VANESSA BELL WAS IN MANY WAYS the emotional lynchpin of the famous Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf memorably described her older artist sister, born in 1879, as “a bowl of golden water which brims but never overflows,” a testament to her fluid, equable nature and source of calm comfort to more volatile characters. “They lived in squares – painted in circles – and loved in triangles,” drolly quipped Dorothy Parker of the Bloomsbury set, describing an unconventional group of writers, artists and philosophers who created a climate embracing literary and artistic modernism.
Bell’s work has often been subsumed byto Bell in The Courtauld’s history, although her work’s been included in past exhibitions of the Bloomsbury Group and the Omega Workshops.”
