A small black-and-white reproduction of Duncan Grant’s 1917 portrait of Vanessa Bell, hangs alongside Mark Lancaster’s paintings in this show. Lancaster has used the portrait—which he owns—as the basis for a series of paintings, plus some drawings and watercolors, called, simply, “Vanessa Bell.”
Lancaster clearly knows Grant’s painting well, and his series is almost a textbook instance of “abstracting from” a subject—a step-by-step sequence of excercises in transcription, variations on a theme. Although Lancaster runs Vanessa Bell through a number of stylistic shifts, certain elements remain constant: a two by three foot, three-quarter portrait format, pink flesh, a red dress, and a consistency of touch.
Vanessa Bell I shows the subject almost intact, but pinned down by a grid (this is the classic art school maneuver in starting a transcription) which slots her in a series of boxes, each reading like a self-contained phrase. There’s a nice tension-in the way the figure seems almost to break out. Number IV is something like Jasper Johns out of Cézanne—angled Vs and canted Ws, meshed vectors defining clashing planes (the marks at once forming a surface rhythm and the fabric of space). Number VII has a sweet blue border decorated with white loop-the-loops scratched through to the ground be-neath. Here the figure has been abbreviated to an upright lozenge, the arms and hands casually painted—perhaps a reference to Vanessa Bell’s own work, or to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop decorations.
Although every move is rooted in Grant’s painting, Lancaster’s work seems willfully mannered, and a bit academic.
The ease with which they’ve been painted, the minimal overpainting, the direct touch and pleasing color, make these paintings all too easy to pass by. If it weren’t Vanessa Bell, would we care? Accompanying the “Bell” series, there’s a large triptych, Charleston, and a sequence of three paintings called “The Diary of Virginia Woolf,” each painting a “volume” of her diary.
I reach for a copy of Quentin Bell’s book on Bloomsbury, but decide against it. What is Lancaster doing here? His “Diary,” and Charleston tell us nothing. Charleston is a painting of nowhere-in-particular (unless I’m too unfamiliar with the Bloomsbury iconography to recognize the specific setting). A trio of primary-colored oblongs, areas of loose brushwork, circles (heads, perhaps, bobbing in conversation), and bits of lattice, are pleasant enough to wander through. But it isn’t Charleston, overdecorated and bizarrely peopled as it was, deep in the English countryside. Likewise all three volumes of the “Diary” with their parallel inventory of forms, are hardly The Diary Of A Writer—just more bobbing circles and fragments of what might constitute interior space (the rooms of her “inner circle”?). These works are scarcely more than run-of-the-mill (and somewhat outdated) loose, geometric color paintings, linked tenuously to Bloomsbury by labels.
—Adrian Searle
