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From the Archive
FROM THE ARCHIVE
A 1950s joining form for the artist Gluck shows that refusing to accept gender norms is nothing new
Gluck at work on a portrait in their studio in Hampstead, London, November 1932.
Photo: Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Known for evocative portraits and still lifes, and subjects including lovers, flowers and rotting fish, the gender non-conforming painter Gluck became a Library member in 1950. Born Hannah Gluckstein in London in 1895, as an adult they rejected their forename and, except in unavoidable circumstances, refused to use a title such as “Miss” or “Ms”. On Gluck’s joining form, “miss” is in brackets, “Hannah” is reduced to a simple initial, but their shortened, self-given name is repeated twice.
They were born into a wealthy Jewish family and educated at St John’s Wood Art School from 1913 to 1916. By the early 1920s, they had shortened Gluckstein to Gluck, and photographs from the time show them in men’s clothing with short-cropped hair. They smoked a pipe, and only exhibited works in “one-man shows”.
Like all official documentation, The London Library’s joining forms have presented an opportunity for applicants to assert or establish an identity – when Virginia Woolf joined at the age of 22, she listed her occupation as “spinster”. They can also reveal something of applicants’ personal lives.
Gluck was nominated for membership by their lover, Edith Shackleton Heald (1885-1976), a journalist and former mistress of W B Yeats (Yeats, while not a member of the Library himself, borrowed books through his wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees). The address noted on Gluck’s joining form is The Chantry House, Heald’s home in West Sussex, where the couple lived together from 1944 until Heald’s death in 1976 (Gluck died at the address two years later).
Gluck had many close relationships with women. In the 1930s they fell in love with the florist Constance Spry, who inspired a floral period in their work. One close friend and artistic collaborator was Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), an American artist known for her society portraits.
The two worked together on paintings and photographs. Brooks’s 1923-24–oil portrait of Gluck shows the latter as self-possessed and highly androgynous – it is titled Peter (a Young English Girl), and is currently on show at the V&A museum in its exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear (until 6 November).
Nesta Obermer (1893-1984) was perhaps their greatest love, and the married playwright and philanthropist inspired Gluck’s most famous painting, Medallion (1936). The double portrait of the couple, which Gluck called the “YouWe” picture, has come to be viewed as an iconic lesbian statement.
In addition to the nickname Peter, Gluck was also known as “Darling Tim” to Obermer, and to at least one admirer they were “Dearest Rabbitskinnootchbunsnoo”. To their family, they were known as “Hig”, and to Heald they were “Dearest Grub”. The artist’s biographer, Diana Souhami, says that “to the art world, and in [their] heart, [they were] simply Gluck”, and on their joining form, “Miss” is in brackets, “Hannah” is reduced to a simple initial, but their shortened, self-given name is repeated twice. •
– Elaine Stabler is a contributing editor of this magazine
"I request you place my name before the Committee for Election at their next Meeting. Signed: (Miss) H. Gluck, professional signature Gluck" "Introduced by: Edith S. Heald"
Photo: Dale Weeks
