The textile artist, literary art director, muralist and fashion designer Cressida Bell – Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter and Virginia Woolf’s great-niece – invites me into her studio in Hackney Central. I am greeted by a wash of colour: geometric dots, kimono-hued patterns, a ménagerie of lampshades, assistants, an Indian bust by her ceramicist and art historian father Quentin Bell and designs, which are all ready to be sent to individual clients, major London museums and literary magazines.
Looking at her I fancy I see in her eyes some sort of fog, the Woolfian fog, the Vanessa Bell rictus of those arch-lintelled, roundish eyes – I would say “with the impenetrability of a tornado”, but then that would put my visit to a boho corner of civilised productivity irruptively and teasingly out of kilter. (And I’m sure that if Cressida had a penny for every time she’d been told she had Bloomsbury eyes, then she’d have a studio of Anselm Kiefer-like proportions.)
Vanessa Bell has her first ever retrospective starting on February 8 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, also starring her photographs, alongside punk-poet Patti Smith’s, of life at Vanessa’s ideas hub, Charleston, in Sussex.
Although she is looking forward to the show, Cressida tells me that her father, Quentin, had a complex relationship with the Bloomsbury matriarch: Vanessa’s other son, Julian, died in action in the Spanish Civil War aged 29, and Quentin felt jealous of his mother’s grief. “It was really hard to cope with, for my father. Because he wasn’t enough. And I think he felt quite hurt that he wasn’t the apple of her eye, that Julian had been the apple of her eye. He felt a slight ambivalence to Vanessa as a result.”
Vanessa Bell, with a practical grasp of how to pursue applied art and painting, ran Charleston as an “artwork come to life” (with attendant infidelities with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant rather mirroring William Morris’s problems with his wife, Jane, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti at Kelmscott Manor).
Cressida remembers: “It was lovely when it was a working house. As children, we stayed in the kitchen with the cook, Grace. You could go into the kitchen, but you couldn’t go into the studio. That was sacrosanct.
"I remember Lydia Lopokova, Maynard Keynes’s wife, walking in the road in a pink and orange Ballets Russes outfit. I was with my father and she greeted him with: "Huhllow, Meester Quentin.'"
She also remembers meeting the pompous journalist Godfrey Winn at Charleston, as well as Ted Heath, (who was very unpopular to the Swinging Sixties children).
The main conduit running from Cressida to Vanessa (who died when Cressida was one) was the letters that ran between Cressida’s mother, Olivia, and Vanessa. One has Olivia wondering to Vanessa if one of her sons is becoming too neurotic. “You wouldn’t want your children not to be neurotic!” replied Vanessa. Speaking to Cressida, I decide she has none of the Woolf-Bell neuroses. The fog of previous sight has lifted. I think.
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) is on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from February 8 to June 4
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