Nina Hamnett: The Last Queen of British Bohemia
Born in 1890, in the small Welsh coastal town of Tenby, Nina Hamnett at first grew up in relatively comfortable family life. She attended a private boarding school until the age of 12, when she was moved on to the Royal School for Daughters of Officers of the Army, in Somerset, until 1905. But when her father was dishonourably discharged, she was forced to leave the school. Her aunts then took over the expense of her education. At 16, she was accepted at the Pelham Art School, and then gained entrance to the London School of Art, where she remained until 1910. While studying in London she had a love affair with the sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who cast a series of nude bronzes of her. She also befriended the poet Ezra Pound.
In 1914, aged 24, she travelled to Paris to study at Marie Vassilieff's Academy. On her first night in the city she gravitated to Montparnasse, Paris' bohemian quarter. She went to the cafe La Rotonde, where Amedeo Modigliani introduced himself to her as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". The pair began a stormy affair, the artist painting several portraits of her. Hamnett also formed close friendships with Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev, Constantin Brâncuși, and Jean Cocteau. She had an enviable knowledge of sailors’ sea shanties, and reduced French writer Andre Gide to fits of helpless laughter by singing a very vulgar one to him. Always forthright and unconventional, Hamnett once threw off all her clothes and danced naked on a table in a Montparnasse bar, “just for the hell of it.” Openly bisexual, Hamnett had many lovers of both sexes. She was a favourite mode for many artists working in Paris at the time. Whilst in Montparnasse, she also met her future husband, the Norwegian artist, Edgar de Bergen (later to be known as Roald Kristian). Their relationship only lasted three years, but they would remain married for forty more.
Back in London, Hamnett worked designing fabrics, clothes, murals, furniture, and rugs for Omega Workshops, the culturally ground-breaking enterprise directed by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant. Her paintings were widely exhibited during World War I - including at the Royal Academy in London, and the Salon d'Automne in Paris – and were well-received. She taught art at the Westminster Technical Institute from 1917 to 1918. She became friends with Augustus John; Dylan Thomas; Lytton Strachey; George Orwell; and Aleister Crowley, amongst other luminaries of the period. Walter Sickert featured her in several paintings. However, Hamnett’s star waned somewhat over the next few years.
Nina Hamnett, Rupert Doone, Dancer, 1922-3
From the mid-1920s until the mid-1940s, the area known as Fitzrovia was London's Bohemian centre – named after the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, which played host to innumerable, rambunctious, drunken gatherings of artists, writers, intellectuals and free-thinkers. This became Hamnett’s support network, as it did a great many artists.
In 1932, Hamnett published Laughing Torso, which documented her extraordinary Bohemian life. Once it became a celebrated bestseller, in both the UK and the US, the occultist Aleister Crowley sued Hamnett and the publisher for libel, over allegations raised in the book that he had practised black magic. He lost the case, but Hamnett was troubled by the experience for the rest of her life.
Roger Fry, Portrait of Nina Hamnett, 1919
Alcoholism would eventually take control of Hamnett’s life, reducing her artistic endeavour and output to zero. The late-1940s would see her barely-propped up at the bar – usually the Fitzroy Tavern – exchanging anecdotes from her illustrious past for the price of a drink. Destitute and living in squalor, and never one to turn down a drink or a generous stranger, she would often stumble home at closing time to continue the evening at her filthy, ramshackle apartment, bringing whomever was still on his feet with her. One such intrepid adventurer wrote:
At three in the morning I crawled up the stairs and climbed into Nina’s bed with all my clothes on. She was bundled up in the other room. I heard a mouse poking his nose around her drawings. I struck a match and noticed little deposits of rat turds on the bed. The pillow crawled. I started to scratch myself. From the next room I heard the moan of a woman who finds a man too heavy, too pleasurable, or herself delighted. Nina had a man in bed. The bed squeaked. She kept up a running line of chatter. More moans. I decided to leave.
Around this time, her landlady took her to court, claiming that Hamnett had regularly pissed in the hand-basin of her flat. The case was dismissed because the judge could not see how it was anatomically possible for a woman to undertake such an action.
In her final years, Hamnett spent her days wandering from bar to bar, giving away small drawings, or telling anecdotes about her life, in exchange for drinks. She acquired the nickname 'Dirty Nina'.
In 1953, Hamnett, now in rapidly declining health, published a second autobiographical book: Is She a Lady?
And, three years later, Nina Hamnett was dead. There is some speculation about the circumstances of her death. She either fell (which is rather unlikely), or she threw herself (which is entirely feasible, given her last words on Earth) forty feet from her apartment window. She was impaled upon the railings at the front of her building and, still alive, had to be strenuously manoeuvred off them by rescuers. Her last words were, “Why don’t they let me die?”
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