Gluck - Who Did She Think He Was?

I really only remember her when she was very old.

She was just this extraordinary physical presence.

I apparently asked my mother, "Is Auntie Hig a man or a woman?"

Because I didn't know.

My first recollections of her, and I must have been quite small,

of this figure in tweed, smoking a cigar.

I mean, everybody was amazed by it, and you know,

this was what she wanted to wear.

She was a society painter.

The people who bought her paintings were the lawmakers,

and the aristocracy, and the upper echelons of society.

And when you look at the visitors book,

and see who attended these shows that she gave,

it is from royalty downwards.

There's Queen Mary on the 9th of November 1932.

Sir Cecil Beaton's signature here.

And there are lots of Rothschilds.

Katharine Hepburn, Hartford, Connecticut.

It became the thing to do.

To go to her shows.

Practically every well-known person in London was in that book.

The Queen Mother, Elizabeth, with a page to herself.

She said that she would only show her work in one-man shows.

She is painting herself to look

as much like a man as she possibly could.

I look at that, and I'm sure lots of people would look at that,

and think it's a bloke.

I've known a lot of people in my life,

and I've never known anybody like her.

She pursued these things like that, and she actually got away with it.

This is probably one of the most iconic pictures by Gluck.

It's a portrait of her in the foreground,

with her lover, Nesta Obermer.

And to a lot of people out there,

particularly Gluck collectors,

and anyone who admires the artist,

this is the painting in the exhibition

that they will come to see.

It is a very, very unusual picture, whatever it is.

It's not because it's so remarkably well painted, or drawn,

or anything. It's just got oomph,

and shouts itself off the wall, as it were.

Completely original, in a way.

I really like her work a lot.

And it's a great story.

This is the archive, eh?

This is the archive, mainly the family archive in here.

That's a lot of Gluckstein archives up here.

This contains all the Gluck archive.

-And you can just see how they've been archived, like this.

-I see.

Gluck was born 1895 into this

dynastic Jewish patriarchal family, really.

She was the first-born, the eldest.

They began as tobacconists, the Salmons and Glucksteins.

They were extremely well off, a bit like the Rothschilds.

They opened the first teashop in Piccadilly, where women could go,

in respectable surroundings, have a cup of tea and not be pestered.

And this grew, quite exponentially.

They owned Lyons Corner house,

they owned a lot of the London hotels,

the Cumberland, the Trocadero.

-So they were rich?

-They were very rich.

There were the expectations

that she would be like the other Gluckstein women.

That she would marry well, preferably a cousin.

That she could, you know, dabble in the arts.

There couldn't have been a wider rift between

the family expectation and the reality.

I mean, there's a picture there of her aged four.

Dressed all in white, even the doll is dressed in white frills.

She's absolute girl, in inverted commas.

But she was a rebel.

And the expression on her face, she really is thinking

unutterable thoughts.

At the very, very beginning, she had to conform,

and she had to have whatever it was that you put on.

But very, very quickly, she absolutely did not.

She started dressing in men's clothes.

She didn't want to call herself Hannah.

She always hated her name, Hannah.

She insisted on being called either Hig or Gluck.

If anybody called her the wrong name, she just ignored them.

She started calling herself Peter.

And then she found a dressmaker to dress her in men's clothes.

"Dear Louis, I'm flourishing in the new garb, intensely exciting.

"It was designed by yours truly and carried out by a mad dressmaker,

"utterly loony. It's most old master-ish,

"very distinguished looking.

"Rather like a Catholic priest.

"I hope you'll like it,

"because I intend to wear this sort of thing always."

She started smoking a pipe.

I mean, it was really quite something for 1915.

And then she began an affair with an art student called Craig.

Craig was a girl.

Gluck ran off to Cornwall with Craig, to become an artist.

There's a reason why she goes down to Cornwall.

Because there's a colony of women who are down there,

who are feeling liberated, feeling free to dress as they like.

That's a picture of her lover, Craig, sketching on the rocks.

She soon after going to Cornwall, she got her hair cut short,

and she was living with the Newlyn Group,

with Laura Knight, Munnings.

It was probably the time, the first time in her life,

where she felt she could be who she wanted to be,

and she's mixing in a society that is tolerant.

There's always been leeway in artistic communities.

But saying that, there's always been much more leeway for men.

Romaine Brooks was another artist who dressed as a man.

Even though Romaine Brooks was American and living in Paris,

they knew each other.

They painted reciprocal portraits of each other.

So, yes, there were others around.

Her mother blamed Craig,

and said that when she left the pernicious influence of Craig,

all would be well.

But it didn't quite work out like that.

Well, of course they were absolutely desolate.

I mean, they couldn't... "She'll grow out of it.

"She'll grow out of it, you know, of course, yes, she'll grow out of it."

Not at all!

Her father talked of his horror at her outre clobber.

And his despair, really.

Her mother talked about a kink in the brain.

If you were female, if you were a girl, if you were Hannah Gluckstein,

it wasn't what you did.

There she was, in their view, masquerading as a man.

In her view,

she was getting closer to the identity

that she felt was real for her, which was a masculine identity.

She didn't want to marry some cousin that she felt nothing for.

She didn't want it and wasn't going to have it.

Gluck exhibited in one of the most prestigious art galleries in London,

called the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street.

She first exhibited there in 1926,

and it remained her gallery for the rest of her life.

They had the best and the brightest.

So she must have impressed them with her skill,

to be taken on as an artist.

It's a really exclusive London gallery,

with an incredible reputation.

And, you know, it attracts a very wealthy clientele.

It's society women, very rich men and women, titled people,

who bought Gluck's work.

They attracted the artists of the day,

and I gather she wouldn't exhibit her paintings

in a room with anybody else's paintings.

She was a fabulous artist.

She's long been one of my favourites.

There is a painting by her of an actor of the time,

Ernest Thesiger, who she was friends with - now, he was homosexual,

he played in drag in many, many shows.

But, of course, he married, because that was commonplace at the time.

And it's just him, standing on his own, on stage in the spotlight.

He's clearly about to take a bow, I think, in front of the curtain,

and he's wearing, as would have been commonplace in drawing-room comedies

of the time, he's wearing a white tie and tails.

And, to me, it is one of the most painful paintings I have ever seen.

The vulnerability of the person who has a secret,

or the vulnerability of the homosexual

who is trying to be bold about themselves,

and yet trying to constrain themselves, literally,

into society through the tightly tied bow tie

and the stiff suit, and standing in the spotlight.

And he stands there, looking slightly startled,

and almost like a little boy.

I love this painting.

I think it's a remarkable painting.

I would sell my house to own this painting, I think it's wonderful.

These are all press cuttings

for Gluck's 1926 exhibition at the Fine Art Society.

All of them go straight to much more than her paintings.

What she looks like.

Her close cut hair, her man's jacket, her plus four trousers.

They all say, you know, "girl with a pipe".

"She dresses as a man and delights in painting Cornish scenes."

There's lots of press cuttings that have titles like,

"Why she dresses like a man, why she always wears menswear."

But at no point is the word "lesbian" ever used.

In the 1920s, clothing choices did not signify

a particular kind of sexual identity.

The high fashion of the time calls for

a boyish look for fashionable women.

This is a portrait of a woman who has all the telltale signs

of female masculinity, she's got the monocle, the cigarette holder,

she's got her hands in her pockets.

It's not just about the boyish look,

it's also about the stance, the bodily stance.

When I look at some of those, I'm reading "lesbian".

Yes. Well, that's not what anyone would have seen in the 1920s.

The cropped hair and trousers look

was actually a real fashion for the time.

Later, of course,

it starts to become more associated with female same-sex desire.

But, at this point,

you can be absolutely at the height of fashion.

So this is Radclyffe Hall,

and one of her most significant relationships

is with Una Troubridge, who is a sculptor.

They cut a dash on the London scene, very stylishly dressed.

Radclyffe Hall, she was not particularly

-seen as mannish in the 1920s.

-Really?

She was seen as elegant.

She got her hair styled at Harrods.

She would often attend dog shows with her partner,

and they looked like countrywomen with their dogs.

Nobody would have thought anything in those days?

No, I don't think that many people

really thought that she was much more than a literary celebrity.

I mean, this is exactly the sort of fashions

that someone like Dorothy Todd, the editor of Vogue,

is really, kind of, promoting on Vogue's pages.

She was actually in a relationship in herself with Madge Garland,

who is one of the picture editors.

It's certainly true that in the 1920s,

there were menswear influences upon elite fashion,

but the type of menswear fashion that Gluck wears

is completely different.

Women did not walk down Bond Street wearing plus fours,

a baggy tailored suit, of a style that Gluck wore.

I mean, this is the sort of clothes

that a man would wear in the country,

walking around the estate.

She had these very extraordinary photographic portraits,

commissioning the top photographers of the day, like Howard Coster,

who described himself as the photographer of men.

She goes to Angus McBean and Hoppe,

all known for taking very strong and powerful photographs of men.

When we look at photographs of Gluck, her hair is cut barber short,

like that of a man. When we look...

Especially, actually, when we look at the Hoppe portrait,

you know, it's barber cut, razored.

Very short. It's a man's haircut.

So, what does that tell us?

It tells us that Gluck wanted to look like a man.

Why do you think she did dress as a man?

Why do you think she did dress as a man?

I supposed to show the world what she wanted to be.

I don't know.

I need a good psychiatrist to think of an answer to that.

I think she is at ease here.

You see, I thought she looked wonderful,

because that's what she was meant to be.

That was how she was.

I mean, I think that's a very wonderful photograph.

I think for her to have dressed in a feminine way

would have been cross-dressing.

We look at her today and say this is a woman who is cross-dressing.

If she had dressed in a feminine way,

that would have been cross-dressing for her.

-Because it would have felt...

-She would have felt wrong.

What was the word for people like Gluck in those days?

The scientific term that had come into use

in the 1890s for both male and female homosexuality

was sexual inversion.

Because it's the idea that this is something topsy-turvy.

The first person to publish in Britain is probably Havelock Ellis.

And this is the first edition of Sexual Inversion.

This was a term that sexologists would have employed.

-The invert?

-The invert.

"The chief characteristic of the sexually inverted woman is a certain

"degree of masculinity.

"There is a pronounced taste for smoking, also a dislike,

"and sometimes incapacity for needlework

"and other domestic occupations."

Well, you know...

So?

One of the characteristics of the invert

was the ability in women to whistle very well.

And in an even later edition,

he said that the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld

had told him about women who actually performed

professionally as whistlers.

So would Gluck be aware of any of this, do you think?

I think it's quite possible that Gluck would have come across people

talking about those ideas.

So it would be somebody saying, "Oh, Ellis says this, Ellis that..."

You know. "Inversion, etc, etc."

Ellis's wife, Edith Lees Ellis, was herself a lesbian.

They obviously had a very devoted relationship between them,

but after their marriage, she fell in love with another woman.

She had already had relationships with women.

And she was, I think, one of his main informants.

I mean, some of their ideas do indeed

seem particularly weird to us now.

These notions of inverts, you know,

I think it was Havelock Ellis who came up with...

Havelock Ellis, of course, famously couldn't have sex at all.

This is our leading sex expert in this country,

and he was an impotent man who married a lesbian.

So I don't know why we took his view as to what people should be called!

Did people use the word lesbian then?

In Paris, they freely used the word lesbian.

Natalie Barney said, "People call it unnatural,

"all I can say is that it's always come naturally to me!"

Here, I never saw any reference of Gluck calling herself lesbian.

She called herself "he" and a boy, and "husband" when she fell in love.

There are some pockets such as the Bloomsbury Group,

who thought that doing something sexually with someone

made them who they were. But most people did not think that way.

The majority of people would not have

understood themselves as a something.

Whether, and you can put any category in there,

you can say trans, or lesbian, or gay person.

That habit of identifying is going to evolve

much later in the 20th century.

This is Bolton House in the heart of Hampstead Village.

Gluck bought this in 1926.

She was working hard for her next exhibition.

It was the Gluckstein money that bought the house,

it was the Gluckstein money that gave her this privileged life.

She had servants, live-in servants.

Everything had to be absolutely just so.

Her clothes had to be laundered in exactly the right way.

She was obsessive.

She wouldn't think of having

anything other than handmade clothes.

And she was very particular about what she had.

I mean, they had to be immaculate.

And if somebody had actually given her a shirt or something like that,

and it had a crease in it, "Take it back.

"I'm not going to have it. You can do it again," you know.

Six years after she bought the house,

Edward Maufe, who was also a friend,

and a very well-known architect,

designed, to her specifications, the state-of-the-art, modern studio.

That's where she painted.

Her father died in 1930.

And so her brother, Louis, was in charge of Gluck's finances.

Gluck and her brother Louis had got on very well

when they were young, but there's nothing

to make people fall out like sex and money.

Of course, she was the first-born,

and in that family set-up, the girls didn't count.

And so her younger brother became head of the family,

and she had to be kept,

and ask for what she needed.

And she wasn't in charge of her own finances, her own life.

And I think it must have driven her bonkers.

Let's be quite clear here, there are two people

both with completely polar views,

my father, the most conventional person you could meet,

and Gluck, the most unconventional.

So we have two people, brother and sister,

who each want to be in control.

And both poles apart?

-And both poles apart.

-Yes.

If she'd really wanted to be independent,

she probably should have broken entirely from them.

But she wanted the money and all the freedoms that money brought her.

She had this wonderful Georgian house,

she had a car with a chauffeur

to take her down to her studio in Cornwall.

She was benefiting from the Gluckstein graft.

You know? They'd made their money, she was spending it.

But they weren't going to let her have it entirely on her terms.

She was never without a woman in her life.

So the woman who moves in is Sybil Cookson.

Sybil Cookson was a journalist.

She specialised in sport and law cases, so of course,

Gluck painted boxing matches

and legal trials.

Unfortunately, Gluck wasn't faithful to Sybil,

and Sybil found her, as she put it,

in the wood shavings of the new studio with Annette Mills.

# We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule... #

Who I remember from my childhood,

because she was on Children's Hour with Muffin the Mule.

# We want Muffin the Mule. #

Hello, everyone.

You see what's going on on my piano today?

It gives new significance

to the theme, "We want muffin," everybody sings.

# We want Muffin, Muffin the Mule... #

Nice kiss. Until next time, goodbye.

There's always a surprise in these stories.

There's always a surprise in these stories!

But because, you know, nobody mentioned being lesbian,

it's a surprise to find the number of people who were.

Lesbianism wasn't illegal, was it?

Lesbianism was not illegal.

There is this persistent myth that

Queen Victoria could not believe that it happened, or her officials

just could not bring themselves to bring this before her.

But it's not true.

It's just that lesbianism was pretty much invisible.

There was an attempt to introduce an amendment to the act that had

indicted Oscar Wilde, about acts of gross indecency between women.

It went to the House of Lords,

I think one of them said 999 women out of 1000 have never even heard

a whisper of these practices.

In the homes of the country,

you are going to tell them that this awful thing exists.

Silence is best.

Things rather came to a head when Radclyffe Hall

published Well Of Loneliness - a lesbian novel.

It was published in 1928, the same year as Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

It has a foreword by Havelock Ellis.

It's a very gloomy story of a congenital sexual invert.

This book, The Well Of Loneliness, is one of those things that,

to this day, makes me sort of enraged.

Because when I was growing up,

this was the only book I'd ever heard of

that had anything to do with lesbianism.

"Father, is there anything strange about me?

"I remember when I was a little child,

"I was never quite like all the other children."

"Her voice sounded apologetic, uncertain.

"And he knew that the tears were not far from her eyes.

"My dear, don't be foolish, there's nothing strange about you.

"Some day, you may meet a man you can love."

I mean, I always sort of wished there was a bin.

I would just check this book in the bin. It makes me really angry.

But you know, again, product of her time.

At least she wrote about it.

The sexiest thing that happens in it

is that she writes, "She kissed her full on the lips.

"And that night, they were not divided."

The grand old men of England

went completely crazy about The Well Of Loneliness.

Because she changed pronouns.

"She kissed her, full on the lips."

The editor of the Sunday Express publishes an editorial, and he says,

"I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl

"a phial of prussic acid than this novel."

Because prussic acid would only kill their bodies.

This novel would kill their souls.

And he calls on the Home Secretary to ban this novel.

The Home Secretary, the Director of Public Prosecutions,

all of them conspired in a kangaroo court

to have this book censored and be burned in the King's furnace.

Do you think she would have read it, Gluck?

Gluck had read it, yes.

Certainly, by 1940, she had read it.

What happened was that it caused a pall of embarrassment and silence.

You know, you mustn't be lesbian.

That was the message that was going out.

I think it shut people up.

All of Gluck's work was autobiographical,

and contingent on the woman who was in her life at any given time.

So when she was with Craig, she painted Cornish scenes.

When she was with Sybil Cookson, she painted boxing matches.

But then came the truly significant relationship

that took her work to the very heart of high society.

"People are much too stuck in a rut with their flower decorations."

So says Constance Spry,

the famous flower expert who does the decorations

for many state banquets and other great occasions.

And why stick your flowers in table vases where they get in the way?

That's Constance.

Which I haven't seen before, ever.

Flower arranger to the Queen and the aristocracy.

She was a household name, really, Constance Spry.

It was in May 1932 that Gluck first met Constance Spry.

A client of both of them ordered

some flowers from the great Constance Spry

to be sent to Gluck at her house in Hampstead.

And Gluck looked at them and decided, "I wanted to paint this."

And so after about a week, Gluck sent a telephone message saying,

"Come back and renew the flowers, I haven't finished yet."

At which point Constance Spry got a bit curious -

"Who is this lady artist in Hampstead

"who is painting my flowers?"

So she too went along,

and I think they just got talking.

Constance Spry was the most famous flower decorator of her time.

She was doing the flowers for very, very rich upper echelons of society.

She was doing weddings, including royal weddings.

She was doing their drawing rooms.

She was doing their parties.

She was doing debutante balls.

So she was socially really up there.

Culminating in doing the flowers for the procession at the coronation.

Constance used to go and stay at Gluck's house in Hampstead

and Gluck occasionally went to stay at Constance's house,

where there was her husband, Shav Spry,

and various other members of the household.

They were lovers. Of course they were lovers, yes.

-How do you know?

-Because Gluck kept diaries, and put an asterisk.

It didn't take me long to work it out -

an asterisk for when she... for sex, you know.

They went on holiday to Tunisia every summer.

They were mixing with a very exciting group -

writers, painters, photographers.

Cecil Beaton was always around.

He was a great friend of Constance Spry's,

a great admirer of hers.

Did Constance Spry's husband know about Gluck?

Oh, yes, I'm sure he must have known about her.

He didn't like Gluck.

He thought she was a rather strange and difficult woman.

But he had enough secrets going of his own.

He wasn't going to spill the beans to anybody,

because Constance Spry, actually, wasn't Mrs Spry at all.

She was living in sin with Shav, who she wasn't married to.

And if this had ever come out,

she would have been dropped, just like that.

Gluck's painting, and life, really flourished under Constance,

and the flower paintings that Gluck did were hugely successful.

Her paintings were displayed

on special frames that she made out of bleached sycamore,

and they heightened the sense of drama of these paintings.

And, of course, commissions poured in.

Gluck's painting is so beautifully perfect and so elegant.

You've got the absolute perfect moment in every bloom

captured in those paintings.

And it would take a long time to paint, so the flowers would change,

the flowers would open,

they'd probably go over a little bit in the heat.

So, it had to be a constant replacement

of exactly the same display so that Gluck could keep working on it.

It was the time, also, of the interior design.

And Gluck would paint these pictures of Constance's flower arrangements,

of lilies and white flowers.

And they would be the sole picture in posh drawing rooms.

This is a really beautiful example.

I love the way that in it, she's picked out the individual petals,

to give it this sort of almost 3D quality.

You could just picture this being the centrepiece of a room,

with that very sort of sculptural quality to the frame.

White was very fashionable in the early '30s.

And all the interior decorators that Constance worked with

were painting their interiors white.

And so, she took white flowers and made them

the essential part of completed decor in a room.

Gluck's relationship with Constance was truly rewarding,

and it lasted for four years,

but then her whole life was turned upside down

when she met a woman called Nesta Obermer.

Something happened at a dinner party, it was in May 1935.

Gluck fell in love with Nesta.

Nesta is the absolute love of Gluck's life.

Gluck's life thereafter is always altered.

She was larger than life.

She was immensely rich,

she was married for convenience to some incredibly wealthy old man.

She's quite a party girl.

She's very charming.

She has a go at everything, you know -

Nesta got her pilot's licence.

Nesta can ski.

Nesta can dance.

She travels the world.

She climbed mountains, she drove fast cars.

I mean, she was a very exciting person for Gluck to have met.

She and Nesta went to the opera,

they went to Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne.

And Gluck felt that the intensity of the music fused them into one.

Coup de foudre, it was a real...

-It was a coup de foudre?

-It was the actual thing, yes.

Even given the extravagance of the 1930s,

it's a humdinger of a love affair.

"My own darling wife...

"I have just driven back in a sudden,

"almost tropical downpour in keeping with my feelings at leaving you.

"I felt so much, I could hardly be said to feel at all.

"Almost numb, and yet every nerve ready to jump into sudden life.

"I made straight for the studio and have, more or less, succeeded."

Well, it is a statement.

It is a statement, and it works as a statement.

Nesta was incredibly important in Gluck's life.

So this is a declaration of her love for Nesta.

And, at the time, that would have been

quite a revolutionary thing, to put it onto canvas

and to show the world.

It is just wonderful.

And look how noble Nesta is.

Contrition, almost. I mean, it's fantastic.

And the golden hair, everything about her is...

This is the two of them,

you know, it's like the Ride of the Valkyries, going out into the world

and conquering. It's strangely Soviet, isn't it?

You know, those wonderful posters of remarkably strong women

running munitions factories entirely on their own,

it has a sort of a feel of it like that.

This painting is completely extraordinary,

and when I saw the real painting,

I think what really struck me was the light in Nesta's eye.

And it's almost biblical, this white, shining light.

It's strong. It's two women together.

It's not a particularly tender painting, I don't think.

She was making a statement,

by this painting, in being...out.

And that was... There might be lots of other lesbians who were

out and about, but didn't visibly demonstrate that.

Well, it is very striking, obviously.

You know, anybody seeing that who had actually read

The Well Of Loneliness would, I'm sure, have thought,

"Oh, yes. Mm, yeah, that's what they look like."

Primarily, her statement is a feminist statement,

of saying, "I demand my rights," you know, "to a free life,"

and, you know, without the restrictions imposed upon women,

which was a very defiant statement, a very bold thing to do.

It is a defiant picture.

She's looking very mannish,

and she liked to work in her studio with that picture

propped in front of her,

and she liked the discomfort it caused to people.

It would hang on the walls at a London gallery,

but quite the intensity of what was going on underneath,

I don't think could ever be said overtly.

I mean, the Queen came to her exhibitions.

Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.

It was all there to be read, if people wanted to read it.

What you do have to say about her,

the thing that she had on her side, is that she had money.

And I think, when you are brought up with money,

it gives you a kind of confidence, that you have a place in the world,

that you're allowed to stand there.

And what I always think when I think about Gluck

is I think about all the women who would've had exactly the same

feelings as she did, but who didn't have money.

Well, class and the amount of money you had

obviously made a huge difference to whether you could get away with

relationships with other women.

If you were an ordinary kind of person,

women just didn't earn enough to support themselves independently.

How could they live their lives with another woman?

Well, many women managed to do that by passing as men,

by cross-dressing or, as it was known in that period, masquerading.

My favourite is always William Holton.

SHE LAUGHS

1929, Holton, who worked in a lot of tough jobs,

he was a navvy, you know, moving heavy goods and so on.

So he really had done that hard, masculine work

over at least 20 years.

But it was only when he was in his forties

that he caught some kind of typhoid fever,

so he was taken off to a workhouse hospital and it was only then

that he was discovered to have the body of a woman.

And he had a wife and a baby,

and the wife swore that as far as she knew,

Holton was the father of that baby, which was her second child.

So, a mystery and a puzzle to the readers of the newspapers.

This was a way in which women could live with another woman

and get away with it.

And indeed, they did get away with it.

At all moments in this picture,

Gluck's chin is lower, her eyesight is lower,

her gaze, everything.

Nesta was American,

and I always think Americans somehow have the slight edge on the British

in terms of seeming publicly more confident.

And I suspect Nesta was the one in charge.

And you can see it in the painting.

You can see Nesta is the one that Gluck is looking to

to lead them both into the light.

After Gluck had met Nesta,

she feels that this is really her life beginning.

And Gluck's so sure of this sense of arrival that she has,

that she burns her past.

She's burning photographs, letters,

she said she even burned some of her old canvases.

"Darling, isn't the world exciting?

"I do not feel I even became conscious and began to live

"until I met you, and claimed you.

"I've never said or written eternity before,

"I was always looking for you.

"Always hoping against hope for you."

Poor old Constance was kind of

left in the wake, and rather forgotten.

Gluck's entry in her diary is "C for the night, BH,

"talked and said no more..." asterisk.

So C is Constance,

BH is Bolton house, which was Gluck's Hampstead house.

And the asterisk is the asterisk!

Constance just kind of walked away from it,

and almost pretended it hadn't happened.

From that day on, almost literally,

they never spoke to each other again.

She really did feel that this was it.

She'd found her other half, if you like.

That's what that portrait shows.

The merging together.

Gluck called it their marriage picture.

In fact, Gluck wrote in a love letter to Nesta,

"Now it is out,

"and to the rest of the world I say, beware, beware,

"we are not to be trifled with."

Did you know that she had an affair with Nesta?

No.

We didn't see her around.

She moved in a completely different circle.

I don't think she brought her lovers to your parent's house?

No!

She wouldn't have done that.

My father would have put his foot down and said, "No."

Very different from today.

Nesta's family home was in Sussex,

and there was a big lake with a punt on it, and you can just see,

in the darkness, the two women sitting together.

And this one is just called The Punt

and you can barely make out it's two women.

Yes, there they are on the punt.

That must be the lake in Plumpton.

There were those idyllic days.

They went skating together, they'd go to Cornwall together.

They'd have picnics.

Gluck painted Nesta's mother.

It was a terrific point in her life, where she felt,

this is how I'm going to be from now on.

It lasted six years.

The problem was that words like "forever", and "only you",

need a context.

And as time goes on, the question is asked,

what are we doing in this relationship?

Where are we going? How is it going to be?

And when you see the letters,

there's a feeling, is this going to last?

"Dearest, most treasured heart, my own most precious wife.

"You fill my heart, my mind, my eyes,

"you are my life and I worship you.

You start reading them and they're quite moving.

In the end, they're quite repetitive,

because it's the same message.

She wants more and more of Nesta.

And Nesta's not prepared to give that.

Nesta's got a husband, who she doesn't want to upset,

who was quite a moneybag.

It would mean that Nesta would have to give up her husband,

and her jet set life.

Nesta could fit into a high society conventional life with her husband,

and she's also operating in a society where it's overlooked

if she has a relationship with another woman.

But to leave your husband to go and live with another woman,

which is what Gluck wanted,

she obviously wasn't prepared to pay that price.

Nesta's reluctance to acknowledge her openly

was a real obstacle to perfect togetherness.

There was no precedent.

There was no context for it.

She wasn't a man.

Nesta was married.

How were they going to live together? Where?

Society wouldn't condone it.

Their families didn't condone it.

And so, ultimately, you're conscious of the lawmakers who say

silence is best, that you can't live like this,

that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Her father saying how much it pains him, her outre clobber.

So they can't create Gluck's romantic ideal

on which she's staked everything.

She gets depressed.

And she does break down.

This portrait is painted just when one of

her most significant relationships is ending.

That's the relationship with Nesta Obermer.

And I think you can see a note of sort of sadness

in this crease between the eyes.

It's quite a sort of weary look to the face.

But it's still that jutting chin that just seems so defiant.

I suppose it just feels quite challenging.

It's so direct and challenging.

I don't know, there is a bit of sadness in there.

-There's pain, yeah.

-Definitely pain in the eyes.

Also a kind of sense of, you know, being proud.

Still defiance - this is who I am.

I think it's, like, you've been dumped,

but you're still trying to hold on to a sense of self and defiance.

Almost keeping the head above the water,

quite literally, with the upturned...

The chin, yeah.

If Gluck were around today,

would she have identified as transgender?

Would she have transitioned?

-Who knows?

-It's hard to know, isn't it?

It's hard to know, because some people don't have to physically,

-even nowadays, transition.

-Not medically.

I would put my vote in for the genderqueer.

-I would say.

-Non-binary.

-On the spectrum.

-Yes.

-Yeah.

It's very difficult, isn't it,

to apply terms that we use today to the past?

But it would seem perfectly likely that she would be,

in today's terminology, a trans man.

I think she would have hated all that, all that...

all that language.

I think she saw herself as above gender.

She didn't want to be...

She didn't want a label.

She didn't even want a name, particularly.

Do you know? Because she didn't want to be claimed.

When I first saw that portrait in the National Portrait Gallery,

I thought that Gluck looked enraged.

And I remember thinking, it's very rare,

when you look through the history of women painting themselves,

to depict themselves thus.

And then, the more I looked at it, I thought, actually,

she's not enraged, she actually looks incredibly distressed.

It's a very, very powerful self portrait of a woman.

She had, I think, been bereaved, and lost her sense of direction.

She couldn't be more than the times she lived in.

It becomes clear to Gluck that this relationship with Nesta

is not going to work out.

And almost by way of consolation,

she turns to another woman called Edith Heald.

Edith Heald was a journalist, and she lived with her sister, Nora,

who was the editor of The Lady magazine,

and they lived together in a house in Sussex.

They are well connected - Edith had been the last lover of Yeats.

They're intellectual, they're interested in her.

And they invite her to go and live with them.

Gluck starts a relationship with Edith, Nora thinks it's appalling.

And Nora moves out.

After the war, Gluck chooses a much quieter, rural existence.

It's a different world from the world that Gluck occupied

in Bond Street in the 1920s and '30s.

It certainly ended an era, the Second World War.

And 1945, yes, there was a Labour administration,

there was a new definition of what society would be like.

The Labour Party's great victory shows that the country is ready

for a new policy to face new world conditions.

The welfare state, you know.

It's not going to be Nesta's scene, is it?

Not Nesta's scene at all. No.

She was off to Hawaii.

# I wonder who's kissing her now

# I wonder who's kissing her now

# I wonder... #

It's the end of, certainly, those wonderful white interiors,

and flower paintings for the walls of the rich.

That whole country house lifestyle has gone,

lots of people have to sell their country houses,

because they've got to pay more tax. It's a different world.

It's also a time where her sort of art was no longer fashionable.

We've got different sorts of art.

It's much more working class, artistic expression,

kitchen sink dramas, the angry young men.

Don't let the bastards grind you down,

that's one thing I've learned.

She stops painting in any meaningful or directional way.

She is too much of a professional to stop completely.

But she takes forever over one picture.

# Like a circle in a spiral

-# Like a wheel within a wheel...

-#

Gluck goes through a very dark phase where she doesn't paint very much,

and becomes completely obsessive

about trying to change the quality of paints.

She spends her time dithering about writing letters about paint

standards, because that's a thing to focus on, isn't it?

That's something you can, kind of, cope with.

It's not emotional.

It's not emotional at all to look at the consistency of paint,

literally, she is watching paint dry, because she's so miserable.

I think she had a broken heart for the rest of her life.

Because we don't get the creativity.

# Like the circles that you find

# In the windmills of your mind. #

In 1960, she'd advertised, in a shop window in the high street,

for someone to do her secretarial work.

She employed me for the next, God knows how long, 14 years?

-Where was your office?

-Up in the roof, the left-hand one.

Up there.

That's what she looked like at the time.

Very short hair, and...

But she always wore trousers.

Yes, she looked like a male, really.

She was a very strong woman, very lovely to talk to.

Because you could get...

You know, you had proper conversations with her.

She didn't waffle about.

If she believed in something, she fought for it.

You know, her attitude towards life, I admired.

Very much. And so, yes, I named one of my daughters after her.

30 years goes by without her having an exhibition.

And she's all but forgotten.

It was 30 years without those feelings of being in love.

The feelings that she found in herself, for Nesta, were lost.

She'd buried herself in the country, really.

And I think she was in her 70s when she went into the Fine Art Society

and said, "It's 30 years since I had my last exhibition,

"don't you think it's time I had another?"

This amazing character comes in through the door,

extremely handsome, wearing a deerstalker hat,

a Sherlock Holmes cloak, and said,

"I last showed here in '37, is there any chance of another exhibition?"

Gluck, to say the least of it, was a brilliant professional.

Everybody who was anybody knew that the show was coming on.

It was massively popular.

You know, seeing this visitors' book, it reads like a film premiere.

It was a smash hit.

Smash hit.

One of the guests at Gluck's 1973 exhibition was Katharine Hepburn.

There she is, signing it and she gives us her address,

Hartford, Connecticut.

Of course, we recognised who it was when she came in, asking,

"Where is the Gluck exhibition?"

So we just pointed out where the Gluck exhibition was,

and then they chatted like two old friends for the next hour.

Katharine Hepburn would have known of Gluck's work,

and known of her life.

And, of course, her love life wasn't clear, and is only clearer now.

There's an alliance and an allegiance,

and she would be there because she knew of Gluck's life and her work.

There was still the same buzz of people, she got very good reviews.

She hadn't finished as an artist.

You know, one of the things she wrote was,

"I really do want to do some good and lovely work before I die."

Five years after the last exhibition, she died.

She obviously knows that she's on her way out,

but she did wonderful things with her life.

You look at that face, my gosh!

The directors of the Fine Art Society asked Nesta

if there was anything of Gluck's she wanted, and she said,

"Oh, a few of her fine haired brushes," you know.

So she didn't lose her knowledge of Gluck, or her love of Gluck,

I don't think. It's just, they didn't find a way.

So, it's in 1977, which is the year before Gluck died,

she decided to donate to Brighton Museum, which is her local museum,

a collection of objects - it included these dresses,

which was really what you don't expect from Gluck.

We'd imagine that we might find suits, you know,

ideally, the fedora hat, perhaps some men's lace-up shoes.

And actually, what we found was a collection of flowery dresses.

Through documentary evidence, and actually through looking at images,

we've come to the idea that, actually,

a lot of them were worn by her girlfriends.

And they're really a memorial to her life.

So we've sort of sectioned these off, really, as being worn by Edith,

who was Gluck's girlfriend in the last 30 years.

The other dresses, we think, it's probably Nesta.

They date from the '30s,

the second half of the '30s, which is when Gluck was with Nesta.

It's deeply meaningful that the items Gluck chose to preserve

are the items that were worn by the women she loved.

And it would be interesting to see the sort of

tailored menswear she wore, but this is more touching.

I'm sure that's why Gluck decided to leave these objects,

because it told a story about her life.

In 1982, when Virago was republishing Radclyffe Hall's

Well Of Loneliness, the book that was banned in 1928,

they used the YouWe picture.

They thought that it was a double profile of Gluck.

That it was both her, and her alter ego, looking out into the future.

They didn't realise that the other half of it was Nesta.

Because the story wasn't revealed at that time.

I think, ultimately, it's a story of the YouWe picture.

Do you know, I think, in a way, all this is coded into that picture.

I think that painting will last.

And even now, even this year,

there's been another showing of her work.

And people have thought that the work looks as fresh

as the day she painted it.

Never take away from here the flair and skill she had.

Whatever sort of difficult person she was,

that is her bequest to the world.

And her paintings wouldn't attract the people they do to this day

if that were not the case.

They're collected by people in the pop world.

-It's fascinating.

-And if she hadn't spent so long arguing with

-everybody else, she'd have painted a lot more!

-Yes.

I think she was ahead of her time.

She wouldn't have any trouble now, would she?

If she lived now, doing what she does, she'd be fine.

I think she was authentic.

I think she was true.

She couldn't be anything else other than what she was.

I think it's these images, these are the legacy,

because they look so modern.

They look gender neutral.

They look incredibly stylish to contemporary eyes.

It's a fashionable look right now.

Extraordinary, really, when you think, you know, 90 years on,

we still look at Gluck and she still looks compelling and radical,

and incredibly modern.

# I will follow him

# Follow him wherever he may go

# There isn't an ocean too deep

# A mountain so high it can keep, keep me away

# Away from my love

# I love him, I love him, I love him

# And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow

# He'll always be my true love, my true love, my true love

# From now until forever, forever, forever... #