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Category Archives: Art

Winning the Grand National – Life Imitating Art

The Smile of TriumphSaturday’s historic Grand National win by Rachel Blackmore on Minella Times, making her the first female jockey to win the race since it began in 1839, was thrilling in so many ways.

‘Now girls can dream’ Blackmore said afterwards in one of many press conferences.

But in fact Enid Bagnold, the novelist, had already had that dream, a dream which she wrote about in her 1935 classic novel National Velvet. Nine years later in wartime Hollywood, with palm trees appearing on the imagined Aintree racecourse, MGM turned the book into a hugely successful film, a box office hit that set the then unknown child actress Elizabeth Taylor firmly on the path to stardom. Taylor was a horse mad English child who happened to be living in America at the time. She was little more than ten when she first auditioned for the role and told me, 40 years later, when I was writing the biography of Bagnold, why getting the part had meant so much to her.  

I have interviewed Elizabeth Taylor twice and in November 2020, mid lockdown, I was asked by the BBC (with full Covid restrictions in force) about my memories of meeting the iconic actress.

Both my interviews were many years ago, ten years apart, but five minutes with Elizabeth Taylor is something never to be forgotten. I had fifty minutes twice. My reflections will appear, with impeccable BBC timing, this Saturday https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vc82

Rachel Blackmore’s win is a triumph but it is worth also remembering that sometimes Life imitates Art and Enid Bagnold had imagined just this scenario almost ninety years ago, when no female jockeys were allowed. Another triumph, but of the imagination.

 

Women in Public Places

Millicent Fawcett Statue

Walking around London these days it’s hard not to be struck by the number of large, often life-sized bronzes in public places. In a selfie obsessed generation, tourists can often be seen posing on the bench in Bond Street in between a rigid Churchill and Roosevelt. Yet a mere 3% of all statues in public places are of women. What a pathetically shocking statistic. And most of those are of Queens or allegorical figures. How can we expect children to grow up with a healthy view of diversity and range of careers open to them if all they see around them are images of successful men?

There is a major statue of Millicent Fawcett by the artist Gillian Wearing being prepared for Parliament Square to commemorate the anniversary of (some) women being granted the vote in 1918. Wearing’s design will show Fawcett in her prime, aged 50 in 1897, the year the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed. Some 52 other suffragist campaigners who fought for the right to vote for women will at least have their images engraved on the plinth.

About time too. But even that may not yet go ahead if planning permission is refused. I was asked this week to write in support of the statue to the City of Westminster Millicent Fawcett Statue

And I have just spent an hour or so talking about Virginia Woolf and the need to have her commemorated in Richmond-upon-Thames where she lived for about ten years from 1915- 1924 and I now live and work. You might think that Richmond would abound with blue plaques and busts of one of its most famous residents, one of the most famous women writers of the last century, a brilliant diarist and the founder of literary modernism. But no. Because Virginia suffered from severe mental illness throughout her life and made a remark, often quoted, about Richmond and death (she would, she said, if given the choice prefer the latter) it is assumed she hated living here. In fact it was a highly creative period for her. She wrote short stories in Richmond, her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out,’ was published the year she moved in and, together with husband Leonard Woolf, began publishing at the Hogarth Press, which they founded in Richmond.

My words were being filmed for a promotional video intended to help raise money for the Virginia Woolf statue, the first ever full figure life-size bronze depiction of her. There is a campaign underway to fund the statue, which has already been designed by award-winning sculptor Laury Dizengremel and which has Virginia seated on a bench. It will deliberately show a smiling, friendly Virginia, in the hope that young people will set next to her and feel something of her spirit and be inspired. For more information or better still to donate go to https://aurorametro.org/virginia-woolf-statue/

Prison and Fashion – an unlikely link?

Brian Stonehouse The Green Dress c 1955

Brian Stonehouse The Green Dress c 1955

As I start to write segments of my book on Paris in wartime (and beyond) it’s hard to get prisons out of my mind – especially Nazi ones. On Monday I interviewed the surviving daughter of a French resistante, one of the bravest imaginable who even tried to escape from Ravensbruck, possibly the only woman ever to try and escape from this particular hell hole. But she was re-captured and made to pay cruelly. Amazingly, she survived her punishment of torture, solitary confinement and a diet verging on starvation and was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in 1945. One of the most extraordinary documents which also survived, and which her daughter showed me during our interview, was her mother’s prison ID card, stamped with the dates of her various prison stays mostly in France but culminating in Ravensbruck. The barbarity is so hard to believe that these pieces of tangible evidence are more important than ever.

Before her arrest, this sophisticated Parisienne was noted for wearing elegant Lanvin suits while undertaking highly dangerous missions. And the unlikely link between prison and fashion, which will be threaded through my book, (pun intended), continued the day after this moving interview when I visited the unusual exhibition of works by the SOE secret agent and artist, Brian Stonehouse at the London gallery, Abbott and Holder until December 23rd.

https://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/brian-stonehouse-vogue/

Stonehouse, who moved to the US after the war where he became a Vogue illustrator, (one of the last before photography took over completely), may not be a household name in the pantheon of British secret agents. However, he played a critical role at one point in post war SOE history as his artistic skills enabled him to help identity four women he had seen hours before they were sent to their deaths at Natzweiler-Strutof camp, where he too was being held in the summer of 1944.  He had noticed the women’s arrival and, after the war, dredged his memory to produce sketches of them in order to try and help with identifying them. Within hours of their arrival, the women were given lethal injections of phenol in an attempt to drug them before their bodies were thrown in the crematorium. But one of the women, although drugged, apparently woke up when her body was flung into the furnace and began to struggle just enough to scratch the face of the German executioner forcing her back in. It is believed that this brave woman who resisted until the last, was Vera Leigh, a milliner before the war and another true Parisienne.

Stonehouse, a remarkable man who survived two and a half years of torture and solitary confinement himself in a variety of camps, is now being celebrated in London for his artistic talent. The Imperial War Museum holds many of the drawings he made on the liberation of Dachau and of the War Crimes Tribunal but these fashion sketches show he was a man of many talents. As for the numerous women whose stories I am unearthing, their bravery was second to none but they still cared about how they look. From the moment war was declared in September 1939 fashion was viewed in France at least as yet another small way in which German dominance could be resisted.

There is a book to accompany the exhibition – Brian Stonehouse: Artist,  Soldier, War Hero, Fashion Illustrator – by Frederic A. Sharf with Michelle Finamore

Museums and Women!

Blog on Museums and WomenAs book titles go, Museums and Women is about as boring as it gets. But in John Updike’s hands, of course it is emotional and sensuous, intellectual and erotic. It is the title of a short story (and subsequent volume) about a small boy first visiting a museum with his mother which morphs into a tale of adultery with a woman working in a museum. It is beautifully written.  It was left on a table for me to read at the club in New York where I am staying this week. I had plenty of other reading material with me but, waking early from jet lag, this fifty- year old volume spoke to me.

One of my favourite cities for visiting Museums is New York and today was no different. I was aware of the newly opened Memorial to 9/11 Museum on the site of the tragedy which announces that it “will display artifacts associated with the events of 9/11, while presenting stories of loss and recovery.”  There is an associated gift shop selling T Shirts and other memorabilia. Not surprisingly,  it is deeply controversial and it wasn’t a difficult decision for me to go instead to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. There I looked at all the children thronging the Egyptian galleries of the Met and wondered what their memories of childhood visits to admire ancient statuary would be. What could they possibly make of the faces with no noses, the bodies with no arms and magnificent jewellery?

I was there to see the amazing ball gowns designed by legendary 20th century Anglo-American couturier, Charles James. One of his 1950’s creations would cost around $12,000 in today’s money so they were a true “investment piece” as the phrase goes. James was born in England in 1906 to a British army father who never understood his creative son and treated him cruelly and a Chicago socialite mother, almost wealthy enough to be called a dollar princess and whose contacts among American high society were to prove invaluable when her son set out in Paris, first as a milliner.

He returned to England during the war but Post-war established himself in New York.

What’s not to like about a designer who says: “My dresses help women discover figures they didn’t know they had.”

Or this “All my work was inspired by women who were not merely lovely or rich but personalities and who seemed to share some of my own feeling about life in general.”

But it’s not just that I warmed to the man. The inaugural exhibition of the newly renovated Costume Institute Charles James: Beyond Fashion is spectacular technically and visually. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/charles-james-beyond-fashion/images

By using robotic electronic cameras, most of the ball gowns on display are individually deconstructed on an adjacent screen which explains and explores James’s design process, focusing on his use of sculptural, scientific, and mathematical approaches to construct his revolutionary and magnificent ball gowns.

The exhibition is not just entertainment for women. James himself saw himself as a creative artist on a par with many famous writers and musicians of the day. He is also an inventor. He needed women for his art but, as the Met curators rightly recognise, this story is not just about fashion, it goes way beyond fashion.

Charles James : Beyond fashion is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until August 8th 2014

What I really mean when I say I am going to Paris for a few days…

Why does nobody believe me when I say I am going to Paris to work? No, not shopping, I pronounce confidently, it’s a research trip.

‘Ha, ha! Have a nice holiday,’ they say as they wave me off. If I told people I was going to Berlin or Edinburgh, or even Geneva, they wouldn’t make the same automatic assumption.

Is it because of the latest shenanigans with President Hollande and his motorcycle helmet that people assume Paris is code for doing something else? Or is it historic, this attitude to Paris? Certainly a German soldier posted to Paris in 1941 rejoiced. Of course it was better than the eastern front. It had food, women, perfume and brothels.

A tiny part of me, of course, doesn’t mind the teasing. It’s why I am writing the book I am about women in Paris in the 40’s, both during the war and after it. I knew instinctively when I proposed the idea that what de Gaulle managed to do after the war for the whole of France was writ large in Paris. He ensured that the idea of Paris, the notion of a city, depended upon its reputation as a hub of beauty, gastronomy and fashion – and he succeeded magnificently. Paris is exciting. It is a breathtakingly beautiful city whose buildings, if not its honour, remained virtually intact after the war. The brothels may have been closed down (more or less…at any rate they were made illegal in 1946) but, seventy years after the liberation, Paris is still the city of romance par excellence. Parisian women look stunningly fashionable, just as they tried to do throughout the War.

Well, mostly they do.  The everyday reality is different for anyone who travels beyond the centre to the suburbs. Try telling anyone who spends days in the subterranean enclosure that is the Bibliotheque Nationale or the National Archives, which are located miles outside the centre in a desolate part of the city,  that you are going for a romantic holiday. The train from the airport to the centre – for those who do not use Eurostar – comes past a number of dreary suburbs including the hellish Drancy. How could anyone live in a town whose name is a byword for the evil perpetrated on French soil?  The metro is often crowded full of thousands of jostling, unfashionable, ordinary women going about their daily business as well as beggars and thieves just as in every European city. Tragically people throw themselves under trains here just as they do in London. I have noticed however that French seem not to treat the metro as a convenient place to have a smelly curry in the way do in London.

Fabulous shops in Paris, boutiques

So what about the shopping?  Well, there are some fabulous shops in Paris, boutiques which are not part of any chain selling wildly original objects displayed eye catchingly. There is a sweet smelling artisan chocolatier or patisserie on every street corner and an ‘artisan’ bag or belt maker on several others. Haute cuisine and haute couture are put within the tempting reach of every miserable passer-by. Right next door to my hotel is a fabulous designer hat shop but so far the prices have kept me just a window shopper. I just look longingly at the beautiful designer shops and popup shops and the unusual –objects- which-I-really- don’t-need-shops. I even found myself stopping outside a designer spectacle shop today and feeling deeply covetous. So far, other than the occasional gift, I have kept away.

ColetteBut yesterday my resolve cracked as my research took me to a new part of town – the Comedie Francaise archives are located not only right in the centre of town but in the Palais Royale, nestling among the historic arcades full of designer boutiques. The writer Colette lived here and ever watchful had a good view of several unsavoury comings and goings during the War. My hands were dangerously cold, I decided. I had to have some gloves, some Parisian gloves I convinced myself. And as my cosseted fingers recovered their feeling I recognised that these fabulously expensive gloves are just softer, sleeker, longer more supple than any gloves I have ever bought in London. No I am not acquiring a Parisian shopping habit. They are only gloves after all.