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pazzesco · 6 months

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Queen of Bohemia

Amedeo Modigliani -Jeune Femme (Nina Hamnett) - 1917

Roger Fry - Nina Hamnett avec une guitare - 1917

Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was a Welsh artist and writer, and an expert on sailors’ chanteys, who became known as the Queen of Bohemia. Flamboyantly unconventional, and openly bisexual, Hamnett once danced nude on a Montparnasse café table just for the “hell of it”. She drank heavily, was sexually promiscuous, and kept numerous lovers and close associations within the artistic community. Very quickly, she became a well-known bohemian personality throughout Paris and modelled for many artists. She went on to have a love affair with Brzeska, and later with Amedeo Modigliani and Roger Fry.

Amedeo Modigliani - Woman with Red Hair (Nina Hamnett) - 1917

Nina Hamnett - Self Portrait - 1913

British painter, designer, and illustrator, famous more for her flamboyant bohemian life than for her work. She was born in Tenby, Wales, the daughter of an army officer, and studied at various art schools in Dublin, London, and finally Paris. On her first night there she met the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. He introduced her to Picasso, Serge Dighilev, and Jean Cocteau, and she went to live at the famous artist’s residence of La Ruche which housed many other Bohemian artists and modernist writers. It was there that she met the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian (also known as Edgar de Bergen), whom she married in 1914. She seems to have been relieved when he was deported as an unregistered alien during the First World War; they never saw one another again.

Like other women at the time reveling in a newfound independence, she had her hair cut short in a ‘crophead’ style (what we would now call a basin cut) and she wore eccentric clothing:

"I wore in the daytime a clergyman’s hat, a check coat, and a skirt with red facings … white stockings and men’s dancing pumps and was stared at in the Tottenham Court Road. One had to do something to celebrate one’s freedom and escape from home."

Roger Fry - Nina Hamnett - 1917

Nina Hamnett - "Rupert Doone" - Dancer - 1922

Nina Hamnett - "Dolores" - 1931

From 1913 to 1919 Hamnett worked for Roger Fry's Omega Workshops; Fry (with whom she had a love affair) painted several portraits of her. In the 1920s, she spent much of her time in Paris, where once again she knew many leading figures of the avant-garde, including Jean Cocteau and the composers Satie and Stravinsky.

During the 1920s (and for the rest of her life) she made the area in central London known as Fitzrovia her home and stamping ground. This new locale for arty-Bohemia was centred on the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street which she frequented along with fellow Welsh artists Augustus John and Dylan Thomas, making occasional excursions across Oxford Street to the Gargoyle Club in Soho.

Nina Hamnett - Illustrated Osbert Sitwell's "The People's Album of London Statues" - 1927

However, she often returned to London for exhibitions of her work, which included portraits, landscapes, interiors, and figure compositions (notably café scenes) in a robust style drawing on various modern influences. In addition to paintings, she made book illustrations (spontaneous pen-and-ink drawings), notably for Osbert Sitwell's The People's Album of London Statues (1928). From the 1930s the quality of her work declined, partly because of the influence of alcohol.

In 1932 she published a volume of memoirs entitled Laughing Torso, which was a best-seller in both the UK and the USA. Following its publication she was sued by Aleister Crowley, whom she had accused of practicing black magic. The ensuing trial caused a sensation which helped sales of the book, and Crowley lost his case.

Hamnett enjoying herself with some new friends

Her success in this instance only fuelled her downward spiral, and she spent the last three decades of her life propping up the bar of the Fitzroy trading anecdotes of her glory years for free drinks. She took little interest in personal hygiene, was incontinent in public, and vomited into her handbag.

Her ending was as spectacular as had been her previous life. Drunk one night she either fell or jumped from the window of her flat and was impaled on the railing spikes below.

#art #Nina Hamnett #Laughing Torso #Osbert Sitwell #artist #Queen of Bohemia #amedeo modigliani #paintings #drawings #roger fry #aleister crowley #picasso #hamnett #illustrations #modigliani

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blackswaneuroparedux · 11 months

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A work of art is a curious object. Isn't it infectious? . . . We - we the beholders or listeners or whatever we are - undergo a change analogous to creation. We are rapt into a region near to that where the artist worked, and like him when we return to earth we feel surprised ….Something has passed. I have been transformed towards his condition, he has called me out of myself, he has thrown me into a subsidiary dream.

- E. M. Forster

Portrait of E.M. Forster by Roger Fry (1866-1934). Dating from 1911, it was painted when Fry and Forster were neighbours in Surrey and was painted at Fry’s house in Guildford. The two men had become close friends some years before – Forster had included a character called Rankin based on the painter and art critic in an early draft of his 1908 novel A Room with a View. According to Fry’s biographer Matthew Sturgis, the picture came about as “an upshot of their happy friendship” and was painted at a time when the artist, “steeped in the Parisian experiments of Post-Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists”, was striving to “introduce something of their daring simplification and anti-naturalism into his own art". The faceting and angularities of Forster’s head (which Lytton Strachey called “triangular”) in the portrait were believed to be derived from Picasso’s 1909 portrait of Clovis Sagot, a work which Fry had included in the seminal exhibition dedicated to Manet and the Post-Impressionists held in London in 1910-11.

Earlier in 1911, Fry had been in Turkey with Clive and Vanessa Bell and had sent home a mass of textiles, mostly from Brusa, some of which featured in the portrait. Forster wrote to his friend Florence Barger that in the picture he appeared to be “a bright healthy young man, without one hand, it is true, and very queer legs, perhaps the result of an aeroplane accident, as he seems to have fallen from an immense height onto a sofa”. Forster, who actually bought the picture after it was shown in Fry’s solo exhibition at the Alpine Club Gallery in 1912, later gave it to Barger and it remained in her family for over 50 years without being shown in public. In 1984 it passed through London dealer Anthony d’Offay and it eventually came up for auctions via Bonhams in 2020. It was eventually sold for a record £260,000. The price for the portrait raised the bar for the Bloomsbury school at any auction.

#forster #em forster #quote #literature #art #art criticism #artist #literary criticism #culture #arts #society #how to look at art #bloomsbury set #blommsbury #auction #art auction #roger fry #fry #british

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peaceinthestorm · 2 years

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Roger Fry (1866-1934, British) ~ A London Garden, 1924

[Source: LotSearch]

#roger fry #british art #at the garden

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fashionbooksmilano · 1 year

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Edith Sitwell

A Unicorn Amongs Lions

Victoria Glendinning

Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1981, 393 pages, 20 illustrated pages, 13 x 20 cm, ISBN 0297778013

euro 30,00

email if you want to buy [email protected]

Freed from her unhappy homelife, Edith Sitwell set up home in a shabby London flat: she became one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Victoria Glendinning presents a biography of a woman known for her eccentricity and gothic appearance.

Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, this is the definitive portrait of a spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman.

'The excellence of Mrs Glendinning's book is that it remains wise and balanced while never sacrificing critical edge... It's hard to imagine a life of Edith Sitwell that could surpass it.' John Carey, "Sunday Times"

orders to: [email protected]

twitter: @fashionbooksmi

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16/02/23

#Edith Sitwell #Cecil Beaton #Roger Fry #Alvaro Guevara #eccentricity #gothic appearance #Sargent #Tchelitchew #Pavel Tchelitchew #Lady Machbeth #1920s pioneering poets #fashionbooksmilano

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portraituresque · 1 year

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Self-Portrait (1928) by Roger Fry

#roger fry #self-portrait

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kirbykendrick · 1 year

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“Le Sacré-Coeur, Montmartre” (1920), Roger Fry

“First I have a think, and then I put a line around it." - Roger Fry, a member of London's Bloomsbury Circle

#art #I love art #follow art #artists on tumblr #Tumblr art blogs #painting #color #beauty #art quotes #Roger Fry #Bloomsbury Circle #famous artists #paintings #Virginia Woolf

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cupofmeat · 1 year

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"Margery", Roger Fry, 1913. Block printed linen.

#roger fry #textile design #pattern

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imkeepinit · 2 years

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Portrait of Bertrand Russell (1923) by Roger Fry

#art #painting #Portrait of Bertrand Russell #Roger Fry #1923 paintings

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internatlvelvet · 2 months

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Roger Fry and Duncan Grant

1911-1912

#duncan grant #roger fry #duncan and roger #1911 #1912 #1910s #duncan grant 1910s

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alwayswiselight · 3 months

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Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) is one of my heroes. He was openly homosexual at a time in England when it was illegal. Unlike Oscar Wilde, he never suffered the consequences of this. He was also a social activist who supported a woman's right to vote saying: "Men can never be free until women are." A remarkable individual.

I have the biography pictured above which is considered the best and most comprehensive one. The painted full-length portrait of 1894 is by Roger Fry and is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

#edward carpenter #gay activist #biography #book #portrait #roger fry

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boricuacherry-blog · 5 months

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#stephane mallarme #afternoon of a faun #poem #french #roger fry #1876 #1800s

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peaceinthestorm · 2 years

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Roger Fry (1866-1934, British) ~ View from the Terrace, n/d

[Source: Christie’s]

#roger fry #british art #view from the terrace

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brandycranby · 4 months

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what if stevie showed up on his motorcycle to pick you up after work and he had a big bag of greasy food with him bc he knew you'd be hungry? 🥺 what then?

#marriage thats what #take me body and soul french fry provider 🥰#feel free to rb about what stevie would bring you 🥺#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you

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d4rk-x-w0lf-17 · 5 months

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y'all sure love to yell "P*DO!!" whenever someone tries to ship shadow with someone (namely sonic), but ignore the conversation whenever these guys are brought up