Vanessa Bell retrospective

Much has been written about the painter Vanessa Bell, her sister Virginia Woolf and the affairs and shenanigans of the extraordinary collection of writers and artists who formed the Bloomsbury Group. Bell was at the centre of the group and contributed her fair share to the bohemian behaviour, with an open marriage to Clive Bell and her affair with the gay Duncan Grant. However, her work has been overshadowed by Grant and by her sister. This exhibition, Bell’s first ever solo show, proves that her work was of equal merit to Grant and in some cases more interesting.

Previously I did not rate Bell as highly as I should. However, this exhibition, which has managed to bring together pictures from private collections that have never been seen in pubic before, has convinced me that she is an important British artist.

Bell exhibited with Matisse at a Post-Impressionist show in 1912. Through the discipline of textile design she produced abstract paintings in 1914, a good 40 years before the St Ives artists followed that path. Her bold and colourful still lifes certainly owe a debt to Matisse and the European Post-Impressionists.

Although Bell lived until her eighties, she painted her most interesting work in her twenties and thirties when her children were small. This is what makes up the majority of this themed exhibition, divided into portraits, abstract oils, fabrics and interiors with and without people, and landscapes.

Her portraits certainly break from the style of her tutor, John Singer Sargent, particularly in her depiction of women. Folds, creases and details are often not fully rendered and her brush strokes are bold and solid. The effect makes the subjects look strong, independent and inscrutable – which many of them were.

Females in Bell’s portraits are single-minded types with forthright opinions. The picture A Conversation is obviously not about flower-arranging. Bell paints as she sees and gets behind her subject’s outward appearance – Mrs St John Hutchinson, Clive Bell’s mistress, acclaimed as a vivacious beauty, is lemon-lipped in a poison green dress.

Bell is able to develop the characters of family and friends more fully by painting them in domestic settings. One cannot help but be charmed by her daughter engrossed in a book in a beautiful room, her sleeping baby son, and her brother-in-law Leonard at his desk next to a sleeping dog. To appreciate the variety of Bell’s work, this exhibition is well worth a visit.

Until 4 June at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, London SE21: 020-8693 5254, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk