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Lot Essay
Painted in 1932, Chromatic is among the most ambitious of the flower paintings for which Gluck, one of the most singular figures in Modern British Art, is best known. The picture began with an arrangement of white flowers, made up at Gluck’s home by Val Pirie, a trusted assistant to the society florist Constance Spry, whom a mutual friend, Prudence Maufe, had asked to present the artist with a floral display. Struck by the novelty of the composition, Gluck resolved to paint it immediately (D. Souhami, Gluck: Her Biography, London, 1988, pp. 89-91). The painting proved more exacting than anything Gluck had yet attempted: over the course of many months, flowers were renewed one by one as they wilted, until amaryllis, arums and anthuriums were held together – in all their subtle gradations of white – on a canvas of considerable scale. Born of that first meeting of flowers and paint, Chromatic records the quiet beginning of an attachment that would come to shape the artist’s life and work, and something of that early tenderness seems held within its pale, luminous petals.
The painting dates from a moment of growing renown for an artist who openly rejected the gender conventions of the day. Born Hannah Gluckstein in 1895, Gluck adopted a single, androgynous name and insisted on being known simply as ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, or quotes’ (D. Souhami, op. cit., p. 9). With cropped hair and tailored clothes, Gluck cultivated a striking and deliberate presence, one that remains as much a part of the artist’s legacy as the paintings themselves.
From that arrangement grew a close personal and professional relationship between Gluck and Spry, two leading figures in modern London society, each pursuing a distinct art yet profoundly shaping the other’s. The two became lovers, and their relationship would last until 1936. Spry had transformed flower arranging into an art form, bringing lichen-covered branches, wild arums and primrose-starred moss into the shop windows and drawing rooms of fashionable London. She drew Gluck into this world, introducing the artist to the decorator Syrie Maugham, whose celebrated all-white drawing room was widely admired and much imitated, while Spry’s own clients soon began to collect Gluck’s paintings. The first of many paintings inspired by Spry’s ‘genius for flowers’ (D. Souhami, Gluck: Her Biography, London, 1988, p. 89), Chromatic was much admired by Spry herself, who likened it to the work of the old Flemish masters and found in it ‘the delicacy and the strength, the subtleties and the grandeur of white flowers’ (C. Spry, Flower Decoration, quoted in ibid., p. 89). Indeed, Gluck’s own ‘Notes on Flower Painting’ reveal how deeply Spry’s ideas had taken hold: ‘Always give your flowers a setting in keeping with their essential characteristics, just as you would a portrait’ (quoted in ibid., p. 89).
Such a concern with setting extended to the way the paintings were shown. In 1932, Gluck designed the ‘Gluck frame’, a stepped white surround in which – as the artist explained – ‘the usual essence of all frames was reversed and instead of the outer edge dominating, it was made to die away in the wall and cease to be a separate feature’ (quoted in S. Martin, op. cit.). When Chromatic took pride of place in Gluck’s exhibition at the Fine Art Society that November, it hung in such a frame, within a gallery transformed into the ‘Gluck Room’, whose white panelled bays and pilasters echoed the receding planes of the frame itself. The Times saw in this arrangement an answer to ‘how to hang pictures in the typically “modern” interior, with its severe lines and plane surfaces’ (quoted in ibid., Art and Identity, footnote. 26), and photographs of the installation (illustrated) show Chromatic as Gluck intended it to be seen: picture, frame and room conceived as a single, harmonious whole.
The 1932 exhibition marked a defining moment in Gluck’s career. Of the twenty-nine paintings exhibited, eleven were studies of flowers, and at the centre of the display hung Chromatic, the work around which the exhibition was conceived. Spry herself filled the galleries with flowers, and in her arrangements – set beside the paintings they had inspired – the exhibition bore quiet witness to the closeness between the two: a meeting not only of two artists, but of two lives. The exhibition did much to secure Gluck’s standing as an artist of serious consequence. Chromatic was subsequently acquired by a private collector; Gluck later sought to repurchase it but was refused, an indication of the particular significance the work held for the artist.
Chromatic captures a remarkable moment in the cultural life of inter-war London. Alongside Spry and Syrie Maugham, Gluck stood at the centre of a circle whose flowers, interiors and paintings helped to define a new, modern sensibility. Yet Gluck remained, above all, an individualist: drawing on the world that Spry and Maugham had shaped while pursuing a vision entirely the artist’s own. Chromatic is at once a product of this brilliant circle and a declaration of Gluck’s independence within it.
The painting dates from a moment of growing renown for an artist who openly rejected the gender conventions of the day. Born Hannah Gluckstein in 1895, Gluck adopted a single, androgynous name and insisted on being known simply as ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, or quotes’ (D. Souhami, op. cit., p. 9). With cropped hair and tailored clothes, Gluck cultivated a striking and deliberate presence, one that remains as much a part of the artist’s legacy as the paintings themselves.
From that arrangement grew a close personal and professional relationship between Gluck and Spry, two leading figures in modern London society, each pursuing a distinct art yet profoundly shaping the other’s. The two became lovers, and their relationship would last until 1936. Spry had transformed flower arranging into an art form, bringing lichen-covered branches, wild arums and primrose-starred moss into the shop windows and drawing rooms of fashionable London. She drew Gluck into this world, introducing the artist to the decorator Syrie Maugham, whose celebrated all-white drawing room was widely admired and much imitated, while Spry’s own clients soon began to collect Gluck’s paintings. The first of many paintings inspired by Spry’s ‘genius for flowers’ (D. Souhami, Gluck: Her Biography, London, 1988, p. 89), Chromatic was much admired by Spry herself, who likened it to the work of the old Flemish masters and found in it ‘the delicacy and the strength, the subtleties and the grandeur of white flowers’ (C. Spry, Flower Decoration, quoted in ibid., p. 89). Indeed, Gluck’s own ‘Notes on Flower Painting’ reveal how deeply Spry’s ideas had taken hold: ‘Always give your flowers a setting in keeping with their essential characteristics, just as you would a portrait’ (quoted in ibid., p. 89).
Such a concern with setting extended to the way the paintings were shown. In 1932, Gluck designed the ‘Gluck frame’, a stepped white surround in which – as the artist explained – ‘the usual essence of all frames was reversed and instead of the outer edge dominating, it was made to die away in the wall and cease to be a separate feature’ (quoted in S. Martin, op. cit.). When Chromatic took pride of place in Gluck’s exhibition at the Fine Art Society that November, it hung in such a frame, within a gallery transformed into the ‘Gluck Room’, whose white panelled bays and pilasters echoed the receding planes of the frame itself. The Times saw in this arrangement an answer to ‘how to hang pictures in the typically “modern” interior, with its severe lines and plane surfaces’ (quoted in ibid., Art and Identity, footnote. 26), and photographs of the installation (illustrated) show Chromatic as Gluck intended it to be seen: picture, frame and room conceived as a single, harmonious whole.
The 1932 exhibition marked a defining moment in Gluck’s career. Of the twenty-nine paintings exhibited, eleven were studies of flowers, and at the centre of the display hung Chromatic, the work around which the exhibition was conceived. Spry herself filled the galleries with flowers, and in her arrangements – set beside the paintings they had inspired – the exhibition bore quiet witness to the closeness between the two: a meeting not only of two artists, but of two lives. The exhibition did much to secure Gluck’s standing as an artist of serious consequence. Chromatic was subsequently acquired by a private collector; Gluck later sought to repurchase it but was refused, an indication of the particular significance the work held for the artist.
Chromatic captures a remarkable moment in the cultural life of inter-war London. Alongside Spry and Syrie Maugham, Gluck stood at the centre of a circle whose flowers, interiors and paintings helped to define a new, modern sensibility. Yet Gluck remained, above all, an individualist: drawing on the world that Spry and Maugham had shaped while pursuing a vision entirely the artist’s own. Chromatic is at once a product of this brilliant circle and a declaration of Gluck’s independence within it.