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Goals like 'Decluttering', 'shaping ambition', 'paying attention to domesticity', 'discarding fatal prettiness', ring like New Year's resolutions, but they are actually descriptions of painter Vanessa Bell's quest in early twentieth-century art and society. On January 24, 2025, join us on-line, for a day-long conference at MK Gallery, with top Vanessa Bell scholars and authors, in response to the exhibition 'Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour'.
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour: Exhibition at the MK Gallery, until February 23, 2025, Chris Henley
THE MORNING SESSION
With ‘Shaping ambition’, Dr Wendy Hitchmough is set to explore what it meant to be ambitious and a woman in the first decades of the twentieth century, as she delves into Vanessa Bell’s family background and the Friday Club, which Bell founded in 1905, as a radical initiative, providing women with opportunities on an equal footing with men.
Frances Spalding’s lecture ‘Stripping down and decluttering: The path to Abstraction’ focuses on Bell’s alertness to the silent and elusive in art. Spalding will be discussing Bell’s quest to find what is needed (or not needed) in the building of a picture, and the role abstraction can play in the process.
Dr Darren Clarke will share his lecture ‘Fatal Prettiness: Vanessa Bell and the Omega Workshops’. In her role of co-director, Bell shaped and influenced the look and style of the Omega. She despised the ‘fatal prettiness’ she saw in English design, asking Roger Fry: “Can’t we paint stuffs etc, which won’t be gay and pretty?” During the conference, Clarke will address the question: “Did she succeed?”
In her talk ‘Vanessa Bell, Bloomsbury, and the ballet (1928-1933)’, Dr Sophie Pickford will be discussing Bell's costume and set designs for ballet productions in Cambridge and London from 1928-1933. From her overlooked contributions to ‘A Tschouvachian Wedding’ to her Camargo Society work and designs for ‘Pomona’, Bell’s work for the ballet casts fresh light on the connections between Bloomsbury and the stage.
Cultural activist Rob Gifford, the curator of StonyWords – an annual community literary festival in Stony Stratford – will chair the morning’s panel discussion with Hitchmough, Spalding, Clarke and Pickford.
THE AFTERNOON SESSION
Rebecca Birrell’s talk entitled ‘Vanessa Bell’s Still Life: Domesticity, Intimacy and the Everyday’ provides an overview of Bell’s still life painting, looking at how she combined an almost diaristic attention to domesticity and everyday life. She cited unexpectedly playful references to many cultural sources, from Jean-Siméon Chardin to Paul Cézanne, raising new questions about the relationship between genre, gender, domesticity and work.
Dr Hana Leaper will join the conference, with her paper ‘Dining with the ‘Famous Women’: A legacy of Radical hospitality’. Leaper examines why the ‘Famous Women’ dinner service was conceived and created. Her paper will explore the women included in the set, and consider its reverberations throughout art history.
Dr Stephanie Taylor will chair the afternoon’s panel discussion with Birrell, Brockington and Leaper. She is Emeritus Professor at the Open University, Milton Keynes, co-author of Contemporary Identities of Creativity and Creative Work (Routledge 2016), co-editor of Gender and Creative Labour (Wiley-Blackwell 2015) and author of Narratives of Identity and Place (2009).
A SPECIAL READING
Megan Hunter, ‘Interior with Two Women: Vanessa Bell and Angelica Garnett in life, art and fiction’
Megan Hunter will read from this theatrical work-in-progress centered around the complex relationship between Bell and her daughter Angelica Garnett. She will also discuss her forthcoming, Charleston-inspired novel, Days of Light (Picador, April 2025) and will be in conversation with Rebecca Birrell.
Megan Hunter is a prizewinning novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. She is the author of three novels: The End We Start From (2017), which was adapted into a feature film, The Harpy (2020) and Days of Light (forthcoming in 2025). In September 2024, her dramatic monologue Salt of the Earth premiered at Venice Film Festival.
Hunter’s contribution to the conference is supported by the Calliope Arts Foundation.
Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour: Exhibition at the MK Gallery, until February 23, 2025, Chris Henley
MORE ON PARTICIPATING SCHOLARS
Wendy Hitchmough is emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Sussex. Her books include Vanessa Bell. The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale 2025) and The Bloomsbury Look (Yale 2020). She was curator at Charleston in East Sussex from 2001-13. Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and cultural historian, whose books include John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (OUP Oxford, 2009) and Vanessa Bell (Tempus, 2006). In 2014, she curated an exhibition on Virginia Woolf for the National Portrait Gallery.
Darren Clarke is the Head of Collections and Research at Charleston. He has curated several exhibitions including Post-Impressionist Living: The Omega Workshops (2019) and Collecting Modernism: Pablo Picasso to Winifred Nicholson (2024). He has also contributed to Queer Bloomsbury (EUP, 2016) and edited eight editions of the Charleston Press. Dr Sophie Pickford is a Fellow in History of Art at King’s College, Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, whose current research focuses on the cross-cultural interaction between the Bloomsbury Group and the Ballets Russes in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Rebecca Birrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at University of St Andrews and a Research Affiliate at The Fitzwilliam Museum, where she was Curator of 19th and 20th Century Paintings and Drawings. Her award-winning first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Grace Brockinton is Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is a specialist in modern British art, with particular interests in the connections between art and theatre, internationalism and literature. She has written on Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group, particularly in relation to the peace movement in the First World War. Hana Leaper is Reader in History of Art and Exhibition Studies and the John Moores Painting Prize Embedded Post Holder at Liverpool John Moores University. She completed her PhD ‘Vanessa bell and the Significance of Form’ in 2014 and, in the same year, worked at Charleston with materials from the Angelica Garnett gift in Vanessa Bell’s studio.
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