The Rare and the Beautiful: The Art, Loves, and Lives of the Garman Sisters PDF
Preview The Rare and the Beautiful: The Art, Loves, and Lives of the Garman Sisters
T H E A R E A N D T H E B E A U T I F U L The Art , Loves , and Lives of the Garman Sis t ers C R E S S I D A C O N N O L L Y To my sister and brothers Sarah Bradbury Simon Craven Matthew Connolly Contents Preface viii O N E The Black Country 1 T W O London 19 T H R E E Sunsets etc 41 F O U R Magazines 61 F I V E The Summer School of Love 79 S I X Wing My Heart 101 S E V E N Martigues 125 E I G H T Peggy and the Party 145 N I N E You Beautiful Creature 167 T E N The Poet and the Painter 181 E L E V E N Lady Epstein 203 T W E L V E Our Winter Season 229 T H I R T E E N Dealing with Dreams 247 F O U R T E E N Nothing in Moderation 261 A P P E N D I X Theo and Esther 277 Sources 287 Bibliography 297 Acknowledgments 301 Photograph Credits 303 Index 305 About the Author Other Books by Cressida Connolly Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Preface arly in the autumn of 2000 I went to see the New Art EGallery in Walsall, West Midlands, less than an hour from where I live. The gallery had been much in the news, partly because it was a spectacular new piece of modern architecture, and partly because it was home to a remarkable collection of art, the Garman Ryan Collection. Here were works by Monet, Van Gogh, Constable, Rembrandt, Degas, Rodin, Dürer, Cézanne, Burne-Jones. There were sculptures, votive objects, and vessels from Africa, Asia, South America, and the islands of the Pacific. Twentieth-century art was especially well represented, with works by Picasso, Modigliani, Matthew Smith, Augustus John, Lucian Freud, and Gaudier-Brzeska. At the nucleus of it all were a number of family portraits by the American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein. From the catalogue I learned something of the personalities who had assembled the collection before giving it to the region. One was an heiress, the little-known American sculptor Sally v i i i Preface Ryan, and the other was Epstein’s widow, the alluring and mysterious Kathleen Garman. Included in the catalogue was a vivid personal account by the Epsteins’ daughter Kitty Garman. This name rang a bell. I remembered that Kitty Garman and her first cousin Michael Wishart had been friends of my parents. Their world had overlapped with that of the Garmans and their children: Chelsea in the 1930s, nights at the Gargoyle Club in Soho and afternoons sitting for Augustus John, lunches with Al- dous Huxley in the south of France before the Second World War. Later, when I spent time in the archive where Kathleen Ep- stein’s books are housed, I found many books which I recognized from home. There were the baby blue covers of Scott Mon- crieff ’s translation of Proust; an austere navy-and-gold set of Henry James; signed first editions of T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, and Allen Tate; and the fading Chinese yellow binding of the Larousse Mythology, with its introduction by Robert Graves. Another link was that some of the Garmans had settled near the sea by the South Downs in Sussex, where I grew up. I sent a letter to Kitty Garman to see whether I might obtain her permission to write something about her mother. At that point I had only an article in mind. Kitty Garman replied that she’d always thought that someone should write a book about her mother, and her mother’s sisters. It turned out that Kathleen Garman had had six sisters, each of whom had led a remarkable life. The Garmans were strikingly beautiful, artistic, and flam- boyant. Mary, the eldest, had married the poet Roy Campbell and become the lover of Vita Sackville-West before settling in the Mediterranean. Another sister, a willowy lesbian given to wearing an aviator’s hat, had been possibly the only female lover i x
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