Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein)
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Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein, August 13, 1895 - January 10, 1978) was a British painter. She was born into a wealthy Jewish family whom she scandalized by wearing men's clothes and running away to live with another woman. Her father, Joseph Gluckstein, owned the J. Lyons and Co. Coffee Houses and catering empire in London and her mother, Francesca Hall, was an American opera singer. In the 1920s and 30s she became known for her portraits and floral paintings. She insisted on being known only as Gluck, "no prefix, suffix, or quotes"; when an art society of which she was vice president identified her as "Miss Gluck" on its letterhead, she resigned. She identified with no artistic school or movement and showed her work only in solo exhibitions, where her works were displayed in a special frame she invented and patented. This "Gluck frame" rose from the wall in three tiers; painted or papered to match the wall on which it hung, it made her paintings look like part of the architecture of the room.
One of her best-known paintings, Medallion, is a dual portrait of her and her partner Nesta Obermer, inspired by a night in 1936 when they attended a Fritz Busch production of Mozart's Don Giovanni. According to Gluck's biographer Diana Souhami, "They sat in the third row and she felt the intensity of the music fused them into one person and matched their love." She referred to it as the "YouWe" picture.[1] It was later used as the cover of a Virago Press edition of The Well of Loneliness.[2]
In the 1950s she became dissatisfied with the artist's paints available and began a "paint war" to increase their quality. Ultimately she persuaded the British Standards Institution to create a new standard for oil paints; however, the campaign consumed her time and energy to the exclusion of painting for more than a decade.
In her seventies, using special handmade paints supplied free by a manufacturer who had taken her exacting standards as a challenge, she returned to painting and had another well-received solo show -- her first since 1937, and her last. She died in 1978. Her last major work was a painting of a decomposing fish head on the beach entitled Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Light.
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- O'Rourke, Rebecca. Reflecting on The Well of Loneliness. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-01841-2.
- Souhami, Diana (2001). Gluck: Her Biography, rev. ed., London: Phoenix Press. ISBN 1-84212-196-0.
