Laughing Torso

"This is an interesting book. It’s Nina Hamnett’s memoir of being in Paris during the period covered by Bohemian Paris although Hamnett doesn’t appear in Bohemian Paris . This is a first-hand account of what it was like to be in Paris during that period. Hamnett was a female artist who came from Wales. She went to London and became an artist’s model. She modelled for Roger Fry, the artist and critic—a sort of tastemaker for the Bloomsbury Group. She also modelled for Augustus John, who was probably the most infamous artist in England at the time. She migrated to Paris and became very good friends with Modigliani, whom she met by accident in a café. She modelled a lot for him. He absolutely adored her. Later in life, when she got very drunk, she would boast that Modigliani said that she had the best tits in Europe, and pull her jumper up to show them to everyone. “Paris was full of foreign nationals, people like Modigliani, Brancusi, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Picasso etc. It was a real melting pot of talent” At the time she was a very well known figure and when you read the book it gives you a great sense of Paris’ café society. She talks about the café owners and how they operated. You get a really good nuts-and-bolts account of what it was like to be there. And it’s very well written. When it came out it was well reviewed and something of a best seller. After Modigliani died she worked in his studio and became convinced it was haunted by his ghost. There are a lot of interesting stories in the book about strange occurrences that happened in the studio, that she took to be signs from Modigliani in the afterlife. She was also good friends with Rodin and was sued by the infamous Satanist, Aleister Crowley, over what she said about him in the memoir—I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the details. What’s interesting about Hamnett is not just that she’s an artist, muse and model, but she also links bohemian Paris to bohemian London. She talks a lot about both cities—the pluses and minuses of working and living in each. You get a real sense of this intellectual and cultural exchange going on between the two cities. I’ve become more and more interested in trying to dig out these accounts written in the first person, because there’s a lot of information in them that art historians have just ignored, or never registered. Bad art historians tend to paraphrase what other art historians have said before, building upon an accepted narrative. It’s a rather like building a snowman, where different people just keep slapping bits on to it. But no one ever questions that maybe it’s a slightly asymmetrical snowman, with skewed foundations. It really needs to be knocked down and started all over again. No. She knew about the Parisian art world, she wanted to be part of it. She wasn’t alone. Lots of people made the same journey. There was a constant exchange, going back and forth, and a lot of that was mediated by women. Most books covering the period focus just on men, which is completely bizarre because the women were key to the whole scene. The muses saw it all through different eyes and often belonged to many different social circles. They tended to have quite a good, well-rounded overview of things because they were moving between all these different overlapping groups of people. In 1956. The Laughing Torso was published in 1935 and after the war she tried to capitalise on the success of her first memoir by writing a sequel called Is she a Lady? That was a flop. Her death is something of a mystery. Some say it was suicide and that she jumped from her apartment window, others that it was an accident. It was very hard to be taken seriously and make a living as a woman in the art world. Once your ‘looks had gone,’ people didn’t want to know you. It’s not just Nina Hamnett. People would often remark how Lucian Freud’s ex, Caroline Blackwood (who later married the poet, Robert Lowell) ‘lost her looks’ later in life. But what’s that got to do with anything? It does not affect her talent. But women were judged that way. It was a very misogynistic world. You also have to remember that it costs money to spend the day indoors heating your home. Quite a lot of poor people hung around in bars or cafés all day to keep warm until it was time to go to bed. People inadvertently became alcoholics because they slowly drank all day, every day. So Hamnett’s gradual slide in to old age, alcoholism and poverty was an all too familiar one."