Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant: Inside Bloomsbury looks beyond the sex to the art – with mixed results

By Benedict Carpenter van Barthold, Lecturer, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University

The originality of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant is often sensationalised, with the focus being on their unconventional sex lives as much as their avant-garde art.

The pair were members of the informal Bloomsbury group, a loose constellation of gilded artists, writers and intellectuals centred around Gordon Square in central London. The group is coarsely remembered as much for its triangular romantic liaisons as its cultural…

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