T he 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.

Duncan Grant Self-Portrait c.1920. Photograph: © 2026 Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS

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.…