by Pericles Lewis
Vanessa Bell’s “Studland Beach,” painted around 1912, shows the achievement of British post-impressionism in its arrangement of planes of color and balancing of two groups of figures seen only from behind. The painting emphasizes what Bell’s husband Clive called “significant form.”[1] The figures in the left foreground of the canvas seem to be watching those in the upper right corner, calling attention to the act of perception involved in painting. All the figures face away from the viewer, oriented like the painting itself towards the sea.
- ↑ Bell, Art (1914) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958) p. 16.
- ↑ Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 117-42.
- ↑ This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis’s Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 92.