Wendy Hitchmough | Vanessa Bell: The Life & Art of a Bloomsbury Radical
Fri 25 Apr 2025 | 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Vanessa Bell’s approach to life as well as to art was trail-blazing: she rejected conventions and challenged the structures of early twentieth–century society. A leading figure within The Bloomsbury Group and known for her unconventional lifestyle, Vanessa Bell’s work as a painter, designer and decorator has often been overlooked and relegated within the bombastic, male-dominated field of British modernism.
Wendy Hitchmough, writer of Vanessa’s new biography and former curator of the Bloomsbury artists’ home, Charleston, joins Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors’ curator Claudia Tobin to discusses the impact of this most radical and influential of artists with Bloomsbury scholar Frances Spalding.
Venue: Palmerston Room
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
Wendy Hitchmough is emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Sussex and was curator at the Bloomsbury artists’ home, Charleston, for over twelve years. She is author of The Bloomsbury Look.
Dr Claudia Tobin is a writer, curator, and academic. She recently curated Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors at the Garden Museum in London and has worked on exhibitions and research projects on Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and modern British artists including at Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. Her recent book publications include a collection of Virginia Woolf’s art writings, Oh, to be a Painter! (2021), Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (2020), and she is co-editor of Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices (2019). She is currently writing a book about women artists, writers and their gardens. Claudia is a Bye Fellow at Downing College and Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum, Jesus College, Cambridge. She has held numerous prestigious fellowships including as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge, and Fellow at I Tatti, Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies.
Chair Biography
Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS, The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, led on to a commission from the Tate to write a centennial history of this national institution. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she was invited by the National Portrait Gallery to curate the exhibition Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision, and to write the accompanying book. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now is Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
