Tate Britain Gives Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant Their First Joint Show Since 1999

Tate Britain opens Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury on 12 November, running to 11 April 2027 — the gallery's first Bloomsbury exhibition in more than 25 years. The last one was in 1999. That gap is the whole point of the show.

The curator, Thomas Kennedy, Tate Britain's curator of Modern British art, puts it plainly. "That means an entire generation of visitors have not seen an exhibition on Vanessa or Duncan's work at Tate, and we felt that it was important for us to revisit their practices again after so long," Kennedy says.

Bell and Grant were the Bloomsbury Group's most active and high-profile painters. Roger Fry — the critic who introduced European Post-Impressionism to Britain with his 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries — was arguably the group's most influential art-world voice, but Bell and Grant made the pictures. The Tate show brackets the two together partly because of their 40-year open relationship: they lived and painted together, and each other, for decades.

What was so bad about 1999?

The turn of the millennium marked a low point in critical opinion of the Bloomsbury artists. The Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle called them "a bit crap", "lightweights" and "third rate". The novelist Philip Hensher, writing in The Independent, described these "no-hopers" and their "rubbish" as inspiring simple "rage and loathing".

Kennedy is not having it. Bell and Grant, he says, "started experimenting with art in unique ways that hadn't really been seen in Britain before". He adds: "They created some of the first abstract works in Britain, which is sometimes very much overlooked. And they were creating these works together, and talking about art all day, every day, breaking the distinction between fine and decorative art with the Omega Workshops. What they were doing was really special."

Two painters, one household

Kennedy claims no major exhibition has ever paired Vanessa and Duncan. "It's so fascinating to see the ways they differ," he says. "We should recognise their individual accomplishments of course, but also the works they made together and how they influenced each other. We know about their relationship—she was married and he was gay—but this exhibition explores what that really meant in their artworks and in their life."

The mechanics of the pairing matter. Both moved to Charleston, near Lewes in East Sussex, in 1918 and stayed within arm's reach until Bell's death in 1961. Their styles sat close together, but Kennedy draws the line clearly. "Vanessa's painting is more deliberate with very considered blocks of colour and very strong outlines, whereas Duncan's is scratchier, more impulsive and it feels like he is experimenting more with more expressive techniques," he says.

Sometimes authorship dissolved entirely. Working on the Famous Women dinner service — a collection of 50 hand-painted plates — their styles became, in Kennedy's words, "completely the same: the authorship has very much broken down and we can't tell who did what". Roger Fry went so far as to tell them to paint in separate studios to reassess their own ways of making. "It's fascinating to see that push and pull between what they were taking from each other," Kennedy says.

Bell, whose sister Virginia Woolf was even more celebrated in her own field, is today perhaps the slightly more recognisable name of the two. But both were considered leading figures during their lifetimes.

What does this change for how we see Bloomsbury?

The very thing that diminished the group for earlier critics — their tangled love lives — may now be powering the revival. To contemporary eyes, they look like pioneers of unrepentantly queer lifestyles. Bell married the painter Clive Bell in 1907, then had a long relationship with Fry, and in 1918 had a daughter, Angelica, with Grant. Grant, for his part, kept a string of male lovers while maintaining his domestic life with Bell.

"They were looking towards non-monogamous relationships and accepting queer relationships. The latter, as you know, was illegal in the UK at the time," Kennedy says. "Within the Bloomsbury Group they felt freedom—both artistically and the way they lived."

The Tate show lands amid ongoing Bloomsbury activity. Charleston, the pair's former home, runs a near-constant exhibition programme; its current show, Mad Bloomsbury (4 November–11 April 2027), examines the group's engagement with mental health issues. The group has also kept its cultural profile through feature films and the BBC's 2015 mini-series Life in Squares, titled after Dorothy Parker's supposed gag that the group "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".

After a quarter-century of absence from the national home of British art, Bell and Grant get their institutional reassessment — and a new generation gets its first look at whether the "third rate" verdict or Kennedy's case for Britain's early abstractionists holds up.