THE ART OF LIFE
Virginia Nicholson reflects on the outstanding legacy of her grandmother Vanessa Bell, as the first major retrospective of the artist’s work is staged in London
Virginia Nicholson recalls her grandmother Vanessa Bell, whose paintings are enjoying their first major retrospective
For me, she was always ‘Nessa’. After her death, my grandmother, the artist Vanessa Bell, left me a gold chain. She couldn’t have known that a far greater legacy would inspire and delight countless people who now visit her home, Charleston, in Sussex. Conscientiously and lovingly preserved intact after the death of her lifelong companion Duncan Grant, the house, dramatically set just below the highest point of the South Downs, has become a cultural magnet. But for my brother and sister and me, Charleston was simply our favourite place in the world – a house full of dappled light, redolent of books, turpentine and clay, with Vanessa at its heart. Adorned with decorated furniture and murals, colourful textiles, ceramics and canvases, Charleston is in itself a work of art; in some senses, perhaps Vanessa’s greatest. And it was under her roof that I absorbed the message that Art was something everybody could do: that it didn’t just belong in ornate picture frames, but could jump out onto chairs, lamps and teapots.
Vanessa died when I was six years old, so my memories are scanty – but they are vivid. With me, my grandmother was always lovingly playful. I can remember a game she played with me after lunch, called ‘Brown Duck’, in which a sugar lump was placed on a teaspoon to go for a ride around the small pond of her coffee cup. Of course, the teaspoon capsized, the duck fell in and was rescued, soaked in black coffee, to be gobbled up by me! I also sat for my portrait in the studio. Fidgety and reluctant, I had to be bribed with sixpence. Vanessa and Duncan sat at their easels, side by side, as my father Quentin Bell has described them, ‘like two sturdy animals in a manger, munching away contentedly, not needing to talk to each other but just happy in the presence of the other’. When I got bored, Vanessa would encourage me to
invent fairy stories, using the subject matter of the pictures hanging on the walls as inspiration.
Today, I’m grateful to own one of the resulting portraits, painted by Duncan Grant, but I’ve never been able to discover what became of Vanessa’s version, painted two yards to the left – a slightly different angle on the solemn, bookish child in a lavender party frock and an Alice band, and probably worth slightly more than sixpence.
Now, that remarkable artistic heritage is set to enrich even more people, as the first comprehensive retrospective of Vanessa’s art is being mounted at Dulwich Picture Gallery. From March, Charleston will be showing some wonderful loans to fill the gaps caused by paintings selected for the exhibition. The old friends that have been borrowed from Charleston’s walls include Vanessa’s pearly still life Iceland Poppies, some deeply touching sketches of her baby son Julian (later killed in the Spanish Civil War), and her stoical 1958 self-portrait, which more than anything recalls the Nessa I knew: shawled, spare and bespectacled.
But the exhibition also holds many surprises, which the curator Sarah Milroy has assembled from collections worldwide. There is a breathtakingly assured Cubist portrait of Molly McCarthy and some groundbreaking abstracts. Nobody could capture her sister Virginia Woolf as Vanessa did. She is ahead of her time in paying homage to Cézanne and Matisse – but she is never reverent. The subtle and brilliant joys of her palette, and her assertion of the pleasure principle – together with her painterly confidence and adventurousness – will surely win her many new admirers.
Whether or not that lost painting of me ever surfaces, I’ll be celebrating Milroy’s challenging re-presentation of my grandmother’s art, and reliving the all-too-brief memories of a woman I had far too little time to know or to love.
‘Vanessa Bell’ is at Dulwich Picture Gallery (www.dulwichpicturegallery. org.uk) from 8 February to 4 June. For more information about Charleston, visit www.charleston.org.uk.