Vanessa Bell

For the first time, this book locates her, ‘centre frame’, focusing on her importance as a painter, designer and decorator. One of the first British artists to produce fully-resolved abstract paintings, and a driving force behind the Omega Workshops, of which she was a co-founder and director, Bell’s work was often collaborative and anonymous.   Bell provided a role model for her younger sister, Virginia Woolf, in her determination to operate professionally on an equal footing with the best male artists of her generation. New research and previously unpublished correspondence establishes how she deployed her skills as a networker, hostess and administrator, operating ‘beneath the radar’ through her brother and fellow artists, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. The book outlines the specific prejudices and obstacles that Bell encountered as a professional woman in the first decades of the twentieth century. Her self-deprecating tactics, championing the work of the men in her circle and even allowing them to take credit for her own creative practice while providing the invisible labour of a housekeeper, caregiver and muse will resonate for feminists today.