Leonide Massine Waiting for his Cue
Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein)
England, oil on canvas, 1925
Given by British Theatre Museum Association
S.83-1986
On display in room 104A
Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Hannah Gluckstein (1895-1978) defied conventional roles expected of young women of her class and time.
Family wealth allowed her freedoms in lifestyle and enabled her to pursue her love of painting. She trained at St John’s Wood School of Art and joined the artists’ colony at Lamorna, Cornwall. She painted landscapes, floral-pieces and portraits but did not identify with any artistic movements.
At 23 she started insisting on being known only as Gluck, cropped her hair and dressed exclusively in men’s clothing. Gluck lived openly with women throughout her life and some of her best known works are stylised floral-pieces inspired by the floral creations of her companion and lover Constance Spry.
Gluck’s friends and contemporaries included Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward. This painting shows the dancer Massine about to make his first entrance in a revue by Noel Coward and Philip Braham. It is in a ‘Gluck Frame’ (not visible in this photograph) – a frame designed and patented by Gluck, which became an integral part of Modernist and Art Deco interiors of the 1930s.
