Hannah Gluckstein, the British, Jewish painter, was born in London August 13, 1895, and died January 10, 1978.
EditLife and Career
Although born with the name Hannah Gluckstein she insisted on being called by the gender-free name Gluck. Gluck wore men’s clothes and loved women for all of her adult life.
She was born into a wealthy family who owned the Lyons Coffee House chain. Her father was Joseph Gluckstein. Gluck became a talented musician like her American mother Francesca Halle Gluckstein who was an opera singer. However Gluck left her solid middle-class family at the earliest opportunity.
She attended St Paul’s Girls’ school, and then from 1913 to 1916 she enrolled at the St John’s Wood School of Art in London. In fact she had had no interest in art and had enrolled at the art school perhaps just to have someting to do. However, she saw the painting of the violinist Joachim by John Singer Sargent in the artists’ room of the Wigmore Hall, and she was so taken by the work that she was then determined to paint. She spent some weeks near the artists’ colony in Newlyn, Cornwall, England, where she was encouraged by other artists including Alfred Munnings, Dod and Ernest Proctor, Harold and Laura Knight, and Lamorna Birch.
Moving back to London she was given space for a studio by Gordon Selfridge in his famous store in Oxford Street, London. She did instant sketches of customers. She later had a studio in 48 (formerly 30) Tite Street, Chelsea, London, SW3. Her first exhibition was organised by the photographer Emil Otto Hoppé at the Dorien Gallery in 1924. Around 1923-4 Gluck met Romaine Brooks and they painted each other’s portrait. The Fine Arts Society gave Gluck one-artist exhibitions in 1926, 1932, 1937, with a retrospective in 1973, and a memorial exhibition in 1980. For her 1932 exhibition she decorated the gallery as a “Gluck room” with white panelled walls, modern furniture, and flower and vegetable arrangements by Constance Spry. All the paintings were in three-tier, stepped “Gluck” frames which she designed and patented.
The July 1935 issue of
Homes and Gardens featured her home in Hampstead with its display of Gluck’s paintings, collection of seashells, Rockingham and Worcester china, collection of glass walking sticks, against white walls. Her most famous painting is
Medallion which is a portrait of herself with her lover Nesta Obermer. This was used on the Virago edition of
Radclyffe Hall‘s novel
The Well of Loneliness. The painting is also reproduced in back and white in
Emmanuel Cooper, (1994), The Sexual Perspective, page 95. Other lovers of Gluck include the flower arranger and hostess Constance Spry, and the critic and journalist Edith Shackleton Heald (?-1976) with whom she lived for nearly forty years. Gluck spent the later years of her life campaigning for the return of quality artists’ materials. She was awarded a Life Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in 1951. A black and white photograph of Gluck is shown in
Elliman and Roll, (1986), page 71.
EditWork
Self Portrait with Cigarette, 1925, oil on canvas 25.4 x 20 cm (Fine Art Society, London) Portrait of Sir James Crighton-Browne, 1928, (National Portrait Gallery, London) Medallian, c1937, oil on canvas 27.9 x 33 cm (Fine Art Society, London) Self Portrait, 1942, (National Portrait Gallery, London)
EditBibliography
Elliman and Roll, (1986), pages 82-83. Emmanuel Cooper, (1994),The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West Diana Souhami, (1989), “Gluck, 1895-1978: Her Biography”, Rivers Oram Press, ISBN 0044405456 (paperback)