Gluck by Diana Souhami (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

an Italian restaurant where they could eat spaghetti. ‘She is an enigma to me,’ said the Meteor. ‘I live in the hope of an awakening some day, but till then must suffer in silence.… I don’t worry any more. It is useless.’16

The income accorded Gluck by her father meant she could do as she pleased. Living in Lamorna was cheap. Few of the artists there had any money. She subsidized the small income Craig earned from illustrating. As well as their Finchley Road flat Gluck rented two rooms in Earls Court as her London studio. She decorated the place herself. One room she painted black, with a white ceiling:

black plain walls, black board floor and ivory coloured woodwork – the chairs and tables are black … the effect is topping and not at all funereal. In fact it is a most cheery little room … I got smothered in black paint and enamel and looked a sketch.17

This was to be her workplace, and in it she kept only the picture she was working on. The other room she painted white, used for ‘entertaining’ and storing pictures and hung a ‘beautiful, old rare Japanese print’ on the wall.

With this freedom of town and country living, of parental support if not approval, of declared ambition and sexual preference, she proceeded to work hard and well. Within a few years she had enough good work for two ‘one-man shows’ at London galleries. The first at the Dorien Leigh Gallery in South Kensington in 1924, the second, in 1926, at The Fine Art Society in Bond Street, where all her subsequent exhibitions were held.

The first picture she did in her all-black studio was of the view from the window – a huddle of roof tops and chimneys, a leaden sky and a scattering of raindrops on the window. It was reproduced in The Studio in 1924. Commissions came in for portraits. One of her earliest and best portraits was of ‘Bettina’, a South American model who was to marry the sculptor Eric Schilksy. After a tragic love affair she killed herself in 1944. In a glancing moment, in Gluck’s picture of her, Bettina adjusts her hat, but the vase-like beauty of her profile is permanent.

Similar to ‘Bettina’ but more stylized and provocative, was ‘Lady in Mask’ in silvers and greys, with textures of chiffon, velvet and silk and flesh like pale pink marble. It caused a stir when reproduced on the cover of Drawing and Design in October 1924. It embodied the sophisticated gaiety of the 1920s – the party days which Evelyn Waugh mocked in Vile Bodies:

Masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as someone else and almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night-clubs, in windmills and swimming baths.18

And it showed Gluck’s fascination with sophisticated women who were glamorous and remote.

She did a small, finely-detailed portrait of Craig, in cool colours, sad-eyed and huddled into her fur collar and a bright portrait of Nancy Morris, sister of the artist Cedric Morris, swathed in an orange scarf, her hair bobbed short, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder. She painted the actress Teddie Gerrard – notorious for her fast living, backless dresses and high-born lovers – looking demure and girlish in a white-collared frock. She did an exuberant picture, ‘Flora’s Cloak’, of a naked girl jumping astride the world with hair flying and wings of flowers. She painted a friend with feverish eyes dying of tuberculosis; a girl in a hat of shimmering green feathers and the artistic young men she met at the Café Royal.

She dashed off these portraits with virtuoso freshness, confident that she was revealing the quintessential self of her sitters:

All men’s gestures are self-revealing.… In some lightning split second you will see the complete revelation of the person in their pose.… You should be aware of this as the spiritually dominating factor from which nothing in your subsequent handling should distract.… This vision must pass through the crucible of your spirit.… This emotion is on a wave length that you must be able to tune in to at will … essential characteristics must be assimilated to such a concentrated degree that no accidental change of light or mood can shake you.… This Divine Blindness is your holy of holies which nothing else must enter, however seductive. Do not try and see everything, only put down that which is essential to the realisation of the essence of your sitter.

Once you have placed all this in a large way on your canvas, you can then attend to all the superimposed details which enhance your original vision and give it more depth of characterisation. For instance you might feel that the hands of your sitter were a complement to point the head or a contradiction to give the depth of duality …19

Gluck’s exhibition at the Dorien Leigh Gallery opened on 14 October 1924. There were fifty-seven pictures in it. ‘The new and much-discussed artist, Gluck,’ said The Sketch,

wears her hair brushed back from her forehead just like a boy and when in Cornwall goes about in shorts. At her show at the Dorien Leigh Galleries she had a long black cloak covering a masculine attire and was busy shaking hands with her left hand, for she had hurt one of her fingers on the other and wore her arm in a sling …

Drawing and Design ran two consecutive features on her, declared ‘… we believe Gluck has a great future’ and wrote of the exceptional originality of her work. High praise came in a letter (30 October 1924) from her friend, Prudence Maufe, an interior designer married to the architect Edward Maufe who designed Gluck’s studio when later she moved to Hampstead:

… here at last is serious and beautiful painting with so many qualities of rightness about it as to fill me with a supreme sense