Modernism and Motherhood: Vanessa Bell’s Images of Women
Excellent online lecture from ARTscapades looking at Vanessa Bell’s early Modernist works. I had assumed this would be a standard book talk as the speaker, Wendy Hitchmough, has recently written a biography of Bell but instead she decided to focus on Bell’s early Modernist works and to discuss how radical they were. This made it a lot more interesting and in depth that I had expected. She began by discussing how Bell encountered the Post-Impressionist via helping to organise the 1910 show of their work in London then looked at the effect this art had on her portraits, particularly of her sister, Virginia Woolf. She next focused on three major works “Studland Beach”, “Mother and Baby” (now lost) and “Nursery Tea” all from 1912 talking about their radical composition and subject matter and how that was informed by Bell’s experience as a woman and mother. She concluded by talking about how Bell created spaces where women could meet and show art such as the Grafton Group and...
