In the summer of 1913, a young Welsh painter with a neatly cropped bob went to the West London studio of a similarly aged French sculptor with a little beard and took off all her clothes. She slowly turned while he sketched her body from different angles. After a while he told her it was her turn to draw, and took off all his clothes. When she had finished three sketches of his nude body, they had some tea.
This is how, in the chapter ‘I Come of Age’ of her autobiography, Nina Hamnett describes the creation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s Torso. According to Hamnett, Gaudier-Brzeska created two marble sculptures from the drawings he made that day. One was chiselled from a ‘large piece of marble’ lying around in his studio, the other from the offcut of a tombstone, stolen by Gaudier-Brzeska from a stonemason’s yard in Putney while Hamnett kept watch.[1]
Torso is pearl-coloured and slight. A lithe woman’s body, gently twisting, her collarbone and ribcage protruding as though she is holding her breath. She is headless and limbless like a classical statue, but deliberately so, rather than a remnant of a formerly whole self. From afar the sculpture looks like a piece of uncarved ivory. Up close it is discernibly a human form, but only just: an exercise in concision. The original is in Tate’s collection, while a posthumous cast stands on a small semi-circular table in the Lower Extension of the Kettle’s Yard house.
As well as the marble torsos, there was a proliferation of bronze versions, based on two plasters that Gaudier-Brzeska gave to his artist-friends, Horace Brodzky (1885-1969) and Alfred Wolmark (1877-1961). A bronze cast from the Wolmark plaster is also in the Kettle’s Yard collection, on permanent display in the Library.
Another tribute to Hamnett took form in Gaudier-Brezska’s Dancer (1913, posthumous cast, 1967) – one of the best known and most loved works at Kettle’s Yard, with the original brown-painted plaster, again, in the Tate’s collection.
According to Hamnett, she and Gaudier-Brezska spent every Sunday afternoon together in the months after their first encounter. They ate roasted chestnuts, drank in Soho bars and walked down the street in matching jumpers, attracting the stares of passers-by. Gaudier-Brezska would sketch Hamnett (clothed, this time), opining about art and complaining about the ‘dirty bourgeoisie’. [2] When he drunkenly confided in her that his ‘sister’ Sophie was in fact his lover, she ‘choked down some sobs’.[3]
After the First World War broke out, they went one afternoon to Richmond Park, where they sat eating plums in gloomy silence while Gaudier-Brzeska sketched the passing ‘antelopes’ (referring to the red and fallow deer of the park). When Gaudier-Brzeska revealed his intention to enlist in the French army, they both sensed it would be the last time they saw each other. They were right. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in June 1915, aged just 23.
By the time Hamnett published her autobiography in 1932, Gaudier-Brzeska had been dead for over 15 years. But their relationship was so defining for her that the book’s title comes from the sculpture that symbolises it: Laughing Torso. In the first edition, a sketch of Torso is printed on the inside cover. Hamnett begins her memoir with a blunt, witty account of her own birth:
‘On February the fourteenth, 1890, I was born. Everybody was furious especially my Father, who still is. As soon as I became conscious of anything I was furious too, at having been born a girl; I have since discovered that it has certain advantages.’[4]
She does not elaborate on what these advantages are, but in the 300-odd pages that follow she chronicles a whirlwind of artistic adventures, slapstick anecdotes and heart-rending tragedies.
Alongside her own art-making, she modelled for several prominent twentieth-century artists, including Amedeo Modigliani, Roger Fry and Walter Sickert. Many of these relationships were collaborative and mutually admiring, but none more so than that with Gaudier-Brzeska. In her account, their very first encounter had been just as reciprocal as their modelling sessions. Speaking of the Allied Artists Exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1913, she reminisced: ‘I used to visit the show several times a week and when I was tired of walking round I sat down on a chair in the midst of [Gaudier-Brzeska’s] statues.’ One day she went upstairs and ‘to my delight found him standing in front of my pictures.’
The same episodes are also narrated in Savage Messiah (1931), Jim Ede’s book about Henri and Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska’s life together. The book is based on their ardent, fractious correspondence, which Ede acquired along with the entirety of their estates after Sophie died intestate in a psychiatric hospital in 1925. Hamnett is anonymised in this telling with her name replaced by dashes: ‘Miss Brzeska acidly suggested that Miss — would not be so poor if she did not smoke so much.’ This was a common authorial technique, particularly in the nineteenth century, for protecting the identity of people who were still living.
Ede’s tactfulness became erasure when the book was adapted to the screen. In the 1972 film adaptation of Savage Messiah, directed by Ken Russell, Hamnett disappears from the narrative altogether. Instead, Gaudier-Brzeska sculpts a much larger version of the torso from stone in a passionate frenzy all through the night. Nothing of the two artists’ collaborative drawing sessions and mutual admiration come into the film’s telling of how the sculpture was created.
This cultural oversight plagued Hamnett throughout the twentieth century, both before and after her death in 1956.
More recently, however, Laughing Torso has been described as a ‘neglected, misunderstood modernist masterpiece.’[5] The first-ever retrospective of Hamnett’s visual art was staged at Charleston in 2021, [6] and her presence persists at Kettle’s Yard.
As dancer, as torso, Hamnett may be anonymous but she is ever-present as part of the permanent displays in the house.
Footnotes
[1] Nina Hamnett, Laughing Torso (London, Virago Press, 1984), p.39
[2] Hamnett, Laughing Torso, p.40
[3] Hamnett, Laughing Torso, p.41
[4] Hamnett, Laughing Torso, p.1
[5] Jane Goldman, ‘Cross-Channel Modernisms and the Vicissitudes of a Laughing Torso: Nina Hamnett, Artist, Bohemian and Writer in London and Paris’ in Cross-Channel Modernisms ed. Claire Davison, Derek Ryan and Jane Goldman (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) p. 97
[6] ‘Nina Hamnett’, 19 May–30 August 2021, Charleston
https://www.charleston.org.uk/exhibition/nina-hamnett/ [accessed 12 September 2024]
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