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

I think really because I haven’t got my Zgr to bite them all in the calf as of yore – I do so need someone to chat them up … I am certain the show would not only be a sell-out but give me some consolation before I die for all the years of frustration.8

She wondered if Nesta might help find a suitable room in a grand private house where she might show her pictures. She thought this would be away from ‘the scrabble of normal exhibition stomping grounds’ and ‘almost Garboish’.

Nesta did not come up with anything specific, so Gluck went again to The Fine Art Society in 1972. ‘As my last show was here in 1937, I think it is time we considered another’, she told the gallery directors, Andrew McIntosh Patrick and Tony Carroll: They got out photographic records of her exhibitions in the 1930s and went down to the Chantry House for Sunday lunch on 14 May 1972. They saw that Gluck had managed to reacquire much of her best work and they offered her an exhibition then and there. They thought ‘The Dying of the Light’ a stunning picture.

For Gluck this was her resurrection, and the happiness of her declining years. She called the directors ‘the boys’. They took her from the obscurity into which she had allowed herself to fade. ‘This’, she told them, ‘will after all be my last one-man show and I would like to go out with a bang!’9 Though she plagued them with her obsessions and demands, preparations for the exhibition, which was to be held in May 1973, were exciting and happy. The two men treated her with straightforwardness and affection. ‘Very respectful reception’, she noted of her next meeting with them in June, ‘lunch in Andrew’s flat 12–3.15.’ Her brother Louis, delighted at this renaissance, arranged for cars to chauffeur her to and fro from Steyning to London and his children and grandchildren convened for a celebratory dinner at his house.

In June 1972 Gluck and Edith, who was getting ever more frail, spent three weeks in Switzerland as Nesta’s guests. On her return to Steyning, Edith began evincing signs of extreme forgetfulness and confusion, and increasing loss of motor control. On a walk with Miss Vye her legs gave way and from then on she had to rely on a walking frame. It was difficult for Gluck too. She wanted to produce more pictures for her show and to involve herself in all preparations for it, but she could not put such acute domestic problems from her mind. Her anxiety and preoccupations made her, if anything, even more short-tempered with Edith. She finished a painting of a spray of myrtle and a shell, but it seemed to have no special significance, beyond the fact of buds bursting to reveal strange effervescent flowers. She was devastated when Tony Carroll did not want to include it in the show. Diplomatically, he told her she must keep some back for her next exhibition.

In November 1972, preparations began in earnest for the show the following Spring. Nesta called at The Fine Art Society, impressed them with her charm, told them she was ‘whirling with contacts’ and began putting the word about to her numerous influential friends. Gluck signed all pictures in her possession, advertised in The Times and The Telegraph to trace the whereabouts of those sold long ago, negotiated with a framemaker, worried about the lettering of the flag to be hung outside the gallery, the quality of photography in the catalogue, the design of the room, the publicity, and whether champagne or sparkling wine would be drunk at the party. She allowed no one to get on with their job without intervention from her.

She could not bring herself to say that ‘The Dying of the Light’ was finished, and she went on and on working at it. Worry took its toll and on a day in December, ten days before Christmas, when a batch of frames arrived all marginally the wrong size, when she felt ‘hysterically overtired and strained’ and the water tanks overflowed in the roof, she had a heart attack and was carried up to bed in a chair. Fearful of alarming ‘the boys’, she phoned and told them she felt ‘as bright as a button’. She phoned David Tonkinson, too, and added a codicil to her Will asking for the exhibition to go ahead even if she died. Christmas – upon which, as with all feast days and holidays, Gluck set great store – was ‘rather grim’ that year. Edith and Miss Vye went to neighbours and Gluck stayed at home alone.

As the deadline drew near, Gluck became impossible. She drove ‘the boys’ to distraction. Publicity, she felt, was inadequate, the walls of the gallery and her frames were not going to match, the wrong picture was to be on the catalogue cover, some of her best pictures were not being given a showing, everything was under-insured, the exhibition was not running long enough, important decisions were being made without proper consultation with her, the invitation cards were too big for their envelopes. ‘Go to London with Nesta. Go to gallery and make mayhem,’ she noted on 26 March.

‘Dear Gluck,’ Andrew McIntosh Patrick wrote to her (9 April 1973),

time is getting short and we feel that the arrangements we have made with great care and professional judgement must not be confused at this stage. I would be much relieved to hear from you that you will leave it to us to look after our part of the arrangement – that is to handle promotion etc. – and you continue to paint your beautiful pictures. We have already talked about a second exhibition but quite honestly if we feel we do not have your confidence and consideration and if our way of working distresses you so frequently the whole matter becomes much too difficult.

With the fondest and most respectful greetings – and to Miss Heald …

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