Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art – In Context

Saturday 22 June 2024
Dr Rachel Sloan and Dr Wendy Hitchmough

On campus at Vernon Square
11:00 – 13:15
£40 and £30 (concessions)
or
Online as a recording
£10 and £5 (concessions)

Course description

Our summer term Saturday Study event accompanies The Courtauld Gallery’s first focused display of works by the important Bloomsbury artist and designer Vanessa Bell.

We’ll investigate Bell’s artistic development and milieu in the context of the wider British art world of the time, ask what it took to be a pioneering woman artist at the time, what we understand by Modernism in Britain in the early years of the 20^th century and in what ways Bell, and the Bloomsbury group more widely, contributed to it.  We’ll weigh the benefits of belonging to a collaborative avant-garde group against the disadvantages of later commentators’ excessive focus on the Bloomsbury artists’ notoriously unorthodox private lives, and ask why it took so long for female artists like Bell to step out of the shadow of her better-known male colleagues.

Speakers are the exhibition curator Dr Rachel Sloan (The Courtauld) and Dr Wendy Hitchmough (formerly curator at the Bloomsbury artists’ home, Charleston, and senior lecturer emerita at the University of Sussex).

Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz

Booking required; the event fee for on-campus attendance includes admission on the day to the display Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art.

Booking for online access remains open until the end of the display (6 October 2024). The lecture recordings will be sent on Wednesday 26 June, or within five days for those booking after the 26 June, and will be accessible for 10 days from delivery.