Quentin Bell was not a great artist, but that didn’t stop him. He saw the world as a magical place. The ceramicist (son of the Bloomsbury group’s Vanessa Bell; biographer of his aunt Virginia Woolf) spent his life lost in a world of magic, myth, newts in ponds, levitating women and knights on horseback.
He died in 1996, leaving behind decades of pots, plates, figurines and drawings filled with wonder and amazement. It all started when Bell was nine years old. Taken to a magic show by some relatives, he saw a jaw-dropping spectacle: a beautiful woman seeming to float in the air.
It stayed with him throughout his life. Five sculptures here show bodies caught in mid-air, raised off the ground, stiff as a board. There are rough messy works in wire and wood and plaster from the 1960s, bronze from the 80s and painted ceramics from the 90s; from modern and stark to gaudy and bright, it’s levitation that set him on his creative path and never left his side.
Most of the work here is ceramic: plates, pots and figurines. They’re humorous, brightly coloured, shiny objects. They’re like messy, rough takes on chintzy 18th-century European decorative art, rococo porcelain with its depictions of reclining ladies in voluminous dresses.
The figurines aren’t great: they’re basic and poorly rendered, often malformed and pretty unremarkable, if quite funny in places. His plates and teapots fare better, especially the later cups and jugs, which are colourful and decorative. But his drawings and illustrations are where it really falls apart.
He paints Greek myths and biblical scenes, he illustrates the story of Cinderella and his own imagined history of Sussex, but none of it is well executed or particularly interesting. They feel like fun creative projects meant to entertain his kids, which some of them were. What makes it compelling is that everything here is at odds with the aesthetic trends of his era.
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