Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision

by Nadia Connor

In Between the Acts (1941) Virginia Woolf describes her protagonist Isa's vision in a triptych mirror of 'three separate versions' of herself. Woolf uses the image in the mirror - fleeting, relative, unstable - to show us a self divided, disobedient to maxims of coherence or unity.

Unlike a mirror, a portrait seems to fix a moment in time and to preserve it. Its claims are grander, but its purview narrower: the mirror contains life in all its capricious transience, while the portrait is authoritative, stilling the self within a frame.

'Virginia Woolf: Life, Art, Vision' at the National Portrait Gallery is a assemblage of portraits, each one a moment captured, defined; but together, they form a diverse arena of images, collectively communicating the partiality of any single attempt to represent their subject. The exhibition as a whole forms a portrait, but an anti-authoritative one, built out of fragments and glimpses which represent their subject as multiple, fractured, mutable.

Showcasing the varying abilities of different media to reveal aspects of a subject, tonal changes register across drafts, diaries and letters, and neither the trepidation nor the humour apparent in the photographs of Woolf translate into the painted portraits. We read Woolf as well as see her, writing versions of herself in letters to friends and peers, or in novel drafts; we also read her written by others, Lytton Strachey or Leonard Woolf, in letters to or about her. The interior accounts of letters and diaries lie beside exterior images; and Woolf's own take on herself rubs up against the perspectives of others.

There are the Bloomsbury portraits, intimate and subjective, painted by Woolf's closest acquaintances - Woolf looking fin-de-siècle and tired by Duncan Grant, or glamorous and defined by Roger Fry, or faceless and folded into the furniture by sister Vanessa Bell. Around these images are photographs, letters, diary excerpts, drafts of novels, objects owned by Woolf, displayed closely-packed on the walls and in glass-topped cabinets. The effect is of a multi-media family album, casual snaps jostling against painted portraits against jocular notes announcing the Woolfs' engagement (‘Ha ha!’ - to Strachey, mastermind behind the coupling, close friend of Leonard and former fiancé of Virginia.)

On this episode, several perspectives are represented. 'As you said,' writes Strachey to Virginia in 1909, shortly after breaking off their short-lived engagement, 'the important thing is that we like each other, and neither of us can doubt that we do'. Elsewhere, Strachey writes to his brother that he 'realised, the very minute it was happening, that [the engagement] was repulsive to [him].' Leonard Woolf's impassioned love letters of 1912 are also on display, as well as Strachey's letters encouraging Leonard's romantic interest in Virginia. We read, variously, Virginia as inspirer of romantic and sexual love; garnerer of affection and admiration; object of sexual repulsion; and as the foil for an 'amusing and singular' mishap in Strachey's personal narrative.

Elsewhere, in her own words, Woolf negotiates her relationship with friend-peer-rival Katherine Mansfield, writing in 1921: 'I was so delighted to get your letter. It came as I was having my tea alone - a half-spring evening, rather pale, and a branch of mimosa smelling very sweet.' Woolf endears Mansfield to her - writing, later in the letter, that she is 'always thinking of things to say to [Mansfield]' - and there is a an inkling of (perhaps competitive) writerly performance in the scene-setting poeticism. A later, exhausted, matter-of-fact Woolf writes to Vanessa Bell in 1941, days before her suicide: 'I have fought against it, but I can't any longer.' Woolf presents different versions of herself to different women at different moments of her life, and the presence of the letters themselves (so endlessly reprinted), existing in particular, irreproducible relation to the historic moment of their making, gesture to the provisionality of self-making in time.

Photographs provide an counterpoint to the interior accounts of the letters. Youthful family snaps capture Woolf playing cricket, at different ages, with sister Vanessa and brother Adrien; looking fragile following her mother's death in 1895; standing awkwardly beside Gerald Duckworth in a white dress in 1897. The moments preserved in these pictures draw attention to their own arbitrariness; the offhand feel of the family photographs seem to suggest their own typicality, but also the well of undocumented moments and experiences existing around them in time. A later selection of photographs shown on a digital screen taken by Ottoline Morrell in 1926 at a garden party show Woolf in movement, through time, reading, socialising, conveying both physical awkwardness and long-limbed, gawky grace.

Later images by Man Ray and Gisele Freund belie the apparent artlessness of these casual snaps. By Freund, Woolf appears antique and whimsical in an Edwardian-style blouse; by Man Ray she is elegant, modern and iconic. Professional photographic portraits testify to Woolf's success and public status; they also show us the image of Woolf as part of the artistic vision of Freund or Man Ray. Woolf hated posing for all kinds of portraits, writing that it made her feel 'pinned', 'like a piece of whalebone bent', 'foam[ing] with rage'. Conscious of the mediation of depiction, she disliked feeling that her identity was being 'bent' and 'pinned' by someone else.

In To The Lighthouse (1927) Woolf considers the the artist's ability to constitute herself by producing a vision of the world around her. Lily Briscoe, when painting, loses 'consciousness of outer things', but gains generative power, 'her mind ... throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space.' Art enables an individual mind to triumph over blankness; to give shape to a disorderly world. In spite of the difficulty of writing, Woolf was more at home as an artist than as part of the pliable material of the viewed world, interpreted by another.

Nontheless, Lily Briscoe is concious of the illimitable perspectives of the visual world; the impossibility of apprehending it entirely. Of Mrs Ramsay, the subject of her painting, she finds that '[f]ifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get around that one woman with.' It's difficult to say exactly how many eyes and minds go into producing the Woolf rendered by this exhibition. The variety of perspectives and range of media displayed produce a multifarious portrait; and one which draws constant attention to the gaps and absences inherent in the record, to the impossibility of capturing a unified or single self.

Writing in her diary in 1929, Woolf asked: 'Is life very solid or very shifting? ... This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world - this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves.' This exhibition renders both subject and material simultaneously solid and shifting, capturing something of the mirror's mutability through the portrait's fixed fragment of time.