The article ran a picture of a showroom, at the Dorland Hall exhibition of British Industrial Art, designed by Oliver Hill in off-white shades, with a quilted bedspread of oyster coloured dull silk, a large white rug and Gluck’s ‘Chromatic’ the sole picture on the walls.
Constance worked for Royalty, the aristocracy and the merely rich. It was a time of surface formality when daughters ‘came out’ into society with lavish dances and parties, weddings were for the most part once-in-a-lifetime affairs and plenty of women spent five or ten pounds a week on flowers for the house. Sir Francis and Lady Oppenheimer were friends and clients. They bought Gluck’s pictures and their daughter Betsan was sufficiently impressed by Gluck’s white sailcloth trousers to get a pair for herself.
Molly Mount Temple was the grandest and most outrageous of Gluck’s new connections. She was stepmother to Edwina, Countess of Burma, and she lived in Broadlands, the Mountbatten home in Romsey in Hampshire. She would phone Constance’s shop in the morning and order flowers for the dinner table to harmonize with what she intended to wear that night. She was said to be the first woman in London to paint her nails red. Her husband, Wilfrid Ashley, was the first baron, Chairman of the Anti-Socialist League, and Under-Secretary of State for War in 1923. Molly Mount Temple’s town house, Gayfere House in Westminster, designed by Oliver Hill, was an extravagant example of high thirties style. In the bathroom, grey mirror-glass walls reflected a collection of blue opaline glass and vases of white madonna lilies. The floor was black marble, the bath and wash-basin gold, the taps Lalique motor car mascots. The entrance hall to the house had a circular staircase of alternate black and white marble steps. Porcelain cats guarded the door and T’ang figures of demons sat on the radiator cases. The onyx dining table was lit from beneath and drapes of rubberized white material festooned the dining-room walls to deaden noise. Molly Mount Temple had a gavel to bang on the table when her guests got too noisy. Soon Gluck was at the dinner parties too and accepting commissions to paint Broadlands and a portrait of Molly. The Meteor lent her daughter her Rolls Royce and chauffeur so that on her first visit to Broadlands, in October 1932, Gluck arrived in style.
Broadlands, the Palladian mansion which had once housed Palmerston, now boasted a polo practice-ground, a golf-course, three tennis courts, eight hundred acres of shooting and room for twenty guests or so. Gluck chose to paint the portico and the sweep of a lawn. She gives a sense of a great deal of private land beyond. Constance described visiting Broadlands in 1932 with Gluck. When asked by Molly Mount Temple to do the flowers for the dinner table, she was uncertain how to match the splendour of the house:
Fortunately [Gluck] … brought to the matter a technically unbiased mind, her eye was arrested only by what she regarded as intrinsically beautiful … I got a lesson not only in flower decoration but in the emphatic necessity of keeping a mind clear of prejudice or fixed ideas.
Red cabbage leaves were the first contribution, followed by curly kale leaves, but only those which had turned slightly towards a yellowy green. These were arranged in two frills round a large shallow copper pan. Then came velvety begonia leaves, again arranged formally and a ring of white scabious. After that a mound of every lovely colour: verbenas, Phlox decussata, salvia, Bougainvillaea, zinnias, pale flame geraniums, gloxinias, purple carnations and dahlias, mauve, yellow and peach coloured. In the centre were yellow and orange African marigolds, and arranged at intervals the head of the amethyst thistle.… It was really exciting, a thrill of colour, satisfying and lovely to a degree. It took a long time, because it involved lengthy and pleasant discussion about the shape and colour of every flower, but it was a great lesson.7
At the dinner party Gluck first met Nesta Obermer, a society woman of charm and style and the second wife of an elderly, wealthy American, Seymour Obermer, whose play Pigeon Post had thrilled Gluck when she saw it with her parents in 1918.
The clients for whom Constance arranged flowers began to commission flower pictures from Gluck. Lord Vernon, who lived in Sudbury Hall, Derby and according to Who’s Who owned about 3500 acres of the surrounding land, commissioned a painting of lilies as an intrinsic part of the design of his new London home, Vernon House in Carlyle Square. ‘This house in Chelsea, designed by Mr Oliver Hill for Lord Vernon, is a perfect example of the small luxury house that is so much liked to-day,’ wrote The Lady, 2 June 1938. Gluck’s flower piece, in a frame designed and patented by her, was the sole picture in the drawing room. The walls and the picture frame were in weathered sycamore, the floor in walnut, the upholstery in ivory satin and carefully chosen pieces of Blanc de chine porcelain adorned the wall niches. The green of the lily leaves in Gluck’s painting was exactly repeated in the green marble inlay round the fireplace. Lord Vernon paid sixty guineas for the picture and described it as ‘the making of the room’.8
A similar painting of arum lilies followed for Bob Lebus, whose family fortune came from Ercol furniture. He used to go on holiday with Constance and Gluck to Tunisia. Though Gluck felt herself to be in some fundamental way aloof from society, these pictures, for the expensive walls of expensive people, are among her best. Some of their effect (as with Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers) is sexual. Gluck painted the orifices and protuberances of orchids and lilies and while painting described herself as being like a bee – ‘penetrating them for their sweetness’.9 She did a painting, now in the Art Gallery, Brighton, of one of Constance’s favourite plants, the Datura – blooms of unlikely and sinister delicacy on gnarled, twigged stems. The arrangements Gluck painted appeared in Constance’s books and articles on flower decoration. Their influence was mutual.
From 1932 until 1936, the two women spent a great deal of time together. Craig and Sybil Cookson still stayed at Bolton House from time to time and in Paris there was the Austrian painter, Mariette Lydis, the Comtesse de Govonne, whom Gluck painted and met frequently, if fleetingly, in a Paris hotel. Mariette Lydis had travelled in Europe and the States then settled in Paris in 1927. She painted portraits of women (her ‘Woman in White’ was bought by the Museum of Luxembourg), illustrated Colette’s ‘Claudine’ books and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and published a collection of etchings on women criminals and lesbians. Gluck noted that an exhibition of hers was held in New York in 1936 with a feature about it in Harper’s Bazaar. (At some point Gluck destroyed her own painting of Mariette Lydis.)
But most weekends Gluck went to Constance’s Kent home, Park Gate in Chelsfield near Orpington, a red-brick Georgian fruit farm with oast houses and acres of garden. Gluck’s paintings hung on the walls: her picture of a girl as the essence of Spring, ‘Primavera’, nicknamed Interflora by the staff from the shop, over the drawing-room fireplace next to ‘Spiritual’, a study of a negro head. At a party, when talking about painting and light, a friend had remarked to Gluck how impossible it would be to paint a black face against a black background. Gluck advertised in the paper for a black person to model and her picture of him proved this was not true. The title reflected his inner world, the use of light in the painting and the quality of American negro music.
Constance went with Gluck to Lamorna and they visited country gardens and took notes and cuttings. She defended Gluck’s taste for ‘outré clobber’: motoring down to the Letter Studio, they stopped in a tea room and a vicar made disparaging remarks about Gluck and her clothes. Constance followed him into the road to reprimand him for his prejudice. ‘And you a man of the cloth’, she said.10 The two women holidayed together in North Africa and France. Unlike Craig, Constance got on well with the Meteor: ‘I hear that Constance had tea with you and she enjoys seeing you always,’ Gluck wrote to her mother.
Mid-week Constance usually stayed a couple of nights at Bolton House. Gluck recorded their times together as ‘very peaceful and sweet’. Shav Spry had less pacific recollections. Writing in January 1934 to Val Pirie, whom he was to marry after Constance’s death in 1960, he described Gluck as fussy and irritating:
She can’t settl
e down to any sort of normal and peaceful life and I doubt if she ever will … I gather that she is litigating about her piano. Everything with her is a complication and very restless. I am quite fond of Gluck but I do not like being with her for too long. There is something about the atmosphere of Bolton House that is disturbing to me – as she herself disturbs me. There are always problems and mysteries and tribulations and nothing seems to run smoothly for more than a short time. She is abnormal herself – a queer mixture of childishness and astuteness. The truth is I think she has no real inner peace – nothing to hold onto.
What she had to hold on to was her painting. That was where order lay. In the year she met Constance, 1932, she was preparing for another exhibition at The Fine Art Society, in November. In this, and in her subsequent exhibition, five years later, she showed an array of new flower paintings – orchids with grotesque heads, heavy branches of white lilac, a huge skeletal display of dead flowers: old man’s beard, willow herb, poppy heads, lotus seeds, wild oats and love-lies-bleeding – most of them gathered by Molly Mount Temple from the gardens of Broadlands.
Constance also influenced the way Gluck dressed. Unbothered with her own appearance (she looked rather dumpy and ordinary), she took Gluck in hand and true as ever to the thing itself, turned androgyny into high fashion. The South African couturier Victor Stiebel was a friend – he became a director of her company. He made Gluck an austere long black velvet dress with a white tie, Elsa Schiaparelli designed her a deeply-pleated culotte in black chiffon and in Paris Madame Karinska made her a black crêpe evening dress appliquéd in gold.
Constance also introduced Gluck to the delights of North Africa. Her friends the Hensons owned the Villa Hammamet in Tunisia. Jean Henson, a wealthy American had, with his wife Violet, created what Gluck described as a garden like ‘Eden, with cats, dogs, birds and fishes all living together free and with no danger to one another’.11 Each morning Gluck was woken at 5.30 by the peacocks. There was a marble courtyard with a fountain playing, a lotus pool, a dovecote, macaws, parrots, Siamese cats.
In later years she talked of the ‘languor and hysteria’ of Tunisia in the thirties: the stream of visitors who congregated on the terraces, drank iced tea and played halma; the starlit evenings; the sirocco that blew all day and the picnics in the hills.
It is savage, lovely, bare country. Lunch – cold chicken, eggs, white wine, figs and grapes and coffee in the shade of a caroubia tree spreading, with silver-grey low-growing branches and a grey-green leaf.… Flocks of black goats and marvellous looking shepherds passing every now and then, the shepherds shy and accepting with pleasure and eagerness empty Vittel bottles as if they were some rare gift. I rode back – and so home and an immediate plunge into a delicious sea to wash off the dust and sweat. My God I felt good after it. Then iced tea and then people to dinner …12
She described wandering round the souk dressed as an Arab. Schiaparelli stayed and got inspiration from the Bedouin robes in the souks of Nabul, and at the time of the abdication 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 uni
ty 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 Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. It showed ‘articles which combine artistic form with utility and sound workmanship’. Gluck had only given permission to Jacksons of Piccadilly to use her frame, but the exhibition organizer, Mr John de la Valette, thinking it ‘the best frame he had ever seen’, used it extensively – without first asking her. Gluck whisked down to Burlington House but was flattered enough to let matters stand ‘only stipulating that the frames should be acknowledged’.
For The Gluck Room at The Fine Art Society she designed an interior of panelled bays and pilasters which echoed the steps of the frames. All were painted white with three undercoats and one finishing coat. An unfortunate Mr Lawrence of The Display Centre Regent Street got the contract to construct the panelling. He had built window displays and exhibition stands for Constance Spry and it was on her recommendation that Gluck used him. She kept an inventory of his firm’s misdemeanours. They were supposed to arrive on the afternoon of Saturday 29 October to set up the room, but the lorry driver went to a football match so did not turn up until 8.15 in the evening. He had no screws, no dust sheets, the pilasters were still being made, the carpenter was not there and as the lorry was open it had rained all over the panels which had to have an extra coat of paint.
Mr Lawrence had given Gluck a verbal estimate of £100 for the job. As all work for her infinitely exceeded any estimate, he finally sent in a bill for £165 saying in a restrained if disgruntled way that the sum represented no profit for him, that she had shown no appreciation of his efforts and had taken all the credit. She stalled about paying him anything. Edward Maufe and Constance Spry interceded and she got the service, gratis, of a surveyor who inspected the work and Lawrence’s accounts. The surveyor negotiated a compromise whereby Gluck paid £125 and let Lawrence salvage the wood used in the structure after the show was over. Lawrence wrote Gluck a conciliatory letter (19 January 1933) regretting
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