The Bloomsbury Group once induced yawns as the smug epitome of a snobbish high culture but they’re now admired for their feminism and queer abandon. There’s a West End play about the loves of the Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes and if you visit the National Trust’s Sissinghurst, its flowerbeds are set alight by Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Virginia Woolf.
But biography can’t set art alight, as Tate Britain’s epic yet flaccid roam through the complicated lives and desperately mediocre paintings of the co-habiting Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant proves. While Keynes was quite the economist and Woolf a literary genius, I honestly can’t see enough interest in the visual art of Bloomsbury to detain anyone for long. That was true when their sex lives were spoken of in a more muted way (I read a biography of Keynes as a student and don’t remember any hanky-panky at all) and it’s true now, even as we trawl their paintings for gay and feminist meanings.
One caption for a male nude by Duncan Grant is so preoccupied with the erotic undertones, it says nothing about what is surely most interesting about the naked young man sitting on a table – that he is the same George Mallory who would vanish trying to climb Everest in 1924 and whose frozen body would be rediscovered there in 1999.
Perhaps the Himalaya is too wild to be encompassed in the sophisticated yet genteel world of Bloomsbury. Then again, so is Paris, in this exhibition. There is no French art here even though both Bell and Grant emulated French modernism, sometimes very belatedly. Grant’s portrait of Mallory, for instance, which dates from 1913, assiduously apes the style of Georges Seurat, who died in 1891.
In the early 1900s, almost every country in continental Europe was throwing up revolutionary modernist geniuses from Munch to Malevich, Schiele to Boccioni, but Britain was so visually repressed that the Bloomsbury Group seemed frightfully clever to have heard of modern art at all. It would have been more honest and interesting to show how this happened. Bell and Grant didn’t just see “post-impressionist” art, as their friend Roger Fry dubbed it, in exhibitions or magazines: they lived with it intimately. In 1918, Keynes famously hid a Cézanne still life of seven apples in a hedge near Bell and Grant’s place in the country, Charleston, because he couldn’t drive it up a muddy lane. When he got it to the house, the group all loved it.
Cézanne’s painting is a compacted philosophical masterpiece, which the Bloomsbury Group were right to admire, but it’s not here. Nor is the early cubist still life by Picasso, Pots and Lemon, that Vanessa’s art critic husband Clive Bell bought in 1911. Their inclusion would have given more context, and certainly more artistic excitement, to this show.
Instead in a section on “modernisms” (what modernisms? There was only one modernism in the early 20th century) it feels as if the wool is being pulled over our eyes. We are supposed to believe that when Grant painted Head of Eve in 1913, a simplified totemic nude like a wooden carving, he was doing something utterly original rather than catching up with Picasso’s African-inspired fetishes, or that when Bell painted her wanly cubistic Portrait of Molly MacCarthy, she was in no way influenced by having a Picasso in the house.
The problem isn’t that Bell and Grant are playing catchup with Paris. It’s that both artists appear so detached and passionless. They try on avant garde ideas but always come back to tradition. Grant’s 1920s views of the South of France have a veneer of modern style but are the kind of holiday art a Victorian painter such as Lord Leighton might have done.
Sophistication and knowledge don’t guarantee greatness, nor does having an interesting life. Tate Britain probably wouldn’t put on a show by artists who were wife and husband but Vanessa and Duncan had a unique lifelong relationship even though he was gay and she married Clive Bell with whom she had children. But the pair don’t seem to influence or rival each other in a way to make a joint show come alive: indeed they cancel each other out. The pull of queer desire that’s a recurring impulse in Grant distracts you from the quiet still observations of Bell. Here is a openly sexed portrait by Grant of his lover David Garnett, over there a painting by Bell of her sister Woolf looking melancholically introspective.
In the Britain of their day, art was barely considered a serious pursuit and, for all their knowledge of French modernism, Bell and Grant are timid about how much any of this playing with brushes matters. But then you go into a little room near the end and find something with real belief: Grant’s erotic drawings. They are totally uninhibited, explicit and beautiful. His classical yet raw depictions of men having sex are like a queer version of Picasso’s Vollard Suite and for once the influence is digested in a creative, powerful way.
It’s the only time in this show that either artist seems truly driven. The rest is the stuff of Bloomsbury costume dramas.
