Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was a pioneering modernist painter and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of influential English artists, writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century.

The reputations of her collaborators, notably her sister Virginia Woolf, and her lover Duncan Grant, have tended to overshadow Bell’s central role. As the largest-ever solo show and first in-depth overview of her work, including drawings, paintings, ceramics, textile designs and furniture, the exhibition reveals her ‘main character’ energy, placing her at the heart of Bloomsbury’s modernist endeavor, which expressed a radical new way of living, sweeping aside the formality and social conventions of Edwardian society.

Bell co-founded the experimental design collective, Omega Workshops and in 1916 moved with Grant to Charleston in rural Sussex. There she created a home that embodied Bloomsbury’s reinvention of domestic space and personal relationships. The exhibition explores how she lived her life in art, immersing herself in a world of form and color.