Vanessa bell, p.20
Vanessa Bell, page 20
In Studland Beach and other paintings of this period, Vanessa’s use of abstraction makes each shape static and separate. This reduction of form to elemental shapes expresses a feeling which is often austere and remote, but also, I think, related to her maternal experience. All her life Vanessa revered her mother and the powerful influence she had had over others. In her paintings and designs of this period she often turns to maternal subjects. Apart from the Piero-like vignette in Studland Beach, she put a stylized image of the madonna and child on to an Omega tray (Coll: Kenneth Rowntree) and into a small clay statuette, also made at the Omega (Charleston Trust). In October 1912 her desire to express maternity in monumental terms led her to begin work on a six-foot-square canvas of the Nativity. She admitted that it was difficult to balance the necessary amount of description that the scene demanded with her desire for abstract design: ‘What a fool I was to embark on such a thing. ... How is one to get form into heads and figures without saying more than one wants to about them.’32 When complete the painting hung in the main hall of Roger’s house at Guildford. By 1914 Vanessa had taken such a dislike to it that she painted another six-foot-square canvas, entitled Woman and Baby, to replace it. The Nativity was almost certainly destroyed; the Woman and Baby is known nowadays only from a photograph? In the latter a woman and her new-born baby lie on the bed while three figures look on. The spare design in which the figures are reduced almost to flat silhouettes, combined with the emotive subject, suggests that this may have been one of her most important post-impressionist paintings. All detail is omitted, the faces hardly delineated because, in a series of recent portraits of Virginia, Vanessa had discovered that character and feeling could be conveyed simply by the tilt of the head.
The logical outcome of this paring down of her vocabulary was the move into pure abstraction. Around 1914-15 she produced a handful of abstract collages and paintings. ‘With hindsight’, Simon Watney has written of her small abstract oil, now in the Tate Gallery, ‘her entire career bears down relentlessly on this point of technical and conceptual sophistication.’33 In this and her only other extant abstract painted on canvas, Vanessa comes close in style to the Czech artist Frantisek Kupka’s Amphora: Fugue in Two Colours which, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1912, was one of the earliest non-representational paintings in European art. Vanessa’s use of flat, abutting and overlapping planes, may, however, owe more to the insistent vertical emphasis often employed by Sickert whose work she admired. But discussion of Kupka’s abstracts and those by Kandinsky shown at the Allied Artists Salon in London in 1913 and at the exhibition of the Grafton Group - an exhibiting society recently founded by Fry - in March that year, may have encouraged her experiments. However, Bloomsbury abstraction never matured into a confident style because, unlike that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, it lacked a philosophical base. G. E. Moore’s insistence on the precise definition of meaning may have indirectly encouraged Vanessa’s use of elemental shapes and the extreme openness and honesty of her abstract style; but a more immediate influence upon Bloomsbury abstraction was the desire for liberation from nineteenth-century representationalism and its often mawkish sentimentality.
Bloomsbury’s abstract period, like that of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, was short-lived. It was destroyed partly by the loss of confidence caused by war and partly by the English intellectual climate which was unsympathetic to such work. It is probable, however, that in Vanessa’s case interest waned because she needed to bring to her art more of her experience of life than the conceptual purity of abstract art allowed.
Post-Impressionism had encouraged not only a more informal treatment but also a broader range of subjects. It had brought Vanessa, as she said, ‘a sudden liberation to feel for oneself’, and now she had no hesitation in putting her own life into her paintings: she portrays her friends chatting around a fire, reading or sewing, in relaxed, unselfconscious poses; instead of conventional landscapes or carefully arranged still lifes, she turned to the casual and everyday: at Studland she had painted the arbitrary configurations of figures on the beach; at Gordon Square she had made the daily routine of ‘nursery tea’, as the Edwardians called it, her subject. Moreover her choice of forms may reflect on her maternal experience for there is an emphatic fullness in the sweep of certain lines, in the curve of the tablecloth in Nursery Tea or the arc of the sea in Studland Beach.
It was partly her delight in the world around her that led her to share Clive’s distrust of narrative painting. In print he had declared the representative element in art to be always irrelevant: Vanessa was to adopt a more modified stance. ‘A work of art’, wrote Matisse in 1908, in his famous Notes d’un peintre, ‘must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.’ It is precisely this point that Vanessa makes in a letter to Leonard Woolf, written in 1913, which remains one of her rare statements on aesthetics:
It can’t be the object of a great artist to tell you facts at the cost of telling you what he feels about them ... I often look at a picture - for instance I did at the Picasso trees by the side of a lake - without seeing in the least what the things are. I saw trees, but never dreamt of a lake or lakes although I saw certain colours and planes behind the trees. I got quite a strong emotion from the forms and colours, but it wasn’t changed when weeks afterwards it was pointed out to me by chance that the blue was a lake. ... The picture does convey the idea of form ... but not the idea of form associated with anything in life, but simply form separated from life. As a matter of fact we do first feel the emotion and then look at the picture ... at least I do. The reason I think that artists paint life and not patterns is that certain qualities of life, what I call movement, mass, weight have aesthetic value. But where I should quarrel with Clive ... is when he says one gets the same emotion from flat patterns that one does from pictures. I say one doesn’t, because of the reason I have just given - that movement etc. give me important aesthetic emotions.34
Her divergence from Clive’s opinion explains why pure abstraction never wholly absorbed her. Abstract art, for her, lacked this sensuous relationship with the everyday world. Though she asserts that she looks at form separated from life, it is separated not from visual and tactile experience, but from concepts of use, value, from sentimental associations and other non-visual content.
Even at a time when she was experimenting with abstraction and enjoying close links with the Parisian avant-garde, she never completely turned her back on subject-matter. In January 1914, on a visit to Paris with Roger, Clive and Molly MacCarthy, she was taken by Gertrude Stein to meet Picasso in his studio. It was bristling with cubist constructions made out of bits of wood and coloured paper as well as certain portraits from his Blue period. Vanessa was astounded by his creativity. She also met Matisse in his studio and saw more of his work in the collection of Michael Stein. It was on this visit that Clive bought a still life of eggs by Juan Gris and Vlaminck’s Village in Provence. Later that month Vanessa’s paintings hung alongside those by Marchand, Lhôte and Friesz in the second of Roger’s Grafton Group shows; photographs of Picasso’s recent constructions were also included. Then in May she sent four works to the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s important survey of twentieth-century art. One of these was her six-foot-square Woman and Baby which had caught the attention of the press when exhibited with the Grafton Group in January. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘powerful and expressive’; the Pall Mall Gazette gushingly discerned a sentiment not so very far removed from that of the Victorians:
Her large subject ‘Woman and Baby’ is one of the most poignant designs that one remembers in modern painting. The broad sculpturesque composition may be derived from Puvis de Chavannes, but it has an intensely human interest, clothed in a primitive passion, that seems to sweep aside all conventional barriers. ... None but a woman, none but a great artist, could have so perfectly expressed, with a new sympathy, all the pathos and bewilderment of this time-worn theme.35
Vanessa’s maternal feelings now played a dominant role in her life. Roger Fry must have perceived this when around 1913 he carved in wood a mother protectively clutching to her side two children; the same motif is found in the Christmas card that he made in 1913. Something of Vanessa’s absorption in her two sons is conveyed in many photographs that she took of them at Asheham where they ran about the garden naked. Her love for them had increased as her marriage daily lessened in importance: confirmed in her role as mother, she was now dismissive of her role as wife. Even in her youth she had instinctively reacted against the male-dominated conventions that her Duckworth half-brothers and others upheld. She liked men as friends, but her new-won independence may have left her disinclined to re-enter a relationship where she would be the submissive partner. This perhaps troubled her affair with Roger who could be demanding, his intellect, energy and enthusiasm challenging the very independence that he had helped her to achieve. Duncan presented no such threat. Like many homosexuals, he was extremely close to his mother and had preserved a streak of juvenile irresponsibility. This, combined with their six-year difference in age, perhaps enabled Vanessa to look on him as a younger brother or even son. Roger demanded of her a more complete role, wanting her to be in all but name a wife. He suffered greatly as she gradually transferred her affection to Duncan. She suffered too, more intensely, perhaps, than she expected, but not in a way that ever threatened her position as mother.
Duncan was not easily caught. Even his age was elusive: in January 1914 he told Maynard, ‘My mother tells me I am only 28 which is a great surprise. I thought I was 29. So I have a whole year to spare.’36 In order to draw Duncan closer to her Vanessa began to underline their difference as painters from the others in their circle. While he was away during the early part of 1914, first at Menton and then in North Africa, she wrote to him from Asheham. ‘Norton says I have become a slut and have quite changed all my habits since he has known me. A good deal is put down to your example. One painter alone is simply mobbed I find. Nothing escapes notice, holes in one’s stockings, green paint on one’s face, shoes down at heel, slowness of mind - all is put down to being a painter.’37 Meanwhile Duncan sent her branches of oranges and lemons from Africa (which she painted) and she in turn sent him reports of the Grafton Group show where Duncan’s Adam and Eve was causing offence. ‘I believe distortion is like Sodomy,’ she wrote. ‘People are simply blindly prejudiced against it because they think it abnormal.’38 But if she was compatible, he was not in love: in February 1914 she jokingly suggested in one letter that they should elope and potter harmoniously together; in August, however, when Clive considered visiting Asheham, she had to admit: ‘You will be very welcome and will interrupt no lovemaking. Only Duncan is here and he as you know is impervious to my charms.’39
Many years later Duncan recalled that he first became aware of the nature of Vanessa’s love when he caught sight of her in a mirror watching him shave.40 To another, he said that awareness of her love struck him after a party given at Lady Ottoline’s.41 This must have been after April 1913 as it was not until then that Ottoline reopened her friendship with Vanessa and Duncan after her quarrel with Roger in May 1911. ‘I went to tea with Ott.,’ Vanessa told Roger. ‘We had a most touching scene! She kissed me warmly and said how nice it was to be friends again. That the whole thing had been so dreadful, but we agreed there was no need to go into that again! Then she kissed me passionately on the lips! And so we made friends and sat and had a long talk about other things. ... Isn’t it odd.’42 After this she and Duncan (but not Roger) often attended Otto-line’s parties at which the guests were invited to dress up in her store of Persian and Turkish clothes and where Duncan performed wild improvisations to one of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, pedalled out on the pianola by Philip Morrell. At one of these parties the violinist Jelly d’Aranyi embraced Duncan on the stairs as he was about to leave. Vanessa, who was waiting for him in the hall below, spun round and without a word promptly left the house. From now on, Duncan realized, Vanessa’s feelings would have to be taken into account.
This shift in her affections had begun during their trip to Italy in the spring of 1913. She had decided then to assert her independence and had refused to do some of the things Roger suggested. Many years later he recalled in a letter to Helen Anrep: ‘I knew so well when Vanessa was falling out of love with me and on her way to falling in love with Duncan ... one of the symptoms was an almost eager seizing on things where she could disagree with me and be in the opposite camp.’43 On their return to England they had both worked intensively towards the opening of the Omega, and though Vanessa saw Roger daily, she was less able to set aside time for their affair. At the same time she was attempting to re-establish normal relations with Clive as she wanted to have another child.
When in the spring of 1914 she went on a short bicycling holiday in France with Roger, it would seem that her complicated affections were equally divided between him, Clive and Duncan. Each day their talk far outpaced the mere ten miles travelled and in the evenings she wrote to Clive. ‘Roger is depressed about his life and his art. He finds me “rébarbative” and says I look like the heroine of a story in the Strand magazine, I am so neat and prim. I do my best to cheer him up about life and art without being too kind - but of course you and Duncan are absurd really - our relations are much too fixed and old-established to be altered now. I find no new excitements in that line and shall be glad of some contemporary company.’44
If her affair with Roger was changing, so too was her relationship with Virginia. Even before her marriage to Leonard, Virginia had begun to feel that her sister was drawing apart, into a world of her own making: ‘As a painter, you are much less conscious of the drone of daily life than I am, as a writer. You are a painter. I think a good deal about you, for purposes of my own, and this seems to me clear. This explains your simplicity. What have you to do with all this turmoil? What you want is a studio where you can see things.’45 Virginia did indeed begin to make use of her sister for her own purposes and gave certain of Vanessa’s characteristics to Mrs Ambrose in The Voyage Out. Throughout her life Virginia seems to have had a need in her writing to draw on her knowledge and understanding of Vanessa. She also found that by underlining and exaggerating certain aspects of Vanessa’s character she retained her hold on her. She seized on Vanessa’s ‘generous talent for losing umbrellas and forgetting messages’46 and on her hilariously muddled use of proverbs. As early as 1910 Vanessa had warned Clive: ‘Virginia since early youth has made it her business to create a character for me according to her own wishes and has now so succeeded in imposing it upon the world that those preposterous stories are supposed to be certainly true because so characteristic.’47 Nevertheless Vanessa herself was to develop a line of self-mockery, underlining habits that touched on the absurd - her reliance on safety-pins, for instance, or her wildly inaccurate dressmaking - so that, like Gertrude Stein’s steady transformation into the likeness that Picasso had earlier painted, she came more and more to resemble Virginia’s invention.
But during this period, while interest in the Post-Impressionists raged, the intimacy between the sisters noticeably cooled. On honeymoon, Virginia learnt that Vanessa had broken confidence and told Leonard how in 1911 Virginia had received a proposal from Walter Lamb. On her return to London Virginia had for a period kept her distance from 46 Gordon Square but had been dissuaded from quarrelling with Vanessa by Leonard. Both sisters now felt that the other had been disloyal, for Virginia had earlier been indiscreet about Roger’s brief fling with Lady Ottoline, a fact that had determined Vanessa to tell her sister nothing about her own affair. Both sisters therefore temporarily withdrew from their former intimacy, and the breach was never wholly repaired. When Virginia tried to re-establish close relations she sometimes received the impression that Vanessa was deliberately repressing affection. Yet Vanessa’s maternal care for her sister had not suddenly ceased, for Leonard, following Virginia’s custom, turned to Vanessa for advice on whether or not Virginia should have children. Vanessa told them to obtain all the advice they could and then make up their minds themselves. In a letter to Virginia, she pointed out that all women ran some risks in having a baby, but that Virginia should be warned against it if it meant running an appreciable risk of another breakdown or a permanent state of nerves which would prevent her from enjoying the child when it arrived. On the whole Vanessa felt that if Virginia waited a while and took adequate care of herself there would be little danger to her health, and she repeated Jean Thomas’s view that a baby would do Virginia good. The case against her having children was, at least in January 1913, less clear-cut than Leonard Woolf in his autobiography Beginning Again suggests. However, what must have decided him against procreation (for it was he who finally took the decision) was the two subsequent nervous attacks which Virginia endured in July and September of that year. During the second of these she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of veronal. Vanessa was immediately called for. After the doctors had given Virginia a stomach pump, Vanessa sat up with her all night while the exhausted Leonard slept. She was the first to tell him in the morning that Virginia had pulled through.
Looking back on this period immediately preceding the outbreak of war, Vanessa felt some explanation was needed for Bloomsbury’s lack of prescience:
It must now be almost incredible how unaware we were of the disaster so soon to come. I do not know how much the politicians then foresaw, but I think that we in Bloomsbury had only the haziest ideas as to what was going on in the rest of Europe. How could we be interested in such matters when first getting to know well the great artists of the immediate past and those following them, when beauty was springing up under one’s feet so vividly that violent abuse was hurled at it and genius generally considered to be insanity, when the writers were pricking up their ears and raising their voices lest too much attention should be given to painting: when music joined in the general chorus with sounds which excited ecstasy rage and disdain: a great new freedom seemed about to come and perhaps would have come, if it had not been for motives and ambitions of which we knew nothing. But surely such unawareness can never come again and it is difficult to explain it to those who cannot hope to feel it.48
