的这方面的研究有助于最近的辩论，在文字和图像的研究有关的竞争之间的艺术家和批评家在世纪初。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，并突出了塑造世纪早期英国艺术的国际网络。民族主义的思想主导了人文学科，从根本上塑造了学科：我们专注于民族学校，主要艺术家被视为国家财产，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案例研究，以一种更广泛的方法，考虑到这一时期国际主义思想的活力，艺术团体的世界性，以及国家之间文化边界的渗透性，即使在民族主义兴起的时代。贝尔的地位，作为一个英国艺术家，尽管她对她的国家和她的反应，以欧洲艺术的矛盾心理，表明了国家学校强加的条件之外的思考，对文化身份更加流动和包容性的理解的重要性。我将根我的讨论在贝尔的艺术作品密切的视觉分析，开发一个上下文，历史的分析，抵制传记轶事。她的作品主要位于英国和美国的博物馆和画廊。英国的地点包括伦敦画廊（考陶德，泰特英国，国家肖像画廊，V&A），菲茨威廉博物馆，剑桥，查尔斯顿信托，苏塞克斯，城市艺术画廊，谢菲尔德和利兹大学艺术收藏。在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。我将查阅的贝尔自己作品的档案收藏品被安置在泰特英国美术馆、剑桥大学国王学院、苏塞克斯大学和纽约的皮尔庞特摩根图书馆。在项目的写作阶段，我将在布里斯托大学工作，在那里我得到了我的导师伊丽莎白·普雷特约翰教授和一个活跃的跨学科研究团体的支持。

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.