Review of Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

20/02/17

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961)

Dulwich Picture Gallery
8 February – 4 June 2017

This is the first major monographic exhibition of work by Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), and the curators, Sarah Milroy and Ian A C Dejardin, are at pains to emphasise their wish to separate Vanessa Bell the artist, and Vanessa Bell’s art, from the many stories and dramas surrounding Vanessa Bell the person, as part of the Bloomsbury Group. Certainly, her work deserves attention – “Vanessa Bell the painter was as radical as Virginia Woolf the writer,” wrote the Guardian critic Fiona MacCarthy, when Bell’s work was shown as part of The Art of Bloomsbury at Tate in 19991 – and she stands strong as an artist in her own right, not just as the sister of Virginia Woolf, the wife of Clive Bell, or the lover of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Nevertheless, no matter how hard one tries – and the curators of this exhibition really have tried – her art cannot be separated from her life. In fact, even they concede as much in the “At Home” section of the exhibition, where they portray the complex (or, perhaps one could argue, remarkably simple, in the way she lived them out) interpenetration of her roles as mother, wife, lover, sister and artist.

Read the review here

Essay on Julia Margaret Cameron

29/01/16

Julia Margaret Cameron

Victoria and Albert Museum

28 November 2015 – 21 February 2016

and

Julia Margaret Cameron: Influence and Intimacy

Media Space, Science Museum

24 September 2015 – 28 March 2016

The aspects of her photography for which Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79) is most celebrated are – and indeed always have been – those for which she is also most criticised, namely her imprecision, lack of focus, and deliberately vague, artistic subject matter. Regardless of one’s opinion on her style, however, Cameron’s impact on the development of the medium and its acceptance as an art form cannot be denied. She was the first photographer who took repeated advantage of the Copyright Bill of 1862, paying one shilling per picture to register some 505 of her photographs, and, in 1868, she became the first “artist in residence” at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), when its then director, Sir Henry Cole, allowed her to use two rooms as a studio. Her experimental techniques and penchant for scratching or drawing on to the negative, as well as her deliberate use of smudges and swirls, from applying an excess of collodion, render her resultant imagery poetic and alluring, far removed from documentary style. Indeed, Cameron herself acknowledged in a letter to her friend and mentor, Sir John Herschel, at the end of 1864: “My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.”

Read the rest of this essay here

Review of Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum

09/12/13

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors

Freud Museum

10 October 2013 – 2 February 2014

In late-19th-century Paris, after decades of political upheaval and social unrest, and an era of neurasthenia, fainting spells, and “the vapours”, a new psychological illness took to the stage: hysteria (from the Greek hystero, meaning womb) was pronounced “the illness of the age” by the prominent journalist, novelist, and playwright Jules Claretie. Largely considered a female malady, it turned women into the focus for the expression of many millennial fears and anxieties. From the 1870s onwards, stories about hysterical patients filled the newspaper columns. They were transformed into fictional characters by novelists, photographed, sculpted, painted, and drawn to such an extent that Georges Didi-Huberman feels “nearly compelled to consider hysteria, insofar as it was fabricated at the Salpêtrière [hospital] in the last third of the 19th century, as a chapter in the history of art.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mad-bad-and-sad-women-and-the-mind-doctors