Constructing Queerness in Gluck: "Flora's Cloak."

By Imogen Lee

In Flora’s Cloak (c.1923, fig. 1), also referred to as Primavera, Gluck reimagines a subject from classical mythology and creates an image of “knowing” queerness. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers and spring, is depicted naked - gliding across a rural landscape of fields, with a pool reflecting the blue sky. A cape of intricately rendered flowers frames the body in an apostrophic shape, bands of flowers wrapping around the left thigh and trailing from the foot. The low, rounded horizon line and the soft gradient of the sky that comprises the top four-fifths of the picture plane suggest that Flora towers above the earth. Within this transcendental atmosphere, Flora, despite the relatively small size of the canvas, appears powerful and divine. This divinity is underscored by the straw headdress, halo-like owing to its delineation with metallic gold lines. Within Flora’s Cloak, Gluck negotiates various artistic references, such as Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer (c.1914-16) and his portrait of Judith I (c.1901); Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c.1490) and Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (c.1477-1482).

Following Elizabeth Freeman’s conception of drag as “the act of plastering the body with outdated rather than just cross-gendered accessories,” enabling queerness “to talk about, indeed talk back to, history,” Gluck can be seen as playing out a similar act of drag by layering the work (the body) with historical citations in disruption of gender binaries. Rejecting her assigned feminine name Hannah Gluckstein to go by Gluck – “no prefix, no suffix, or quotes” - and conducting numerous romantic relationships with women, Gluck’s challenge to heteronormativity is inseparable from their art. Indeed, many works and themes directly correspond to relationships, such as her acclaimed series of floral arrangements and her involvement with the society florist, Constance Spry. As Simon Martin states, “there can be few figures in the history of modern British art as singular as Gluck.” Critics have commented on Gluck’s distinctive masculine clothing as much as her artwork. In the “Gluck: Art and Identity” exhibition, and catalogue, this aspect of dress is emphasised as key in negotiating and expressing identity.

Figure 1: Gluck, Flora’s Cloak, c. 1923, Oil Paint on Canvas, 664 x 410 mm, Tate, London.

In the early 20th century, patriarchal bourgeois family structures, which restricted women to a domestic role in the home, were challenged by the Women’s Suffrage Movement and wartime dependence on women’s labour. Participation in education and the workforce, alongside the rising popularity of sports and bicycles, led to changing expectations of femininity, and a fashion for “boyish slimness.” However, as Elizabeth Wilson highlights, Gluck’s gender presentation went beyond the New Woman or bohemian identity. While some scholars have considered Gluck as a masculine or ‘butch’ lesbian, others interpret them as non-binary. I use she/her pronouns to refer to Gluck here, as this was how she referred to herself. Nonetheless, I want to acknowledge the possibilities and complexity in talking about LGBTQ identities in history given changing figurations of non-normativity and queerness. While Gluck denied artistic influences throughout her career, consciously remaining an outsider to the artworld by not joining any avant-garde groups or conservative art societies, here she evidently engages and plays with various iconographies and traditions. This presentation of alterity in relation to the past and present exemplifies a distinctly queer practice.

Figure 2: Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer, 1914-16, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection. Image courtesy of Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada.

The vertical emphasis and the relationship between the body and flowers recalls the work of Viennese Secessionist Gustav Klimt. Merging Symbolist and Art Nouveau principles, Klimt portrayed the female body in erotic, decorative terms, often emerging from a field of flattened floral patterns. In Portrait of Elizabeth Lederer (fig. 2) flowers form a veil behind the figure, compositionally mirroring Flora’s Cloak. However, the artists approach the body very differently: as is more apparent in Klimt's nude subjects, such as Judith I (fig. 3), female bodies are offered up for visual consumption, characteristically objectified by the male gaze. The distortions of the body emphasise curving lines reflecting a visual fetishisation in Klimt’s representation of women.

Figure 3: Gustav Klimt, Judith I, 1901, Oil on Canvas, 84 x 42 cm, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

In some ways, Gluck’s representation of the body has more realism, such as in the modelling of the leg muscles. While the body is fully nude, except the headdress, the painting is devoid of the voyeurism that structures the male gaze; rather than being staged to access a fantasy for male pleasure, Flora’s Cloak instead grapples with the ambiguities and mutability of gender presentation. Contextualising this work as the only nude in Gluck’s oeuvre, which stresses the possibilities of clothing in fashioning gender identity and dissidence, Flora’s nakedness signifies a “genderlessness” underneath clothes, thereby exposing its inherent performativity. Elements of the body which are typically emphasised in representations of women, such as breasts or hair, are either absent or understated in Flora’s Cloak. This difference is undoubtedly tied to the queer positionality of Gluck, disrupting socially constituted frameworks of looking and power dynamics. Therefore, Gluck visually references Klimt yet provides an alternative to the sexualising gaze.

Figure 4: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490, ink on paper, Galleries of the Academy of Venice. Image accessed via Britanica.

Furthermore, rather than a conventional reclining or contrapposto pose for a nude, the stance of Flora seems to refer to Leonardo’s iconic Vitruvian Man (fig. 4). Flora’s feet point to the bottom corners of the pictorial frame, with one arm falling straight down to the thigh and the other outstretched at forty-five-degree angle. This unnaturalistic positioning, mathematical precision, and spacing of the limbs have led the work to be connected iconographically to the Vitruvian Man. In Leonardo’s attempt to codify the ideal proportions of the human body, a male figure is represented in two overlaid stances within a square and circle. Returning to Flora’s Cloak, the curved line of the flower cloak might then denote this circle. Vitruvian Man has come to epitomise Renaissance ideals, and a scientific or theoretical belief in the body as a microcosm for the macrocosm of the world. Through its citation here, Gluck locates the human body in a framework that avoids eroticising it, contrary to the nude tradition. Moreover, the echoes of Vitruvian Man, as an allusion to Christ with the cruciform position, furthers Flora’s Cloak’s sense of spirituality. Simultaneously, Gluck radically reimagines or queers this symbol, from being categorically coded as masculine – emblematised by a phallus at the centre of the frame – to become almost genderless: while Flora’s body has been discussed as feminine, the absence of body hair or genitals suggests it is perhaps not fully formed or doll-like in its androgyny, and thus there is an element of gender ambiguity. Consequently, Gluck’s reference to Vitruvian Man in Flora’s stance and composition suggests a transcendental relation between the body and the world, while destabilising its masculinity. Through this citation, Gluck symbolically challenges patriarchal forms of knowledge, queerly reimagining ways of being.

Figure 5: Sando Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1480, Tempera grassa on wood, 207 x 319 cm, The Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Finally, the subject of Flora’s Cloak locates it in relation to another principal renaissance work: Botticelli’s Primavera (fig. 5). Botticelli depicts the goddess Flora in an ensemble of classical figures (including Venus, the Muses and Mercury) in a tableau of the arrival of spring. To the right of Venus, Flora is presented stepping forward and reaching into her dress to scatter flowers. Typical of Botticelli’s representations of women, Flora wears a flowing dress, with long hair and a vacant facial expression. Where Botticelli’s Flora appears grounded and earthly, Gluck’s interpretation of Flora is otherworldly; from her facial expression to the curving horizon line, there is a pervading sense of strangeness – or queerness. Moreover, Botticelli’s Flora has inward facing body language, while Gluck lends Flora an openness through the outstretched hand and direct frontal pose. Employing the figure of Flora, as a symbol of idealised feminine beauty, Gluck queers it, like Vitruvian Man, by subverting gender signs. Additionally, Gluck relocates Flora from a dark forest grove to the Cornish landscape, which she described as “very little land and great expanses of sky.” Martin identifies Gluck’s trip to Lamorna in 1916 as the “most formative artistic experience” of her career, crucial in exploring her gender non-conformity away from her conventional family upbringing. Considering this, Cornwall, represented here through wide open skies, signifies potential for liberation and self-realisation. In this environment, the iconography of Flora and the changing of seasons, embodies a potential for transformation.

Ultimately, in this singular work Gluck engages multiple imageries and imaginaries in Flora’s Cloak but undermines those same signs to imbue her painting with queerness. Gluck draws imagery of sensuality, masculinity and femininity from both the recent and more distant past, and in a process of drag, reimagines Flora as a locus of difference and alterity.

Bibliography:

Bench, Paul. “Gluck: Art and Identity — A Symposium.” Visual Culture in Britain 2, vol 19 (2018): 279-28.

De la Haye, Amy and Pel, Martin eds. Gluck: Art and Identity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.

Doan, Laura. “Passing Fashions: Reading Female Masculinities in the 1920s.” Feminist Studies 24, no. 3 (1998): 663–700. 

Tate, “Flora’s Cloak,” accessed at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gluck-floras-cloak-t15334 30/10/24

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Halberstam, Jack. “Framing Queer British Art,” in Queer British Art 1861-1967, edited by Clare Barlow. London: Tate, 2017.

Kim, David Young. "Renaissance." Grove Art Online. 2003; Accessed 8 Nov. 2024. https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000071412.

Martin, Simon. “The Individualist Artist: Gluck and Modern British Art.” In Gluck: Art and Identity, edited by Amy de la Hay and Martin Pel. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.