Couples | NICOLE FARHI SCULPTURE

COUPLES
The Fine Art Society, London
20 November – 23 December 2020

The Fine Art Society in London is delighted to announce Couples, an exhibition of miniature busts of the leading voices of 20th century female liberation that guide us through the history of women’s sexual emancipation, sculpted and painted over the last seven months by Nicole Farhi MRSS. These couples were the independently minded women who became the driving force in the fight against female injustice, gender prejudice and conservatism.

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Photo: Iona Wolf

All photography below: Galia Serf

: Gertrude Stein [1874-1945]
Alice Toklas [1877-1987]

Gertrude Stein. American. Modernist writer and poet, patron of art. She moved to Paris, in 1903 where she met Alice B Toklas. They lived together until Stein’s death in 1946. Alice B Toklas wrote a famous Cook Book which is as much a memoir as a recipe book. Their favorite dog was a large white poodle called Basket.

: Eleanor Roosevelt [1884-1962]
Lorena Hickok aka Hicks 1893-1968].
E. Roosevelt dog Fala.

First Lady, E.Roosevelt was famous for her advocacy on behalf of liberal causes. She was instrumental in the drafting the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She met Hickok, a reporter with Associated Press during her husband’s Presidential campaign and lived with her lover in the White House during the twelve year of his presidency. Fala was the President’s loyal companion, after the President’s death Fala lived with Eleanor Roosevelt. He is buried alongside the president in The Rose Garden in Hyde Park New York.

: Vita Sackville-West [ l892-1962] left
Virginia Wool [1882-1941]
her white cat: Sappho.

V.Sackville-West an upper class English woman, married and mother of two sons, was a successful novelist and poet, she would create in later years beautiful gardens at Sissinghurs her home in Kent. She was well known for her passionate affairs both with men and women. V.Woolf met V.Sackville-West over dinner at some mutual friends, the attraction was immediate and reciprocal. Their relationship spanned 19 years and inspired Woolf one of her most famous book “Orlando’.

: Nina Simone left [1933-2003]
Lorraine Hansberry [ 1930-1965]

Nina Simone was an American singer, song writer, pianist and a civil rights activist. Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright, she crusaded strongly for social progress and against segregation. She became the first African American female author to have her work performed on a Broadway stage. ’A Raisin in The Sun’. She died tragically young at the age of 34. Nina Simone wrote this universally known song ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ 4 years after Hansberry’s death as a tribute to her friend.

: Djuna Barnes left [1892-1982]
Thelma Wood [1901-1970]

D.Barnes left the United States where she was born to become a major literary figure in Paris during the 20’s and 30’s. Although she left a small body of work, nevertheless her book Nightwood which fictionalised her lesbian relationship with Thelma Wood, became a cult classic of lesbian fiction. She belongs to the Modernist Literary movement alongside of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall. T.Wood was an American, a painter specialising in Silverpoint drawing.

: Jane Bowles [1917-1973]
Cherifa [Amina Bakalia]

Bowles American novelist and her husband Paul Bowles lived a very emancipated life-long before the social revolution of 68 normalised many sexual practices. They were both homosexuals, preferred to have sex with their own kind but remained married all their lives. They went to live permanently in Morocco in 1947. In Tangier, J.Bowles felt under the spell of Cherifa, a grain seller, who stripped her of all her possessions and destroyed her.

: Ella Maillart [1903-1997]
Annemarie Schwarzenbach [1908-1942]

Ella Maillart born in Switzerland, was an intrepid woman, a sailor and an International skier. Her passion was travel. From the 1930s onwards, she spent years exploring Asia, Soviet Turkestan, Manchuria, China. With her partner, the gifted Swiss poet Annemarie Schwarzenbach she went to Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and 1940 they drove from Geneva to Kabul. Their photographs, Maillart’s films and writings about their journeys, are fascinating records of life in those remote places. Maillart spent the war-years in South India with her cat Ti Puss while Schwarzenback carried on travelling as an accredited journalist to the Free Press. She died in a bicycle accident which cut a very short but prolific career short.

: Sylvia Beach French{1887-1982 ]left
Adrienne Monnier American [1892-1955]

They met in Paris at Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore “La Maison des Amis des Livres”. From that day on they never left each other, thanks to Monnier experience, in 1919, Sylvia Beach opened her own bookstore and called it Shakespeare and Company. She introduced English and American authors to the French. TS Elliot, James Joyce, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Poets, Writers, Painters, American, English, French met in her bookstore. It became the mecca of the cultural and intellectual life in Paris.

: Angela Davis [1944-]
Doron Samuel -Siegel [1974]

Angela Davis is an American writer and one of the most influential political activist in her country. She has spent the last 50 years campaigning for racial justice, prison reform and recognition of women contribution to the civil-rights struggle. She has promoted feminist thinking. Davis is legally married Doron Samuel Siegel since 2019, a professor of law specialising in civil litigation and restorative justice.

: Frida Kahlo left [1907-1954] with Fulang Chang her spider monkey
Chavela Vargas [1919-2012]

Frida Kahlo was a beautiful Mexican painter, an iconic figure in Mexico, she was known for many of her self portraits. Her work was inspired by her life, her lifelong physical pain due to an accident in her youth, her distress caused by her volatile marriage to famous muralist Diego Rivera. Her work was not only subjective, it referred to life and death, birth and termination, male and female, Mexican and European. Her love life was turbulent, she had affairs with both men and women. One of her lover Chavela Vargas was Costa Rican born Mexican singer. Often dressed in men’s clothing she was a powerful, free spirited outsider, she won multiple awards for her songs, My favourite song “La Llorona Anne Lister left [1791-1840 -Ann Walker [1803-1854].

: Anne Lister [1791 –1840]

An English landowner and diarist from Yorkshire, has often been called “ the first modern lesbian” for living out openly her sexuality. Dressed in black masculine clothing, she was nicknamed “Gentleman Jack “ by some Halifax residents. She had two passions: Shibden Hall, a historic Tudor House she inherited from her aunt and travelling. She considered herself married to a wealthy heiress Ann Walker. They lived together 20 years, spending their income improving the Hall, the lake and landscaping the park. At Lister’s death, Walker inherited Shibden Hall.

: Radclyffe Hall right [1880-1943]
Una Troubridge [1887-1963]

R.Hall was a notorious author as of one of the first Lesbian novels The Well of Loneliness, lived openly with her lover Una Troubridge a sculptor and translator. Together they bred dogs, and particularly French bulldogs.

: Hannah Gluckman [Gluck 1895-1978]
Nesta ]obermer [1893-1984].

Gluck, fought conservatism all her life, dressed in masculine clothes, and became famous for her portraits of society figures and her paintings of flowers. She showed her work exclusively from 1926 onwards at The Fine Art Society in London. Her most important relationship was with American Nesta Obermer who she immortalised in a dual portrait “Medallion”. It inspired me for making their busts

: Audre Lorde [1934-1992] and her life partner Dr Gloria Joseph

Audre Lorde [1934-1992] was an American writer, civil rights activist and the last year of her life was NY State poet laureate . She was an influential voice in the Black Arts movement. Gloria Joseph [1928-2019] born in the Caribbean, was the voice of proactive feminist thoughts of African/American women. She and Audre Lorde through their writings and campaigning fought together on issues of race, gender and sexuality.

: Janet Flanner right [1892 1978]
Solita Solano [1888-1978 ]

Janet Flanner American writer and journalist was Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine for 50 years. Her lifelong lover S.Solano was also a writer. They went to live in Paris in the early 1920. The American expatriate community was prominent in Paris at that time, Flanner played a crucial role, introducing her contemporaries to new artists including Picasso, Braque, Matisse. Gide, Cocteau.

: Natalie Clifford Barney left [1876-1972]
Romaine Brooks [1874-1970]

Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright, poet and novelist. She was best known for hosting a literary salon on the Left Bank of Paris after World War 1, this for more than 60 years. There, writers and artists from around the world were to meet. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Picasso, Gluck, Troubridge and many more. She was openly lesbian and published her poems to women as early as 1900. In 1916, she started a relationship with American artist Romaine Brooks which was to last 50 years. Many women who appeared in Brooks’s paintings were visitors of the Salon. The paintings mostly in a subdued tonal palette of gray form an impressive oeuvre of portraits of lesbians of that time.

: Berenice Abbott American left [1880-1943]
Elizabeth Mc Causland American [1899-1965]

Berenice Abbott studied photography in Berlin and in Paris where she became Man Ray’s studio assistant. As early as 1926 she was an independent photographer, specialising in portraiture. She photographed Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes. She met many of them at N.C.Barney’s Salon. Three years later back in the US, she spent the next decade capturing through her photographs New York City under construction. Abbott then moved on to photograph scientific phenomena. Elizabeth Mc Causland, her partner was one of the first American female art critics. She loved artists and the important social role of art. She wrote the text for “Changing New York”, Abbott’s iconic photographic documentation of the making of a modern city.

: Elizabeth Bishop left [1911-1979]
Lota de Macedo Soarez [1910 – 1967]

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short story writer. Made independent financially thanks to an inheritance from her deceased father, she travelled widely, lived in many cities and countries and wrote poems about her love of travel. She lived in France for many years and returned to the US in 1938. In 1951 she went to Brazil on a traveling fellowship, and ended up staying after she met Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soarez, a well-known landscape designer and architect. They were to live together for the next 15 years. Lota Soarez built for the two of them a magical modernist house in Samambaia above Petropolis. She is remembered for having envisioned and overseen the development in the center of Rio de Janeiro, Flamengo Park. The park is a large recreational public space where Marathons and cycling races start and finish. Flamengo Park is also the location of various museums: The Modern Art Museum and The Carmen Miranda Museum.

: Greta Garb left [ 1905-1990]
Mercedes de Acosta [1892 – 1968]

Greta Garbo born in Sweden became a star of the silent movie at the age of 19. She moved to the States to pursue her career and from the next 10 years, alongside Charlie Chaplin she became the most famous star in the world. She was one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and enigmatic actress, always reluctant to reveal anything about her private life. She started a romantic/turned friendly relationship with Mercedes de Acosta which was to last 30 years during which they exchange a hundred of letters. Garbo felt oppressed by de Acosta and eventually refused to carry on seeing her in fear of being outed as a lesbian. She wrote to her those famous words “I want to be alone”. De Acosta was an American playwright and poet. She was married to the portrait/painter Abram Poole while carrying on having affairs with famous women, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, Greta Garbo. At that time in The States many lesbian relationships couldn’t be lived out openly. This was frustrating de Acosta a great deal. She refused to hide her desires. Her openness and uncompromising expression of her sexuality did affect her carrier and her relationships.

: Marguerite Yourcenar left [1903-1987]
Grace Frick [1937-1979]

Zoe their favourite cocker spaniel Margueritte Yourcenar was a French novelist, poet and dramatist. She was the first woman elected to the French Academy. Multi linguist she translated Greet poets, Virginia Woolf and Henri James into French. In 1937 she met in Paris Grace Frick an American English professor. For the next 40 years Frick will be her companion, her unique translator. They moved definitely to Mount Desert Island in Maine America when the war broke up in Europe.