Butch in Progress

[K] It would be a shame to let LGBT History Month pass without an edition of our Favorite Vintage Butch, wouldn’t it? Especially it the vintage butch in question has a formidably androgynous fashion sense like British painter Gluck (nee Hannah Gluckstein, 1895 - 1978)

^{Gluck, 1924, photographed by E.O. Hoppe (to whom a exhibition is dedicated right now at the National Portrait Gallery)}

As traditional as her paintings were (mostly landscapes and portraits), as un-traditional was her life. Laura Doan, for example, (herself something like Lesbian Studies Superstar) describes Gluck’s appearance as follows

Well before it was acceptable, the androgynous Gluck dressed in men’s clothing and cut her hair short-never to pass as a man but to violate the rules of fashion as well as of social etiquette. (Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultues)

The rules of fashion were not the only ones for which Gluck had little respect. She left her wealthy family early to pursue her career as a painter, rejected being adressed as anything else besides the self-chosen names Peter or Gluck, and openly had numerous affairs and relationships with women, among them Constance Spry, decorator and florist to the Queen, whom she met in 1932.  

Among the advantages of being an artist and being hence surrounded by artists: Lots of great portraits of you and your loved ones. Case in point: this portrait by Romaine Brooks (which also proves again, how small the world of dykes really is, as Romaine Brooks had among others produced a painting of Lady Una Troubridge, lover of Radclyffe Hall and translator of Colette.)

^{Peter (A Young English Girl) by Romaine Brooks, 1923/24 (Portrait of Gluck)}

Another example: this self-portrait of Gluck with her lover Nesta Obermer, which she painted after a shared night at the opera and referred to as the “YouWe”-picture:

^{Medallion by Gluck, 1937} 

Gluck-biographer Diana Souhami discovered a love note to Nesta:

Darling Heart, we are not an ‘affair’ are we - We are husband and wife.

I have never said or written Eternity before I have never as I have said to you over and over again - felt it before..I was always looking for you, always hoping against hope for you - but never in my innermost heart did I think I had found you until I really did so… until you I count my life a dream and do not feel I even became conscious or began to live until I met you and claimed you.

Now it all seems crystal clear, merely with a few roots to stumble over, a few brambles to cut away before reaching freedom and light.

Goodnight my most precious. I must just add two lines I discovered in an old notebook. Don’t know who wrote them or whence they came…

They have most power to hurt us whom we love

We lay our sleeping lives within their arms

I love you I long for you I want you and I need you. All of you for all of me. (Diana Souhami)

They didn’t get eternity (Nesta stayed in her marriage of convenience throught their 8-year relationship, which she ended in 1944, and left Gluck heartbroken - the sadness already in below’s selfportrait from ‘42)), but Gluck soon found another love: journalist Edith Shackleton Heald, with whom she lived together until Edith’s death.

^{Gluck by Gluck, 1942}

Gluck’s last major painting was Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Light, inspired by the Dylan Thomas poem. She was rediscovered by the art scene shortly before her death (somehow similar to Alice Austen) through an exhibition at London’s Fine Art Society. 

Lesbian tritivia: Gluck’s Medallion was used as the cover for the Virago publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1980.