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

It was all something of a muddle – romantic dreams but domestic discord and unhappiness, high ambitions but the dry campaign for better paints, the pain of old wounds, the advancing years, past glory all but forgotten and a sense of self-betrayal so acute as to make her ill. She wrote a bitter little poem about Nesta’s freedom and called it Zgr – her pet name for her:

              Zgr

She gives everyone the slip

Stealing away silently into the black night

Steering by well-remembered stars

Round the treacherous coast

of life.

But however known the coast

The terrors lie beneath

And the stars remain aloof.

Nesta did not many again, even if her suitor did own most of Honolulu. Nor did she withdraw her loyalty to, and affection for Gluck. A few months prior to these rumours, of what Gluck regarded as betrayal, Nesta wrote (14 July 1959):

Darling Tim

I have talked to you so much and so long lately that I woke with a start in the middle of the night and realised that perhaps after all I had not put any of it down on paper … I so hope you had a bit of a good Xmas … I had a lovely one at the Ranch and saw again a Lunar Rainbow one night. Mother of Pearl with violet and faintly touching both ends. I long for you on those occasions and think of you intensely. In fact you have no idea how just thinking of you helps me when I feel frustrated, contemptuous of myself, lonely – or a mixture of all three. I don’t know why exactly, but it’s true and rather interesting. Have you read Dr Zhivago yet?… it is his thoughts on art and life and descriptions of moon on snow and how it glazes a goblet of wine.… There are many places which I just long to read aloud to you so that we can glut over them together. It strikes sparks deep down under the solar plexus.

While Gluck stifled, Nesta was flying high. She adapted stylishly to rich widowhood. Her exotic travels, works for charity, and artistic and sporting successes, were written about in the Honolulu papers. She made such headlines as ‘Englishwoman claims title of oldest surfer at Waikiki’. Rear Admirals, pickle farmers, industrialists, Princesses, musicians, artists, beachboys, film producers, Lords, Dukes and Marchionesses gathered at her parties. She served them caviare and hamburgers. Profits from sales of her paintings went to the blind. She recorded readings for libraries for the blind, made endowments for painting and music scholarships and gave money to striving artists. Dismissive of her own abilities, she tried to help others to achieve. She confided to Gluck that she felt she had never dug deep enough within herself to find out where her own abilities lay.

She was uninterested in Gluck’s paint battle. She urged her to end the fight and get back to Art. Nor did Gluck stop work entirely from 1953 to 1967. But she slowed right down, painted in an unfocused way and some of what she produced was poor.

In October 1954, Edith cut from her rose garden, and put in the drawing room, a single bloom of a white, Frau Karl Drushki rose. The next day Gluck began painting on a panel the face of the rose, snipped at the stem, with a cool grey background. She called it ‘Portrait of Frau Karl’. She worked for a fortnight before complaining that the background would not dry and then again getting absorbed in her campaign.

For thirteen years, on and off from 1955 to 1968, she painted a dish of fruit, walnuts and leaves with ‘autumn tinged vine leaves’ from Gatewick. She intended it as an academic study of the quality of paint, but it became a study of a painter’s block.

Red apple tacky. Woodworm powder falls on it, but can be picked off. Work at grapes.

The most terrible scene of all. E. then goes to have a perm. I am left more dead than alive. After lunch manage to work at Group. Pear and green apple and plum.

Work til dark at foreground. Great bothers with it. Lemon yellow used first time, made freshly by Newman.

Truly horrible scenes. Shattered for day. Cannot settle to anything.

In August 1957 she accepted another commission to paint a judge, this time a relative, her second cousin Sir Cyril Salmon. A year later he made the headlines as the ‘Notting Hill Race Riots Judge’. He sentenced each of nine white youths to four years’ imprisonment for racial assaults and there was a furore at the severity of the sentences: ‘Everyone,’ he told the accused, ‘irrespective of the colour of their skins, is entitled to walk through our streets in peace, with their heads erect, and free from fear. That is a right which these courts will always unfailingly uphold.’11

He said he could afford only half the fee Gluck proposed of 500 guineas. She visited him at the Royal College of Justice and they agreed he should sit in his blue summer robes. Gluck then had an attack of pneumonia and could not work. ‘I feel very ill and breathing difficult and painful. Thought I’d reached the end.’ She painted him dwarfed by heraldic trappings, taking up only a third of the total space, which made him disgruntled. ‘This is most disturbing for me’, Gluck noted in her diary.

Portrait of the Rt Hon. Justice Lord Salmon, 1960

She put in months of work on all the heraldry. For someone disgusted with paint, it is an extremely painterly piece, crammed with detail, from the worn edges of legal documents, to the strings on the lyre, or the cameo on the signet ring. She wanted to avoid the clichés of scarlet and ermine, so used brilliant blues, reds and golds, with touches of green and cyclamen. She shows the chains, red claws and bared teeth of justice, the faces of the lions and the unicorn enraged and cold. She spent a day on the blue cover of