♪ As we got in the cab
♪ I asked her for her name
♪ and when she gave it me, her and mine it was the same
♪ so I lifted up her veil for her face was covered over
♪ to my surprise it was my wife i took down to Lamorna
In 1949 British artist Ithell Colquhoun arrived in Lamorna
A small village on the edge
of England known for fishing, granite quarries and as a magnet for artists
Drawn by the cliffs, coves
and Celtic standing stones of West Cornwall, she soon discovered the area's lesser-known charms
Colquhoun wrote:
"Miss Moss and Mme Nijhoff lived together
Miss Moss had long ago had a relationship
with Miss Palmer who lived with Mrs Dodd
Miss P had also had a relationship with Miss Gluck
Mme Nijhoff went to Holland
Miss Moss had an affair with a mutual friend of theirs who lived
in a caravan at Trecastle
They wanted this to be permanent but Moss turned her down
Moss suggested living with Janet
but Janet turned her down
Mme Nijhoff came back"
Colquhoun's chronicle of queer relationships seems to be written with the voice of an outsider looking in
Yet she once wrote about her love for a woman carrying her in swirling torrents towards the lesbian shore
Was it these same torrents that brought her to West Cornwall
and into an avant-garde queer network thriving on these wild shores?
This is the story of Lamorna Cove
the heart of queer Cornwall and three artists who lived and loved there
British painter and sculptor Marlow Moss came to Lamorna in 1941 with their partner
writer Netty Nijhoff
As a Jewish and queer person in the early years of the Second World War
Moss fled to Cornwall from France after over a decade working in continental Europe
They lived on and off in Lamorna until their death in 1958 when Moss's ashes were scattered in the Cove
Moss's work is abstract, bold, difficult, totally modern
Unfortunately, art history tends to
place Moss in the shadow of Piet Mondrian even though Moss actually influenced his work on at
least one occasion
He was shocked by the way Moss introduced double lines to their abstract canvases
Moss told Mondrian that a single line grid was a "conclusion and a restriction"
"I am no painter I don't see form I only see space, movement, and light"
This sums up Moss's approach to life. Their arrival in Lamorna introduced the locals to a bold
new look on and off the canvas
Moss abandoned a feminine birth name around 1920 and adopted
the gender-neutral Marlow
From their thirties until their death, Marlow presented in masculine
and rather dramatic attire
Their sophisticated tailoring, riding crops and a short back and
sides challenged gender norms
"I destroyed my old personality and created a new one"
This transformation was totally queer and totally modernist
and it was their uncompromising authentic approach that made Moss's life in Lamorna bittersweet
"I'm very much alone in my ideas here, I've seen Ben Nicholson just once. Things aren't going well
between us, I don't even know why... so I never see him"
For reasons we can only guess, Moss's
invitations to tea and overtures of friendship to artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth
in the nearby modernist haven of St Ives went largely unanswered
Moss was a generous neighbour
who would give all the village children sweets at Christmas
But the kids also spied on Moss
while they were swimming, trying to work out their sex
Their butch presentation was radically brave
at the time, and even today
Telling Moss's story asks us to consider our concepts of gender and
how we perceive queer icons of the past
While Moss may well have been happy being described
with these binary pronouns of their time we can never be sure. Neutral pronouns are often used
when referring to them an option which honours all possibilities and draws no conclusions
After all
It was Moss who said that "art is as life forever in the state of becoming"
A sentiment no doubt shared by their neighbour and fellow queer trailblazer
the artist exclusively known as
Gluck
"I am flourishing in a new garb, intensely exciting Everybody likes it, I hope you will like it because
I intend to wear that sort of thing always"
Gluck
A one-word name with "no suffixes, no prefixes, no quotes"
In 1916 Gluck traveled to Lamorna with their friend, fellow artist and possibly their
lover Craig, another self-chosen single-word name free from the constraints of gender
Gluck's mother, none too happy with these developments, called Craig "a pernicious influence"
and labelled the artist's infatuation with each other as "a kink in the brain"
As recent graduates eager
for new experiences Gluck and Craig's arrival in Lamorna's artist colony must have been a
life-changing adventure, a world away from the uptight high society dinner parties of their youth
The iconic painting Medallion, Gluck's self-portrait with Nesta Obermer is a
rare example of the artist with a female lover Traditional in style, radical in its representation
a striking yet intimate portrait of a couple of queer figures in love
If art and life are intertwined in Moss's work art and love are constant companions in Gluck's
Upper-class, wealthy and business-minded, Gluck invented and patented their own bespoke frame, won
a decade-long legal battle that reformed the accepted standards for oil paints
and challenged another artist's use of the name Glück with an umlaut
Gluck said their paintings of the Cornish countryside "were the first that truthfully showed the
immediate impression one gets there that of very little land and great expanses of sky"
Flora's Cloak is an empowering depiction of a woman set in this great expanse
the Cornish landscape transformed into a magical and mythical space
The sea, cliffs, coves and sky of Lamorna were a mysterious psychic space
as well as a physical landscape for Gluck but also for our final subject
Ithell Colquhoun
Here to exist is enough, one scarcely needs diversion for the slightest happenings seem full of a crazy zest
By the time Ithell Colquhoun moved to Lamorna she had already lived in Paris, traveled through Greece
Tenerife, Corsica, had split from both her husband and from the British Surrealists
She was heavily
influenced by the surrealist style throughout her career but the strict rules of the movement
jarred with Colquhoun's interest in the occult and she was pushed out because of it
Colquhoun lived a rather solitary life in Lamorna
She rented a ramshackle hut with no modern facilities
which she named Vow Cave This became her home and studio and Lamorna Valley, her inspiration
"Valley of streams and moon leaves, wet scents and all that cries with the owl's voice
influences, essences, presences, whatever is here I share this place with you
for all you give me I offer thanks"
Colquhoun was fascinated by the occult, Celtic mysticism and the
mythical androgyne, a two-faced creature who existed at the beginning of creation combining both male
and female traits
This mystical view of nature is laid bare in the painting Scylla
Figurative but oddly dreamlike, beautiful and androgynous, the viewer becomes the legendary Scylla herself
gazing through a pair of thighs or perhaps a pair of narrow phallic cliffs at an oncoming ship
Though she never publicly identified as lesbian bi or pansexual, Colquhoun wrote about sapphic desire
for the Greek woman Andromaque Kazou
"I did not try to analyze the stirrings within me
I could not reflect upon them while thus borne along; it was not until later and in calmer intervals
that I recognised this torrent that swirled me onwards. I was being carried indeed to the lesbian shore"
Gluck said if ever a country was pixelated it's Cornwall
Lamorna's queer trailblazers held a love for Cornwall that was deep and enduring
if perhaps romanticised
The freedom to live authentically in a rural village
while traveling often to London and Paris was made possible by their financial resources as
upper middle-class artists Gluck, Moss and Colquhounwere afforded a social mobility rarely enjoyed by
the local population and a world away from the lives of their queer working-class neighbours
It's these queer Cornish voices, some named in the writings of Ithell Colquhoun who were rarely
documented Who was Miss Palmer? Who was Janet?
Still, this drive to seek connection, community
and reinvention outside of your birthplace and class structure is a queer rite of passage
Each found an opportunity to live truthfully and with greater privacy in Lamorna
This small fishing village, not far from Land's End, was their shared passion inspiration and refuge