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

there were rumours that the King and Mrs Simpson were to rent a nearby villa. In July 1936, a month after she began the relationship with Nesta Obermer that was to consume her life and divide her from her former friends, including Constance, Gluck went alone and for the last time to the Villa Hammamet on a prearranged trip. She wrote to Nesta:

Today we have a full time. Bathe this morning, then lunch, then siesta … then three of the most marvellous looking Arab women, the daughters of a minister are coming to tea.… They have an incredible maquillage and go unveiled to come here.… They wear the most beautiful modern clothes and all have extraordinary histories, so it will be an exotic afternoon. Not erotic pour moi because that kind of thing is not my cup of tea at all and I only admire it aesthetically … Barbara is after ‘the secrets of the Harem’ as she writes beauty articles …

As soon as they had left I went all Arab myself, put on my snow-white ‘excrementals’ as Jean calls them (my Arab trousers) – they are white and very baggy – a scarlet Neapolitan sash, yellow shirt and green jacket, geranium behind the ear and Hammamet cap. Jean said I looked the most vicious Arab he had ever seen.13

Gluck worked in the afternoons. She wrote of being ‘madly excited by the beauty and subtlety’ of the skin of an Arab boy whose head she painted. ‘He really is delicious – A tiny delicate little head with a sad, far away look in his eyes.… God knows whether I shall get any of it. He can’t speak French and is very tiny and moves a great deal.’ Violet Henson remarked that she would ‘make a fortune if any old queers saw it’.14 Jean Henson helped her arrange in a large shell a group of pomegranates with the flowers still attached:

It is so rare that Jean says people will even question its truth … they are the last blooms so the usual rush is on.… I shall have to finish it in England because the light is so disturbing here and also I am painting in the general living room with a continual va et vient. The flowers are a bright orange-pink-red-indescribably colour and pomegranates as you know are an exquisite shape and colour.15

She began, but did not finish, the head of a Bedouin woman, and a ‘conversation piece’ of a party on the terrace at night. When it was time to go home, always with stopovers in Paris, she travelled with opium pills for seasickness, rolls of canvas, half-finished pictures, pails in which were turtles for the tanks in Bolton House and ‘a particularly fierce kind of fish which breeds babies and not eggs’, most of which died and began to smell before she reached Marseilles:

Our departure from Hammamet was marvellous – rows of weeping servants – cats, dogs, and friends and a car packed to the brim with luggage.… My cabin is on the deck … have just had thé complet. Such noise of sea and people screeching and children tearing about that I have had to put those wax things in my ears to get some sort of quiet … the boats have no keels and sail at an angle of 45°… I discovered just as I was going to bed last night that all but 5 of my fish had died and it took me ¾ hr to take out the stinking corpses and rescue the survivors. The heat and numbers did them in. It was very sad, but there it is and they breed like hell and I think there is one female left.… I shall arrive at Dover like a Christmas tree and looking as if I had been fishing for sticklebacks.16

Though Gluck’s relationship with Constance ended in 1936, her friendship with the Hensons continued until the outbreak of the Second World War. Her exhibitions of 1932 and 1937 record the languor of North Africa, weekends at Broadlands and the cool brilliance of white flowers. The rich and fashionable bought these images for their walls.

SIX

THE GLUCK FRAME

In her exhibitions in the twenties, Gluck simply hung her paintings on the gallery walls. In 1932 she designed the Gluck Frame, of which she was extremely proud. With its use she transformed the main gallery of The Fine Art Society into ‘The Gluck Room’. She achieved an integrated effect of pictures and setting, so the whole interior became hers. She found heavy gold frames out of place in modern rooms and modern designs unsatisfactory.

One day, feeling quite despairing, I took a lump of plasticine and started trying to make something very simple which, if possible, could be part of any wall on which it might be placed, and in doing this I suddenly realised that what has now become the Gluck frame was the only solution.

This consisted of steps, imitating the costly panelled effect for setting pictures in a wall, but steps of such a character that the usual essence of all frames was reversed and instead of the outer edge dominating, it was made to die away into the wall and cease to be a separate feature …1

She became suspicious that frames of similar design were plagiarisms of hers, had the design registered and patented, was assiduous in watching for infringements and employed an antique furniture dealer and restorer, Louis Koch of Cleveland Street as the sole maker.

It was a serious attempt to incorporate paintings into the overall design of an interior. It worked well with decorative pictures like Gluck’s in fashionable rooms which aspired to the kind of unity she liked. After her 1932 show it was used in the two major British Art in Industry exhibitions of the thirties: that of British Industrial Art at Dorland Hall in 1933 and by all the shops at the British Art in Industry Exhibition at Burlington House in 1935. This was organized by the Royal