She eventually got the British Standards Institution to formulate a standard for artists’ oils which provided a recognized specification, and she got the manufacturers, Rowneys, to produce specialist paints, made with hand-ground pigments and cold-pressed linseed oil that were perfect for her. But she wasted years of creative time in her paint war. She fought it because she wanted her work to last for ever; yet she seemed unconscious of the irony that not to produce paintings is the surest way to artistic oblivion.
Gluck’s life divided into three parts. The first part, her rebellious years, was up until 1936. During that period she broke from her family, lived first with an art student called Craig, then a journalist, Sybil Cookson; divided her time between Cornwall and London and produced the work for her four major exhibitions. In 1936 she fell in love and with the intention of starting life afresh destroyed reference to her past – diaries, letters and the like. So her life up to the age of forty is chronicled more through her paintings than her words. A friend called De La Condamine (Robert Farquhason) visited her studio in 1936 on one of her days of burning. Watching,
he said very solemnly ‘You know why, don’t you?’ and I said ‘Oh yes, of course I do.’ He gave me a beady look and said, ‘the reason is a sexual one.’ I said, ‘I suppose so, the reason for creation is the same as for destruction.’ I like him despite the ‘camp’ of it all’. 9
Into the flames went details of her attachments to and relationships with Craig, Sybil Cookson, Constance Spry. She burned several portraits of women whom she wanted to forget and most references to her childhood. ‘Anything even vaguely smelling of the past stinks in my nostrils’, she told her new, her true love.
After 1936 her thoughts, feelings and daily affairs are more fully recorded. The years when she was consumed by Love, the ‘YouWe’ years, from 1936 until 1945, form the second part of her life. For the sake of Love she let go of her own career.
The last period of her life was from 1945 until her death in 1978. She lived in the Chantry House, Steyning, with the journalist Edith Shackleton Heald, painted in a sporadic way, suffered from frustration about her work and her life – and made others suffer too – fought her grand campaign against the paint manufacturers and then mercifully pushed her way back to the limelight for one last bow when she was seventy-eight: ‘This will after all be my last one-man show and I would like to go out with a bang!’10
In each phase a woman was central to her life. In the first it was her mother, whom she called ‘The Meteor’, a woman of talent, formidable energy, great kindness, moral strength and unsettling personality. ‘Everything the Meteor touches’, Gluck said of her, ‘always seems to lead to confusion – Even her kind acts. That’s what it is to have a disturbed and unbalanced aura or base – It communicates itself to everything.’11 In the second part it was Nesta Obermer, glittering, rich, adored by society and as elusive as the elegant women Gluck sought to capture in paint. And in the third it was Edith Shackleton Heald, clever, trustworthy, fairminded and loyal, who by her virtues seemed to create more problems for Gluck than she solved. Nor were the three women particularly separate in Gluck’s psyche. They merged, with other women, more peripheral to her life, in some unresolved desire for love and home.
Gluck wanted to be remembered for her paintings, the investigation she instigated into the quality of artists’ materials and the setting of a British Standard for oil pigments, and the stepped frame she designed. She also wanted her life remembered, problematic though it was. She was, more than most, full of paradoxes and contradictions. ‘You couldn’t’, said Winifred Vye, her housekeeper in old age, ‘say anything absolutely bad about her because then she’d confound you and be nice.… She was just extremely difficult to live with.’
She was proud, authoritative, obsessive and egotistical, yet dependent in every domestic sense and humble about her work. She was a romantic and yet spent years in an arid campaign about the quality of paint. She felt herself to be a visionary painter and yet some of the best of her work was done to commission for the walls of the sophisticated and rich. She claimed that she ran away from her family, but she kept half their name and was always dependent on them financially. She was a rebel, and a misfit, but staunchly patriotic, politically conservative and good friends with several high court judges including the Master of the Rolls. She was a Jew but wanted to paint the crucifixion of Christ. She was a woman but she dressed as a man. She would call the kitchen staff to account if the housekeeping was a halfpenny out, then give a mere acquaintance £500 to buy a new typewriter. She wanted for nothing in a material sense, and yet allowed herself to be consumed by material concerns. She was unafraid of death and yet hypochondriacal.
Mercurial, maddening, conspicuous and rebellious, she inspired great love and profound dislike. Perhaps what she most feared was indifference – the coldest death. Her dedication to work was total, even through her fallow years. Her severance from gender, family and religion, her resistance to influence from any particular artist or school of painting, her refusal to exhibit her work except in ‘one-man’ shows were all ways of protecting her artistic integrity. She desired to earn her death through the quality of her work: ‘I do want to reach that haven having a prize in my hand.… Something worthy of the trust that was reposed in me when I was sent out …’12 In reaching her destination with her paintings as her
