Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein) (1895-1978)

The Report Post, 1945 was painted during the Second World War when Gluck’s life was dramatically uprooted. Despite the political unrest shaking the world around her, she did not retract from her artistic creation but rather let it make a profound influence on her work, as she summarized in her biography: ‘people say to me, “what dreadful times to live in…” I don’t think so. They are inspiring and spiritual times’ (D. Souhami, Gluck: her biography, London, 1988, p. 186).

The present work depicts Edith, a distinguished journalist and daughter of the editor of The Lady, who became a lifelong friend of Gluck’s. During the war she was a fire warden in Steyning, and here Gluck depicts her seated, hunched over a book in the corner of her office surrounded by telephones and notices. Presumably at an early hour, an air of silence fills the interior, summoning up an unexpectedly peaceful scene – probably a short moment of calm before the hectic day resumes. Gluck herself said ‘I never pose a sitter. I spent much time watching them at work or at ease … and thereafter everything else comes into being at the dictation of what I have felt and seen’ (op. cit.).