This collection contains over 300 letters of painter & decorative designer Vanessa Bell, the central figure in the Bloomsbury group.

A selection of letters by the pacifist and noted art critic Clive Bell, expertly annotated by his biographer Clive Bell was a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury Group. His marriage to Vanessa Bell and his, at times tempestuous, relations with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf form important strands in the cultural history of modernism. A tireless champion of modernist art, a committed pacifist and conscientious objector, Bell produced a huge body of correspondence with many of the leading artistic and political figures of his time. His lively, witty, highly opinionated letters are a window into the turbulence of the early twentieth century, populated by friends and acquaintances including T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as his Bloomsbury set, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. Arranged in eight categories - Bloomsbury Circles; Virginia; War; Arts and Letters; To the Editor; Francophile; Travels; Love, Gossip, Home - this selection emphasises Bell's enormously varied life and interests. Bell was born in the reign of Queen Victoria and lived long enough to have been able to hear the Beatles on the radio. His letters demonstrate an appetite for art, for love and for peace that never flagged. [bio]Mark Hussey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Pace University in New York. His most recent book is Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism, A Biography (2021). He is also the General Editor of the Harcourt annotated edition of Virginia Woolf. www.markhusseybooks.com

To Musgrave, on cultural affairs and personal matters.

Presents three hundred letters of Bloomsbury's painter Vanessa Bell from the 1880s to 1961.

'Amusing, charming, stimulating, urbane' - THE TIMES'Revelatory' - GUARDIAN'Restores Clive Bell vividly to life' - Lucasta Miller______________Clive Bell is perhaps better known today for being a Bloomsbury socialite and the husband of artist Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Yet Bell was a highly important figure in his own right: an internationally renowned art critic who defended daring new forms of expression at a time when Britain was closed off to all things foreign. His groundbreaking book Art brazenly subverted the narratives of art history and cemented his status as the great interpreter of modern art. Bell was also an ardent pacifist and a touchstone for the Wildean values of individual freedoms, and his is a story that leads us into an extraordinary world of intertwined lives, loves and sexualities. For decades, Bell has been an obscure figure, refracted through the wealth of writing on Bloomsbury, but here Mark Hussey brings him to the fore, drawing on personal letters, archives and Bell's own extensive writing. Complete with a cast of famous characters, including Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism is a fascinating portrait of a man who became one of the pioneering voices in art of his era. Reclaiming Bell's stature among the makers of modernism, Hussey has given us a biography to muse and marvel over - a snapshot of a time and of a man who revelled in and encouraged the shock of the new.'A book of real substance written with style and panache, copious fresh information and many insights' - Julian Bell