Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Bloomsbury Group is the subject of a shelf-bowing number of books and still holds a particular fascination. In their permissive attitude towards sex, their rejection of social convention and reverence for individual freedom, we rightly discern in this circle of artists and writers a nascent version of 21st-century attitudes. Wendy Hitchmough\u2019s\u00a0Vanessa Bell: The Life & Art of a Bloomsbury Radical, is likely, then, to find a receptive audience.But any book seeking a place on that crowded shelf must justify its inclusion. In the case of Bell, who is already the subject of an excellent biography by Frances Spalding, this is particularly true. Hitchmough \u2014 who was curator at the Bloomsbury artist\u2019s Sussex home, Charleston, for 12 years \u2014 pitches her book as a corrective. She argues that Bell was hampered by prejudice in a male-dominated field, and that her importance as a female artist \u201cin the vanguard of modernism\u201d has been undervalued. We are to come away from her book with a new understanding of Bell as the radical \u201cmatriarch\u201d of the post-Impressionist scene.Drawing on Bell\u2019s previously unpublished letters, Hitchmough uncovers a litany of instances when the men in the Bloomsbury Group either took credit for or obscured her work. Much of Bell\u2019s labour, she writes, was \u201cinvisible\u201d. While Bell was clearly the co-host (alongside her sister Virginia Woolf) of the first Bloomsbury meetings \u2014 during which the whole edifice of stuffy Victorian culture was dismantled \u2014 it is her brother Thoby Stephen who is credited. And though her husband Clive Bell became an important art critic, her role in supplying him with opinions and introducing him to the work of artists like C\u00e9zanne, Matisse and Picasso goes unacknowledged.Hitchmough uncovers a litany of instances when the men in the Bloomsbury Group either took credit for or obscured her workRoger Fry, her Omega workshop partner and lover, is credited by reviewers for their success at the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, despite most of the work being Bell\u2019s. When we think of Charleston, even, we imagine an idyllic scene but fail to see Bell cleaning, mothering, stretching canvases \u2014 furiously pedalling below the surface.Hitchmough finds Bell\u2019s lover, the painter Duncan Grant, to have caused the most damage. Because their work is so similar in style and often unsigned, art historians have frequently misattributed her work to him. While it was Bell who first \u201csingled him out as a rising talent\u201d at the Friday Club (a salon also organised by her) and continued to promote his work over her own, \u201cit was Duncan who was heralded as \u2018the best English painter alive\u2019\u201d by her own husband. In her relationship with Grant, her tendency to self-sacrifice \u2014 behaviour that she learnt at the hands of her oppressive father, who \u201cconditioned [her] acceptance of selfish, unregulated behaviour\u201d \u2014 was at its most extreme.This is all no doubt true, and entirely convincing as an argument (although it cannot be considered new). But does it make for a good book? The generously printed colour images of Bell\u2019s paintings alongside Hitchmough\u2019s attentive analysis bring her work to life, but Bell herself is barely resurrected. Hitchmough\u2019s insistent argument gets in the way. If it weren\u2019t for the letters, which give us brief flashes of a woman who was clearly as \u201csingularly alive\u201d as the portraits she painted \u2014 full of caustic wit and radical daring \u2014 this book would read more like a curator\u2019s catalogue.We can all stomach a little polemic, and even a sizeable portion of undiluted facts, as long as they come with a side of scene-setting and characterisation. In fact, we are far more easily convinced of an argument if it has been brought to life. But without those necessary literary elements, it all starts to become a bit static. Hitchmough makes no attempt to show Vanessa holding court at the Friday Club or painting on Studland beach. She writes that Grant and Duncan \u201cshared a visual vocabulary\u201d but we are never invited to eavesdrop on their conversations. For a book that promises to give us something of the life of Bell, there is very little in it that moves.During her BBC Reith lectures, the late Hilary Mantel explained that the historical novelist aspires to make \u201cthese bones live\u201d. It is an ambition shared by the greatest biographers. From the \u201cdead fact\u201d, as Richard Holmes writes, \u201csomehow you have to produce the living effect\u201d. The task is to find the balance between fact and art, between information and invention; to, in the words of Virginia Woolf, \u201cproduce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama\u201d. Collecting information and shepherding it around an argument is not enough. A writer\u2019s job is to galvanise the dead fact into life.Vanessa Bell: The Life & Art of a Bloomsbury Radical by Wendy Hitchmough, Yale \u00a330, 352 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Bloomsbury Group is the subject of a shelf-bowing number of books and still holds a particular fascination. In their permissive attitude towards sex, their rejection<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-236711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236713,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236711\/revisions\/236713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}