Rubies and Lemons

    One evening in Paris, the mid-1920s, at the end of the day, the young married couple sat in the living room of their apartment, talking quietly. The pair had met whilst art students and had married in 1904. Gerda Gottlieb was one of the leading illustrators of the day, in the Art Deco style. Her husband, Einar Wegener, painted cityscapes. Tonight, as often before, Gerda, who was a lesbian, turned to her husband and said, “I’m bored. Let’s have Lili visit us.” Einar replied, “Yes. I’ll go and fetch her.” He went to the bedroom. A little while later he returned dressed as his alter-ego, the beautiful Lili.     Einar had been dressing as a woman for many years. The Danish couple had moved to Paris so that he could live openly as a woman there, and Gerda could actively pursue same-sex relationships. Einar’s public cross-dressing began one day, during a life-drawing class that Gerda was conducting. The female life model failed to turn up and the roomful of ...

  It is through art that civilisation arrives – Elisabeth Frink.   Elisabeth Frink was born in rural Suffolk in 1930. Her soldier father saw action at Dunkirk during the Second World War, which broke out when Frink was not quite 9-years old. Her home was close to an airfield and the young girl often used to hear English bombers returning to base, sometimes crippled or in flames. Plane crashes were also a fairly frequent occurrence and Frink would venture out a day or two after the event to scavenge over the wrecks, gleaning bullet-cases, pieces of shrapnel and other detritus, as souvenirs. As wartime rationing was in place, Frink like a legion of others, trapped rabbits for the family table. Because of the airfield, German planes were a constant threat and on one occasion, the young schoolgirl had to dive under a hedge to avoid the strafing machine-gun fire of a German fighter plane. Aged 15, she was amongst the shocked audience in a cinema, watching in horror the first ...

                                                 Sodoma, Martyrdom of St Sebastian , 1525 .    ‘Cut this hideous story out of her brain’ In 1948 Tennessee Williams wrote the poem, San Sebastiano de Sodoma , which, as the title tells us, took as its inspiration Sodoma’s painting. Williams chose to adhere to the re-imagining of the legend, which had been steadily gaining popularity amongst gay aesthetes, namely, that Sebastian was the lover of Diocletian, the emperor who had ordered his execution. This version of events lent the story a subtext of bitchy gay power-play. At the end of the poem, Williams wonders (along with the mother of God), whether this rough-trade Sebastian is really suitable for entry into heaven; he clearly regarded the boy/saint as potential trouble.   How did Saint Sebastian die? ...