Milton Keynes and Vanessa Bell

                                      Milton Keynes and Vanessa Bell

 

Between late October 2024 and early January 2025 I’ve been in two cities that boast a lengthy central road or vista: Washington DC and Milton Keynes.

The juxtaposition is unfair. The National Mall in Washington is imperial: end-stopped by the Capitol and the Washington Monument, wide and green, and flanked by large and wonderful neo-classical (for the most part) buildings.

Midsummer Boulevard in Milton Keynes, although it compares in length, is utilitarian and decidedly not imperial. But both are products of idealists. In the US, of those that wished to create an imposing capital of the Nation; and in the UK of those who, more modestly, wished to create a model town for the citizens of the late C20.

The architects of DC looked to Rome and Greece for monumental inspiration, to Paris for street planning (and to Egypt for Washington’s Stele).

Those who designed the original plans for Milton Keynes- a complete new town for the 1970s- were, according to some accounts, a set of freewheeling hippies (back in the the 1960s and early 1970s this was a commodious category, including any young professional with longish hair and a taste for rock music and, perhaps, pot).

One very hippyish thing was successfully achieved: the laying out of Midsummer Boulevard along the line of the solstice (hence the name..). But here the romance of central Milton Keynes perhaps begins and ends.

Midsummer Boulevard and its Druidic line has been desecrated by the extension of Milton Keynes’s vast shopping mall across its width. The road continues as a right of way through the Mall, but it’s closed at nights.

Mall blockage apart, Midsummer Boulevard, for all the pedestrian and cycle ways running parallel to the road, is beset by endless car parks and gloomy office buildings- a world apart from the National Mall.

The very dreary Milton Keynes railway station is one end-stop for the Boulevard. Nearly 1.5 miles away, near the other end, lurks almost apologetically what the town’s signage calls the “theatre district”. This is a huddle of buildings set on an unattractive small concrete square including, indeed, a theatre and also an art gallery.

The gallery is undistinguished on the outside. But its spaces are good- large and well lit. In recent months it has hosted a festival of colour amidst the gloom of central Milton Keynes- the paintings and designs of Vanessa Bell.

Bell is a painter more engaging than challenging but always intriguingly pleasing. Before World War 1 she was quite the member of the avant garde, experimenting under the influence of Picasso, Matisse and others. This was a time of artistic self-confidence in a brave new modernist dawn, promoted in Britain by members of the Bloomsbury Group (Bell and her sister, Virginia Wolf being founding members). They were also founders of the Omega Workshop, the short-lived design enterprise that brought the styles of the new art movements to textiles and furniture.

 “Bloomsbury” was also notorious for avant garde morals- unconventional arrangements, heterosexual, bisexual and gay.

When the Great War knocked the stuffing out of Europe’s political and artistic confidence, Bell rather retreated into her own protective milieu.

That milieu, formed from the extraordinary talented denizens of Bloomsbury, and still imbued with its unconventions, was a rich one. At its heart was Vanessa and her life partner, Duncan Grant, a gay man who nevertheless fathered a child with Vanessa.

Although Bell retreated into more domestic themes for her painting, her work is hardly domesticated. It encompasses nudes, both male and female, unruly children, an enviable cast of distinguished friends, imaginative interiors and land and city scapes- and a wonderful set of ceramic plates celebrating famous women throughout history, including herself and her sister. She remained unapologetic about all aspects of her intriguing life.

 Bell’s accomplished handling of colour persists always, from her early modernist experimentation to the calm later portraits and landscapes. Perhaps, had she lived a bit longer, she should have turned her artistic eye to central Milton Keynes.

January 2025