The nonconformist artist Gluck’s existential struggle to achieve pigmental perfection

It was bad luck that Gluck’s painting, The Devil’s Altar, was sent from Brighton to St Ives before I could see it. Most of Gluck’s paintings are in private collections and I missed the big retrospective of 2017. Given to Brighton Museum before the artist’s death, reproductions of The Devil’s Altar show two downturned white flowers above long, hard, kinked stems. The flowers look as if their necks were broken. The background is purple and dusky, like a Gethsemane scene, against which the two blooms seem like hanged thieves. The curved edge of the pot in which they’re planted looks like the rim of a planet. These are Brugmansia (‘angel’s trumpet’), a member of the nightshade family. In 2022, a woman was treated for blurred vision after pruning the flower. But there is nothing blurred about Gluck’s painting: her lines are crisp, even cold, the white of the flowers is starched.

This painting, together with the other floral paintings Gluck made in the 1930s, is an homage to the Dutch and Flemish still lifes of the 17th century. But they are also continuing a conversation with her lover Constance Spry, a floral artist who designed the bouquet that appears in Chromatic (1932). For an artist who distilled her birth name – Hannah Gluckstein – into a single suave syllable, names can be deceiving. Angel’s Trumpets on the Devil’s Altar. And Chromatic is hardly a riot of colour, offering a withholding, pale palette of white and grey, with cool slivers of green, pink, yellow, and one very cheeky paprika-red stamen. The artist’s self-designed frame – the three-tiered Gluck frame – was white too, helping a painting’s border to ‘die away in the wall and cease to be a separate feature’ (the artist’s words).

Gluck was clearly interested in crossing borders. The artist’s cropped hair, masculine dress, and androgynous name fascinated the newspapers. Boy or Girl? read a 1926 headline about her. Another article was entitled Why She Feels Better in Men’s Clothes, with the writer postulating: ‘Nor could you tell the artist’s sex from the work shown.’ Born Hannah Gluckstein in 1895 to a wealthy Jewish family, Gluck renounced everything about her upbringing except the money she was sent from the family trust. Educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith and St John’s Wood Art School, her finishing school was a loose community of artists in Lamorna, Cornwall, near St. Newlyn.

Diana Souhami writes that in later life one of Gluck’s acquaintances said she looked like ‘the ninth earl’, which she liked. Romaine Brooks’ portrait of Gluck, Peter, a Young English Girl (1923-4) shows a sharp, handsome face, with high cheekbones, a serious mouth, and melancholic eyes. The artist’s hair is cut short but slightly dishevelled around the forehead – a slight loosening of a figure with ramrod posture inside an oversized coat. The artist’s hand is crabbed at the hip, as if holding something back. A desire to bolt? You can see in the portrait why some have called Gluck a ‘lesbian dandy’. Given her presentation, and her reference to herself as ‘husband’ and ‘boyee’ to her great love, Nesta Obermer, others have wondered whether Gluck might have today identified as trans 1.

Either way, it’s clear Gluck’s masculine presentation offered a freedom that being Hannah Gluckstein, heiress, did not. There were other experiments: landscapes (of Cornwall, Falmer), stylised pictures of entertainers (The Three Nats), portraits of society figures, group scenes in browns and olives during the war. ‘I have always had a feeling of claustrophobia with regard to pigeon-holes!’ Gluck’s family money meant that there was little pressure to produce. She did as she pleased.

Pleasure – however covert – seems key to Gluck’s flower paintings. As the artist wrote to Nesta, ‘I felt like a bee … penetrating [the flowers] for their sweetness’. The verb (‘penetrating’) plays with the traditional gendering of floral art, which was traditionally women’s work. ‘How can these flowers be female?’ wrote Gluck of her 1936 painting Lords and Ladies. ‘Anything more male than this prominent feature I cannot imagine’.

Unlike The Devil’s Altar, this painting’s title is straightforward: it’s the common name for the arum lilies which are the picture’s subject. The flower’s other names – cuckoo pint (or penis), naked boys, naked girls, Adam and Eve – underline the species’ sexual associations, and suggests Gluck’s painting is even more of a tease than it seems at first.

Lords and Ladies shows mottled green flowers – spread as archly as a peacock’s tail – in a marbled caramel vase against a hard black background. There’s an air of Medusa’s decapitated head about the arrangement: it’s a different kind of deadly trophy to The Devil’s Altar. Randolph Schwabe, the head of the Slade School of Art, was right to describe Gluck’s paintings as ‘hard and dextrous’. The black of the background to Lords and Ladies is not velvety, but an absolute black, like Milton’s description of ‘darkness visible’. The brashness of the bright flowers against the black reminds me of the 18th-century botanical artist Mary Delaney here. (Some have suggested that Delaney, like Gluck, liked women.) These are uncompromising colours.

And Gluck was uncompromising in many ways, most of all when it came to colour. The first salvo in what would come to be known as the ‘paint wars’ started as early as Lords and Ladies. However stark the painting looks in reproduction, its artist perceived a ‘horrible graining in the canvas’, as the paint sank in and became ‘dead’. Black, in particular, suffered from staying ‘tacky and leaving a ‘silvery sheen or a blue edge’ (Diana Souhami). By the 1950s, Gluck had become disgusted by the quality of paint, which degraded on the canvas after use, ‘rather like rubbing suede in different directions’. Artists had once ground their own paints by hand. Now, outraged by the lower standards of modern paint production, Gluck began to agitate for standards in art materials. No longer living in the avant-garde part of Chelsea and visiting Nesta’s house in Plumpton, Sussex, she had settled into an uneasy partnership with Edith Shackleton Heald, at Chantry House in Steyning, from which she conducted her campaign. In the course of her paint wars, Gluck lectured in public and at her dining table, sent out surveys to artists, and corresponded with authorities like Kenneth Clark and Laura Knight and Graham Sutherland. Paint ought to be made to a particular standard, Gluck argued, using only the best raw materials and pigments. Like other organic materials, paint should have a shelf life, and matured canvas should be distinguished by a mark. The campaign took up a third of her income and she painted very little.

At last, in 1954, the British Standards Institution Technical Committee on Artists’ Material met to decide many of the questions Gluck was keen to settle: the names and make-up of paints, the length of their use. In the meantime, she was – as the director of the Tate Gallery called Gluck – ‘that woman who is making everyone’s life hell over trying to get a paint standard’.

It’s true that the question of standardisation seems to be at odds with Gluck’s idiosyncrasy both as an artist and a person. Writers have suggested that her fixation on the question of paint emerged from her oppositional nature and her disappointment in love. Her relationship with Shackleton Heald was fractious and lacked the creative intensity of her relationship in the 1930s with Obermer. But, however much time it took away from painting, it would be a pity to see Gluck’s efforts to guarantee particular standards as just a sign of creative ebbing, or as a small-minded obsession. The campaign could be seen as a credo of how central materiality is to the process of painting: the colour and texture of oil paint is not secondary – just as words are not secondary to communication. They are the substance and manifestation. The friction of their use makes certain things possible and others impossible. Gluck wrote that she stopped painting ‘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’.

The American writer Tillie Olsen writes of the silences that interrupt a creative life – the thwarting silences of family life, of motherhood, of domesticity, of the paid work that supports the art. ‘What are creation’s needs for full functioning?’ Olsen asks. For Gluck, who did not have children, was not responsible for the running of a house, and had no need of paid work, but who had been badly let down by love, it seems to have been faith in the quality and durability of her materials. Worrying about paint was surely also a way of worrying about the artist’s legacy. What would it mean to create something which would degrade in ways one couldn’t control? What assumptions would later viewers bring to a work of art that could not live up to its conception?

Eventually, Gluck found paints she could use – pigment mixed by hand with cold linseed oil: a method unsustainable for wider production. (The manufacturer, Rowneys, let Gluck have them for free for the rest of her life.) The paint that has survived the passing of time and the artist’s semi-regular bonfires holds up. The sootiness in the background of her portrait of Molly Mount Temple, who was the first woman in London to paint her nails red, and who from Gluck’s canvas purses tangerine lips. The wintry, wheaty austerity of the bouquet in Nature Morte returns in the late work. These are more muted, less absolute pictures (in colour, not intent). Their subjects are confrontations with animal mortality rather than botanical poise: a brown crumpled sparrow, a cadaverous fish head found on Worthing Beach.

After painting the fish head for Credo (Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light), Gluck wrote ‘Reflections after a day of painting’:

‘I am living daily with death and decay and it is beautiful + calming. Something vital emanates – All is movement and transubstantiation. Iridescent and nacreous colours seem to float on my palette, and then on to the canvas where they tremble between opacity and translucence.’

It was one more limit to cross.

Words by Christy Edwall

Note: It’s tempting to rewrite the past in the light of a more hospitable present. In the interest of not defining Gluck by our terms, and at the risk of clumsiness, I’ve decided to follow Gluck’s own usage (she/her but ‘no prefix [or] suffix’).