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Below left: Vanessa Bell, Self–Portrait, c1915, oil on canvas laid on panel, 64 x 46cmBelow right: Vanessa Bell, Wallfl owers, c1950, oil on canvas, 36 x 25cmImages: © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett; Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. 5050 - B1982.16.2 © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett; Private Collection. © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Photo credit: © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images.for young ladies in the fi rst decade of the 20th century, and Bell made it more so by painting the walls white and hanging curtains in wild colours. More unconventional still was the way she chose to live there, with her brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends coming and going at all hours of the night, meals eaten on the fl y, and total candour established as the order of the day.Intellectual debate was the group sport of choice, with the nature of truth or the true value of art debated into the small hours of the night. The tone Bell set in her homes – both in London and (after 1916) at Charleston in the Sussex countryside – was one of tolerance and open enquiry. Far from being frowned upon, homosexuality was exalted, though gay love remained illegal in England until the 1960s. As Britain inched its way into disastrous engagement in WW1, Bell and her circle asserted their pacifi sm.Atheism was assumed, and, importantly, equality between the sexes was championed. One of the most subversive thing about Bloomsbury, in retrospect, may have been that its male and female members were well and truly friends, colleagues and thought-partners, exchanging their often heated views across gender lines, regardless of their romantic relations. Most resoundingly, the exhibition corrects a major oversight of art history. In past exhibitions, Vanessa Bell has tended to be contextualised (and downplayed) within the distracting context of her arguably tamer fellow artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. A fascination with her colourful life and loves has led to a problem in seeing her artistic accomplishments clearly, and in dispassionately separating the wheat from the chaff of her production. As well, in past attempts to tell the ‘Vanessa Bell story’, the radical creativity and drive of her distinctive pre-war period has tended to be somewhat lost in the shuffl e. With hindsight, though, we can now clearly see Bell’s signal role in bringing Continental Modernism to the UK in the period before the war – the radiant colour and stylised forms of Matisse, the sharp-elbowed Cubism of Picasso, the sinuous, sensual lines of Gauguin, Vuillard, Bonnard and Maurice Denis. Emboldened by the ground-breaking exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, organised by 30 NADFAS REVIEW / SPRING 2017 www.nadfas.org.ukVANESSA BELL