Virginia Woolf: Art, Life & Vision

‘Words are an impure medium… better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint.’ – Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf: Art, Life & Vision is the first exhibition exploring the life and achievements of Virginia Woolf as a novelist, intellectual, campaigner and public figure through portraiture by her Bloomsbury Group contemporaries Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry and photographs by Beresford and Man Ray, as well as intimate images recording her time spent with friends and family.

This intimate show features more than 100 works, including paintings, photographs, drawings, Woolf’s early life and literary achievements, alongside lesser known aspects of her time in London and political views, diaries, books and rare archive material such as the letter, being loaned by the British Library, that Woolf wrote to her sister before her suicide aged 59 in 1941.

“Virginia Woolf was one of Britain’s most important writers and thinkers, who played a pivotal role at the heart of modernism in the early 20th century.” – Sandy Nairne
(NPG Director)

Woolf was one of the most important and celebrated writers of the twentieth century and she definitely deserved a show like this one, curated with care by biographer and art historian Professor Frances Spalding.

Here’s an audio tour featuring the key themes and objects in the display:

The exhibition begins with a devastating photograph of the Woolfs’ house at 52 Tavistock Square after it was hit by a bomb in October 1940. The building appears split in half and the fireplace in the upper-floor sitting room is visible from the street, with a painting still hanging above it. Shambles of a lifetime that Woolf described like this in her diary: “…rubble where I wrote so many books. Open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties…”

Through the display, first editions of Woolf’s novels with cover designs by Bell, letters and diary entries can be found alongside a certain item that specially captures all visitors attention… The walking stick that she left on the bank of the River Ouse, alerting her husband, Leonard, to the way that she had killed herself on 28 March 1941, when she put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the river near her home, and drowned herself.

The final section features Woolf’s meeting with Sigmund Freud, who gave her a symbolic narcissus; Man Ray’s work, who photographed her magically in the studio he shared with McKight Kauffer at the Lund Humphries; and the most moving portraits, which are the only colour photographs of Woolf known to exist, taken shortly before the outbreak of war by the last photographer to have access to Virginia, the perceptive German refugee Gisèle Freund.

Here’s the suicide note she left to her husband:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.

‘Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision’ is at the National Portrait Gallery until October 26. A late shift gallery tour is available on August 28th.