One of Britain’s most radical and influential artists working in the first decades of the twentieth century, Vanessa Bell was a pioneer for professional women.

A leading figure within The Bloomsbury Group and known for her unconventional lifestyle, Vanessa Bell’s work as a painter, designer and decorator has often been overlooked and relegated within the bombastic, male-dominated field of British modernism.

With new research including previously unpublished letters, Wendy Hitchmough explores the ways in which Vanessa Bell forged new pathways as a modernist woman. Writing openly about depression and mental health at a time when the subject was stigmatised, as well as challenging taboos surrounding women’s bodies, Vanessa Bell exploited the patriarchal society that oppressed her. She responded to the nudes and pastoral scenes of Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse with themes of miscarriage and motherhood. She co-exhibited with her partner, Duncan Grant, and comparisons between their parallel careers highlight the gender disparities that shaped her life and work.

Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical celebrates the artist’s trail-blazing approach to art as well as life, her rejection of conventions and the challenge she posed to the structures of early twentieth-century society.