A flaccid roam through Bloomsbury’s desperately mediocre modernists: Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant review

Tate Britain, London
Trying to present these two as pioneers of British art is fruitless: their lives, sexualities and the Picasso and Cézanne paintings in their home were more exciting than what’s here

The Bloomsbury Group once induced yawns as the smug epitome of a snobbish high culture but they’re now admired for their feminism and queer abandon. There’s a West End play about the loves of the Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes and if you visit the National Trust’s Sissinghurst, its flowerbeds are set alight by Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Virginia Woolf.

But biography can’t set art alight, as Tate Britain’s epic yet flaccid roam through the complicated lives and desperately mediocre paintings of the co-habiting Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant proves. While Keynes was quite the economist and Woolf a literary genius, I honestly can’t see enough interest in the visual art of Bloomsbury to detain anyone for long. That was true when their sex lives were spoken of in a more muted way (I read a biography of Keynes as a student and don’t remember any hanky-panky at all) and it’s true now, even as we trawl their paintings for gay and feminist meanings.