Gluck
Page 22
Gluck did not see that, spam or no, her mother was at least eating it, whereas all the smoked salmon in the Cumberland had not tempted her. She internalized her mother’s anguish and made it her own. She saw her as a victim of a vile injustice perpetrated by wrongdoers. The scribbling on the bed linen was Gluck’s evidence of crime. She insisted that her mother’s mind was clear: ‘Not once did she say anything but wonderful and truly noble things.’ This was the Meteor, whom she thought beautiful and remote, from whom she got her idealized view of women and who should have been a great opera singer. It was intolerable to Gluck to see her mother stripped of all status and so reduced. She could not accept what a leveller such illness is:
I have had sleepless nights for two months now and I can’t go on … You I am sure have done what you thought was for the best, under advice and pressure. That you have suffered much I have no doubt, but dearest Luigi do realise that for us to have done this together would have been easier and safer. No one can know her as we do. The present state of affairs is shameful and I certainly cannot let it continue. Let us meet in amity and without anything to distract us from the one purpose – to see that Mother is safe and allowed some sort of comfort and peace at the end.
I am too upset to write any more
My love to you …7
In the same post Louis got a letter from Dr Solomons reiterating his clinical opinion about his mother – that she was physically much better, but mentally as confused and disorientated. He had found her conversation incessant, rambling and tangential. At one moment she said she had gone there for a rest and was well, and eating well, the next that she was in prison. She thought she had been in Court ten days recently, that Solomons was a well-known barrister and Dr Gilmour, whom she saw every day, his junior.
He reiterated that her condition was irreversible, that she would have to be ‘kept in some suitable place’, but that this did not have to be Moorcroft. And he again urged Louis and Gluck to come and see him ‘… while doing the right thing for your mother I want both you and her to feel that I can carry you both with me in any course of action.’8
Louis wrote formally to Gluck (10 May 1950), whom he was totally unprepared to meet except in the presence of a disinterested professional. He sent her a copy of Dr Solomons’ letter, asked her to suggest a date for a meeting and to send, before then, ‘any positive suggestions or definite proposals for dealing with this very difficult problem, so that I may have time to consider them’.
Gluck wrote back that she must see Louis alone before any meeting with Dr Solomons. Louis ignored this request and made an appointment, which he asked Gluck to confirm, for them both to see the doctor.
13th May 1950
My dear Luigi
… Perhaps my letter was not clear, but it is essential that I see you alone before I see you with Dr Solomons, so will you let me know when I can do this, preferably on Wednesday or Thursday. I have to be at Victoria by 5 pm in order to catch my return train here. At the moment I cannot stay the night in London, so perhaps you could give me some time in the morning or early afternoon, and at 199 Piccadilly. We could then also arrange another appointment with Dr Solomons
With my love
Hig
15th May 1950
My dear Hig
Your letter of the 11th was quite clear. Until we have seen Dr Solomons together I do not propose to see you alone.
As apparently you cannot keep the appointment with him on Thursday at 4.20 I am cancelling it.
When you are prepared to agree a joint interview with Dr Solomons and let me know convenient dates and times I will arrange another appointment with him.
Yours ever
Luigi
17th May 1950
My dear Luigi
… Not only have you ignored everything I told you in my letter of May 5th, but now you refuse my entirely reasonable request to see you alone before I meet you with Dr Solomons …
I had asked to see you as my only concern is to make things better for Mother and if possible prevent you from making an irretrievable mistake.
… Your overriding desire only to see me with Dr Solomons is a little belated. It would surely have been better if this meeting, to which I have twice agreed, had taken place before you carried out your plans for Mother, of which, with ample opportunity, you gave me not the slightest hint.
… I had indicated in my letter that she was in danger in circumstances I would explain to you privately. You have chosen to ignore this, as also the evidence of something I found in her room, preferring to try to force me to speak on matters intimate to us both in front of a third person …
Should you reconsider your decision I should still be glad to meet you, otherwise I must hold you responsible for everything that has happened, is happening, and is likely to happen to Mother
My love to you,
Hig
The ‘evidence’ she wished to show him was the bit of sheet with the Meteor’s sad writing on it, which now seemed as significant to Gluck as did Desdemona’s handkerchief to Othello. No meeting took place either with or without the doctor, as neither brother nor sister gave way. Edith had been in hospital for a fortnight for a minor operation. Between visits to her, Gluck worked at her Rose picture and prepared a list of complaints, for the Board of Control, about her mother’s treatment at Moorcroft. ‘Work at Roses, very tired and worried … Paint a little but worried and unhappy.’ Arrangements were made to move the Meteor to another nursing home, ‘The Priory’ in Roehampton. Gluck heard of this ‘from official sources’, so went to check the place out, with her mother’s car and chauffeur, and wrote again to her brother:
May 22nd 1950
My dear Luigi
I understand from official sources that Mother is to be transferred to ‘Priory’, Roehampton
I am most anxious that this should be done with as little distress to her as possible – avoiding at all costs any associations with her unhappy arrival at Moorcroft.
We should both be with her on the journey and see her in.
Will you therefore let me know what day and time Mother will be leaving Moorcroft for Roehampton so that I can arrange to be with her.
Yours ever,
Hig
24th May 1950
My dear Hig
Mother’s transfer to the Priory is under consideration by the Board of Control. As soon as I receive the official permission for her removal I shall let you know the day on which it is to be carried out.
We shall have to be guided by our medical advisers as to the manner in which the journey from Uxbridge to Roehampton is to be made and as to who should be with Mother during that journey. You, as much as I, will have to conform to that advice and guidance.
Yours ever
Luigi
He had already asked for a nurse to accompany their mother, and had arranged about a car. He would not deal with ‘this very difficult problem’ on Gluck’s terms, nor would either compromise one jot to spare the other’s feelings. Gluck appealed to her cousin Julia to intercede, but there was little she could do:
I have tried to convey to you both that I consider you both have your mother’s wellbeing at heart and that it would be much better if you could work together, but my dear I cannot make this happen if you and Louis do not. Being of my father’s cast of mind I am unable ever to believe that anybody is always right or always wrong, but as I said on the telephone, I cannot do more in this problem of relationship which rests with you both. Any practical help I can give in helping to make Aunt Frances comfortable I am more than anxious to give …9
On Friday 26 May, Gluck was told that the transfer to the ‘Priory’ would take place the next day. She got there before her mother, who arrived at eleven in the morning. ‘L. arrives 12 – I leave 12.45 L. having rushed out before. Lunch Grosvenor Hotel. Catch 2.18 home. Terrible day.’ she wrote in her diary.
Gluck pursued her complaints of ill treatment and negligence of her mother at Moorcroft with the Bo
ard of Control, but they found no justification for them. Rather the reverse, they thought she had been carefully looked after and that her physical health had improved while she was there. Louis was appointed Receiver of his mother’s Estate. Gluck sent her mother’s chauffeur, Peter Smith, £15. ‘I only done my best to someone I liked to serve’, he said in his letter of thanks (19 August 1950), ‘it is all very sad to think such a wonderfull woman will end her days as she will.’
The choice of the ‘Priory’ proved pacific, and the Meteor stayed there, in her twilight world, until her death, eight years later, on 17 May 1958. Gluck arranged for a nurse to phone twice a week with news of her mother whom she visited each month for an hour or so. But all true communication between them was now gone. Gone too was the chance of rapprochement with Louis. The ‘problem of relationship’ by now was deep. At pains to strike a wedge between herself and her family when young, time added savagely to the rift. She made a Will, the first of many, excluding mention of him from it. As the years passed they managed a sort of truce and cautious displays of affection. The day came, a decade later, when he offered her a cigar with her coffee and brandy after dining with her at the Trocadero – a gesture that she noted in her diary. Nor did the sense of quarrel extend to his children, with whom she was on fond terms.
But at the time it was all too much – another rift, another trauma. She could not have tried harder, in the name of love, for Nesta and that had gone. She had caused, however inadvertently, an irreconcilable split between the Heald sisters. Her mother had sunk into madness and her brother had turned away. It all affected her confidence and her ability to work. She was in a deep sense lonely. The élan, the sparkle, the sense of a charmed life were all swept away. Life was suddenly hard and unkind. She turned again and again to the painting of roses which she could not finish. The Maufes, Osbert Lancaster, Molly Mount Temple, Alfred Munnings, Ernest Thesiger – many of her friends from the old days went to see her portrait of Sir Raymond Evershed, The Master of the Rolls, at a private showing at the Bourlet Rooms. It was a bit of a splash, but not an exhibition. ‘It would have been better’, she wrote bitterly, ‘if I had not had such an unequal struggle with my materials … I am not doing any more until I can work without frustration.’10
Her sense of so many personal injustices now merged with the sense that her paints too had betrayed her and she began her grand campaign against the colourmen. She called it her battle, fought it with anger, obsession and a great deal of personal sacrifice, put into it pains, fears and spoiled hopes that truly belonged elsewhere and turned it into a crusade.
SEVENTEEN
THE PAINT WAR
What stopped me from painting was not the thought that my paintings were going to fall to pieces, but because I could not produce the effect I wanted with my materials. I could not say what I wanted, I was made to stutter and that is no good. It was as if, being known for your good calligraphy, you find yourself with only a crossed nib with which to write.1
It was not only poor quality materials that stopped Gluck painting for more than a decade. A conflation of troubles – the end of her romantic hopes following the break with Nesta, the Meteor’s tragic illness, the social upheaval of the war, the decline of interest in realistic painting in the postwar years, the selling of her London home, her unhappiness at Steyning – all made her turn against the materials which were her means of self-expression. The creative block she suffered for a decade, from the mid-fifties on, had as much to do with loss of confidence and direction as with the quality of paint.
None the less her sense of being thwarted by her paints and canvases dated back to 1937 with ‘Lords and Ladies’, a picture of lilies. She wrote then of her problems to Nesta (January 1937):
I feel very sad about this canvas – To have waited so long to paint this picture, two years at least, and then have this … apart from horrible graining in the canvas, the paint sinks in and becomes what is known as ‘dead’… and any subtle differences just get lost in a dim blur – it means many repaintings to try and get rid of it …
And in 1939, when staying at Chillington Hall to paint Diana Giffard’s portrait, she wrote to the Meteor in some despair (11 December 1939):
I cannot tell you what a frightful time I have had struggling with this abominable canvas, it has all taken at least four times as long, and I have poured good work into it and it seems all in vain. That’s one of the things I have got to settle when I get to London as I can’t go on like this any longer.
By the 1950s she was criticizing the consistency of oil paints too. She found they showed a ‘greasy turbidity’, which she called the ‘suede effect’ whereby according to the direction of brush strokes she got a change of tone and colour. She maintained this was caused by mixing machine-ground, rather than hand-ground paint pigments with hot-pressed linseed oil – where the linseed is heated prior to crushing to extract a greater yield of oil from it. And she found certain colours were still tacky on the canvas weeks or even months after being applied. ‘My paints now disgust me,’ she wrote, ‘they are soapy to use, and when to prove this I squeezed them out on my palette for an eminent paint chemist’s opinion, he shuddered and said ‘They look slimy – like slugs.’2 After battling on and off for two years to produce her indifferent portrait of Sir Reginald CroomJohnson, in 1953 she downed her brushes and for more than a decade fought to ensure that the quality of paints and canvases be improved.
In her fight for better artists’ materials, Gluck saw herself as following in the shoes of Holman Hunt and George Frederic Watts who had, in the midnineteenth century, made public similar concerns. She thought it wrong that guaranteed materials were nowhere to be found at any price. The old masters had had apprentices to grind their paints and prepare their canvases. ‘As it is impossible to put the clock back and reproduce what Giotto did, would it not be as well to see that the serious student and artist could obtain guaranteed materials if he is honest enough to want them?’3 She saw ominous ramifications in terms of short life-span for modern paintings without such guarantees.
Gluck wanted five assurances from the Board of Trade and the colourmen:
1. That the ingredients of guaranteed paints should conform to a standard, clearly labelled specification.
2. That paints should bear the date of manufacture and shelf life.
3. That guaranteed matured canvas should be made available with some mark to distinguish it.
4. That a standard reliable priming for canvases should be specified and adhered to.
5. That the government should provide facilities for the colourmen to import best quality raw materials for the manufacture of artists’ materials.
From 1913 to 1936 she had used James Newman’s tubes of hand-ground oil paints which she maintained were completely reliable and free from the ‘suede effect’. After the demise of Newman’s firm she had trouble from the paints of the four leading artists’ colourmen: Winsor & Newton, Robersons, Rowney, and Reeves. These firms had joined together as the British Artists’ Colour Manufacturers’ Association.
She intended to write a book on the turbulent history of artists’ relationship to the colourmen. It was to be called Pandora’s Paintbox: Paints, Portents and Posterity. She went deep into the history of artists’ materials, from the time, up to the late-seventeeth century, when artists supervised the grinding of their own colours in their workshops, through to the development of commercial suppliers. She believed that the main troubles stemmed from the nineteenth century when diverse colourmen sold their wares, and names of paints did not mean the same thing from one colourman to another. ‘The quality and quantity of pigment in powder, cake or tube, was as unregulated as the identity and proportion of meat in a sausage before the Lord Chief Justice’s recent apportionment for this particular bag of mystery.’4 Despite the efforts of nineteenth-century artists like Holman Hunt and Watts to get a standard to which paints must conform, she thought the situation had gone from bad to worse. ‘For nearly one hundred
and fifty years … we have had secret concoctions of traditional materials; from now on we are to face an even greater menace, secrecy over unknown materials.’5 She maintained that present-day manufacturers used all manner of unspecified, unsuitable and harmful chemicals and additives in order to increase and speed up production, reduce costs and prolong the shelf-life of tubes of paint.
Though Gluck got no further with her book than a two-page synopsis, she generated a library of correspondence with the colourmen, The British Standards Institution, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Colour Manufacturers Association, the British Museum, the Courtauld Institute, the Imperial Arts League, the International Institute for the Conservation of Museums, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Works, the Museums Association, the National Gallery, the Oil and Colour Chemists’ Association, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal College of Art, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Institute of Oilpainters, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Slade School of Fine Art, and the Society of Women Artists. She lectured and published articles including ‘The Impermanence of Paintings in Relation to Artists’ Materials’, ‘The Dilemma of the Painter and Conservator in the Synthetic Age’ and ‘On the Quality of Paint’. For a decade she spent a third of her annual income on the whole campaign. She broadcast, appeared on television, wrote to the papers, artists, politicians, directors of galleries, the Queen and almost everyone else as well. Nesta took up the cause in Honolulu:
Sir Colin Anderson came through here the other day, who is another director of the Tate Gallery [sic]. I asked him whether he knew you and he immediately said ‘Oh – that woman who is making everyone’s life hell over trying to get a paint standard?’ I said, ‘But don’t you think there should be a paint standard?’ ‘Undoubtedly,’ he said. ‘Then don’t you agree that she is doing a remarkably fine job, giving up her own work to get this through?’ He said, ‘Oh yes, I admit it’s necessary, but I don’t see why she should set everybody by the ears in the process.’ I said, ‘As far as I can remember that is exactly what Christ did, and it’s apparently the only way as long as mankind remains in the lethargy it’s in now.’