Duncan grant

The artist Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, the wife of Clive Bell, is enjoying the limelight this year as an exhibition of her work travels the country. Hot on its coat-tails comes Wendy Hitchmough’s beautifully illustrated new study of Bell’s life and art. As the former curator of the painter’s home at Charleston, Hitchmough writes with insider knowledge, supported by an armoury of scholarship: the bibliography alone stretches to 14 pages and the notes to 45. Somewhere within this carapace is a uniquely original and talented artist struggling to get out – a true radical whose story was one long, rolling sequence of experiments in leading as creative a life as

When I mentioned the subject of this book to someone reasonably well-informed about 20th-century British art, the response was: ‘Isn’t that all portrait and still-life paintings?’ Well, perhaps if you’re looking exclusively at the contents of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions – and even there landscape was another popular choice. But actually the period was alive with innovation – with abstraction and surrealism infiltrating and balancing out a new kind of realism. Art was a melting pot of competing attitudes, drawing equally on native traditions and stimulating foreign influences, principally Cézanne and Picasso. In her enjoyable new book Frances Spalding identifies ‘a recurrent tension… between a precarious stasis on the