Tate Britain surveys the fifty-year partnership of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, with more than 300 works and the Charleston studio restaged at Millbank.
Tate Britain on Millbank surveys the partnership of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, at the centre of the Bloomsbury Group, from Thursday 12 November 2026.
Bell was born Vanessa Stephen in London in 1879, the sister of Virginia Woolf. She took the bright colour and bold form of the Post-Impressionist exhibitions Roger Fry organised.
In 1913 she, Fry and Grant founded the Omega Workshops, which made avant-garde furniture, textiles and household objects until 1919. By 1914 Bell had turned to abstraction.
In 1916 the pair moved their household to Charleston, a farmhouse near Lewes. They painted its walls, doors and furniture, and the house became the country meeting place of Bloomsbury’s writers, painters and economists. The partnership lasted more than fifty years, until Bell’s death there in 1961.
Charleston, now in the care of a trust, opened its own galleries in 2018 and organises the exhibition with Tate. More than 300 works trace the shared work and the separate paths each artist took, and the centrepiece is the artists’ studio, restaged in the galleries.
The lead supporter is the designer Kim Jones, vice president of the Charleston Trust.