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Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury
The 50-year creative partnership of Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, with over 300 works and a recreation of their studio at Charleston in Sussex.
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Preview: written before the show opened
In 1909 Vanessa Bell wrote to Duncan Grant inviting him to tea and suggesting they use first names. They went on to share a home for over 50 years, a daughter, and a studio at Charleston in Sussex. That studio has now been taken out of Charleston and restaged at Tate Britain while Charleston is conserved, the first time it has left.
Over 300 works fill the Lower floor, starting before the pair met: Bell's Iceland Poppies from her time under John Singer Sargent, Grant's copy after Chardin from Paris. Then come the post-impressionist experiments that became some of Britain's earliest abstract paintings, the chairs and ceramics of the Omega Workshops, Bell's covers for her sister Virginia Woolf's books, and Grant's erotic male nudes, kept hidden for years.
Paintings of the same subject hang side by side, so you can watch two hands working on one idea. Tate's content guidance flags one room with sexually explicit work.
Editor's pick
The Charleston studio, rebuilt outside Charleston for the first time, among more than 300 works: Iceland Poppies, Omega Workshops pieces, the Famous Women Dinner Service, Woolf's book covers. One room is sexually explicit.
Look for
The Charleston studio
The room the pair shared until 1939, relocated from Sussex and restaged in the gallery.
The Famous Women Dinner Service, 1932-34
Fifty hand-painted Wedgwood plates, from Jane Austen to Cleopatra, one of the rare projects they made together.
Two mantelpieces, 1914
Bell's Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece and Grant's The Mantelpiece paint the same corner of a room in a shared language.
Studland Beach, c.1912
Bell's seaside scene in bold colour and simplified shapes, showing of their circle of friends, from the years after Roger Fry's 1910 Post-Impressionist show.
Grant's male nudes
Rarely shown erotic nudes that stayed hidden for years, a window on his life as a gay man.
Good for
- Nerding Out
- Out-Of-Town Guests
With kids
Under Tate's general exhibition rules, up to four children aged 11 and under go free per adult and 12-18s pay £5. One room contains sexually explicit content.
Free in the same building
- Chris Ofili: RequiemA commissioned mural on Tate Britain's North Staircase paying tribute to artist Khadija Saye, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire, unfolding across three chapters exploring loss, transformation and redemption.
- Historic and Early Modern British ArtTrace 500 years of British art from the Tudor court through revolution, war, and the suffragette movement: Hogarth, Constable, Millais and more.
- JMW Turner — Clore GalleryThe world's largest Turner collection: 300 oil paintings and thousands of watercolours in James Stirling's purpose-built Clore Gallery, all free.
- Modern and Contemporary British ArtEleven rooms of British art from 1940 to now, from post-war anxiety through pop art and the YBAs to Hockney, Emin, and beyond.
Also at Tate Britain
On now nearby
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Image credits
7
- Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside BloomsburyCourtesy of Tate Britain
- Childhood in War© IWM (Art. IWM PST 8105)
- Dame Vera Lynn CollectionCourtesy of Imperial War Museum
- RootsCourtesy of The Photographers' Gallery
- Tate BritainJulian Herzog / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
- Churchill War RoomsJenny Poole / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Imperial War MuseumPeter Trimming / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0