Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet until this authorized biography was written, she largely remained a silent and inscrutable figure. Glimpses of her life appeared mainly through her famous sister, Virginia Woolf, whose letters and diaries frequently mentioned her. In this quality reissue of the definitive biography on the artist, Frances Spalding draws upon a mass of previously unpublished documents to reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life. She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's joining the Bloomsbury Group - and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists -  ran parallel with her increasingly unorthodox personal life between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her sister.

 

With a inset galley of photographs and pictures of her art, extensive notes, and a select bibliography, this book is a thrilling look at Vanessa Bell’s life and art, and at the growth of the Bloomsbury Group, the gathering of artists and intellectuals who were friends long before they became the famed painters and writers loved by the world.