Anglotopia

Bruno Hat: Still Life With Pears, 1929

Abstracts for Distracted Aristocrats

Whiskey flowed and banter flew on the evening of July 23, 1929, as England’s young and chic descended on a gray-brick Westminster mansion abutting narrow Buckingham Street. Approach to Hat read the catalogue handed out at the door. Inside, rooms were hung with the most daring sort of modern art — vaguely cubist compositions painted on canvas or cork, some of them framed in heavy rope. They whispered “Picasso” but were signed “Bruno Hat.”

London’s smart young socialites and their literary compatriots — collectively known as “Bright Young Things” — were more accustomed to wild soirees than seemingly sedate art shows like this one for “England’s first abstract painter.” But, in pampered lives like theirs, always on the verge of Existential Boredom, any party would do, so long as the hosts were of the Right Sort. Their antics helped hide the impending world  collapse behind a veil of champagne bubbles and cigarette smoke.

10 Buckingham Street, site of the must-see 1930 Bruno Hat exhibition.

At the BYTs’ more typical galas, costumes were de rigueur, writes Mary Lovell in The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family: “A party where guests attended in ordinary evening clothes was just plain unsmart.” Clowns, Russia, book subjects and scanty clothing all provided inspiration for costume galas. In addition, “there were ‘baby parties’ at which guests arrived dressed as infants in prams or on hired donkeys, some even accompanied by reluctant nannies borrowed for the evening,” recalls Jessica Mitford in Hons and Rebels, a memoir. “There were treasure-hunts in which each guest was given a list of items he must retrieve: a lamppost, a St. Bernard dog, a policeman, a duck from St. James’s Park. The newspapers dubbed the participants the Bright Young People, and railed at these sons and daughters of the rich for fiddling while Rome burned.”

Rome itself was a theme, in fact, as was Greece. Hat-show hostess Diana Mitford Guinness dressed for one bash as Nero’s queen, Poppaea, in a daring bustier. Her friend, Brian Howard – another of Mr. Hat’s backers — hosted a BYOB bacchanalia in 1929 he dubbed the “Great Urban Dionysia.”

The Hat exhibition was just one of several soirées Diana hosted with her husband, brewery heir Bryan Guinness. Like the glittering young couple themselves, their parties left their mark. An 1860s-themed Guinness gala, for example, inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Vile Bodies, a satire that pinned and labeled the Bright Young Things like butterflies on display — irridescent, but doomed.

For this night, though, Waugh was discoursing on art, under the playfully punny pen-name, “A.R. de T.” “In overcoming for the first time what the artist himself admits as his extraordinary shyness, and opening her house to those who wish to see the works of Bruno Hat, Mrs.Guinness is attempting to do a service less to him than to the artistic public,” Mr. de T. enthused in the catalogue’s introduction to the previously unknown Mr. Hat.

Given boldface names like Mitford, Guinness and Waugh, and the posh Guinness digs as backdrop, news correspondents descended to cover the new artistic phenomenon. For an obscure, impoverished artist of Polish — or was it German — extraction (no one seemed to know), the mustachioed Mr. Hat was making a splash on the London scene.

But was there more to the scene than his refracted oils revealed?

Our Hosts

It was the “nuptials of the year” when, in January 1929,  the Hon. Diana Mitford married Bryan Guinness at fashionable St. Margaret’s church in Westminster. Guinness was not merely handsome and rich, but clever, friendly and poetically inclined, and he danced like a dream. He was clearly besotted with his 18-year-old wife, a celebrated beauty of their age and a lively wit. Diana was almost as delighted with Bryan as she was thrilled to have escaped the sheltered life of a country peer’s daughter.

Her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney, had frowned on the engagement, mostly on account of Diana’s youth. But their frugal tendencies, born partly of necessity, also contrasted sharply with the Guinnesses’ free-spending ways, as Diana’s sister Jessica recalled in Hons and Rebels. “We gathered that Muv’s main objection centred on the fact that Bryan was ‘so frightfully rich’,” Jessica wrote.

Indeed, Diana went from home-baked bread and home-sewn frocks to a lavish wardrobe of Paris couture, purchased right after her wedding. She briefly played at tracking expenses in a ledger from her mother, leather-bound “with my initials in gold,” she said. But the practice horrified her new mother-in-law, the eccentric Lady Evelyn. ‘How barbarous of Bryan,’ she exclaimed, assuming it had been her son’s idea. Diana “never thereafter returned to this barbarous occupation,” she admitted, even when she no longer had Guinness millions to splash around.

Spring found the newlyweds ensconced in their first home, near St. James Park, with a skittish dog named Rubbish. The dog was a gift from the bride’s father; the house was a gift from the groom’s. While “modest” by Guinness standards, 10 Buckingham Street (now Buckingham Place) wasn’t cheap: Its yearly property taxes alone, at £910, surpassed the income of most of Diana and Bryan’s friends, Lovell notes. It had been assembled from several townhouses in the early 1900s by renowned architect Edwin Lutyens, famed designer of the Thiepval memorial and other prestigious commissions. (A prior owner was Muriel, Countess de la Warr, descended from Delaware’s founding family.)

Lady Evelyn, product of an American textile fortune, was that rare mother who worried that her son was underspending his allowance while at university. Like their house, most of the young couple’s furniture came from his family. As Lady Evelyn’s decorating tastes favored kitschy medieval flourishes and ersatz “aging” (in her own manors, she served meals on pewter and encouraged smoky fires to appropriately blacken the panelling), she generously provided heavy items like an austere refectory table for the dining room. Pewter jugs and Jacobean glasses served as ornament. Only in subsequent homes would Diana exercise her flair for airy, pastel rooms and light, Edwardian furnishings.

"It" girl, Diana Mitford Guinness.

Diana “was now a Beauty with a capital B. Photographs of her stared from the covers of the society weeklies with great regularity,” recalled her sister, Jessica. Jessica and the other cloistered younger sisters pined for their playful sibling but mostly followed her activities through the society pages. They feared Diana had become affected, but her friends considered her anything but.

More than lace, central heat and baronial homes, what Diana relished in her new life was the largesse she could offer the smart crowd of friends she’d made with her brother, Tom, an Etonian, and elder sister, Nancy, a sharp-tongued writer. Though less learned than her Oxford-educated cohort, Diana outdid them in warmth, curiosity and joie de vivre. She was the life of the party and knew how to have fun in the daytime, too.

These overlapping cliques of aesthetes, aristocrats and intellectuals included the esteemed Bloomsbury writer Lytton Strachey, theater folk of the Noel Coward ilk, and early jet-setters, like American-born Emerald Cunard, of the cruise-line dynasty. Admirers like Waugh would come sit on her bed to chat in the mornings while Diana sipped tea and handled correspondence, and then accompany her to lunch and outings. She and Bryan were regulars at the Savoy’s restaurant during his law school lunch breaks, where pals likewise joined them. Dinner, too, was a social event, often followed by theatre, if no party was on tap.

It was amidst this gay whirlwind that Bruno Hat emerged.

The Scene: Why you wish you’d been there

“Artistically, we are incurably unpunctual,” archly wrote A.R. de T., slyly chiding the English for lagging Europe in its embrace of modernists like Picasso, Gris and de Chirico. Perhaps the effort to redress this unpunctuality inspired the swooning reception for Hat’s work, or perhaps it was the bold-faced names and tony surroundings that stirred the press to raptures. Waugh did his best to stoke the passion, with high-toned commentary that called Hat “the first signal of the coming world movement towards the creation of Pure Form.”

A writer for the Sunday Dispatch hailed the impending show and described its inception. Bryan Guinness had discovered  Hat, she explained, near Clymping, Sussex, in a village shop. “[E]ntering by mistake the wrong room, he found a number of very good paintings in the modern French style. The paintings were done by the son of the old lady who keeps the store. … I have seen one or two and they are surprisingly clever.” His absent father was German, she reported, but Hat had never travelled, so his work was wholly untutored and original.

Bruno Hat: Adoration of the Magi, 1929

Hat collector Strachey

“[T] our joy not only all our friends but also the critics came in droves,” Diana recalled in her memoir, A Life of Contrasts. “Photographers elbowed their way in with immense cameras and were firmly directed by Brian away from [Hat] and persuaded to photograph the art.” Cocktails were being served when, along with the literati and glitterati, reporters from the Dispatch and its competition descended upon the show. Milling with guests about the Guinnesses’ pompously “period” rooms, they pondered some 20 abstracts with titles seemingly torn straight from the National Gallery’s collection: Still Life with Pears, Adoration of the Magi. “Lytton Strachey bought a picture,” the Magi, “to please me, and I stuck a red spot on it,” Diana wrote in Contrasts.

The only off note was Hat himself, who proved gruff and uncommunicative. As The Talk of London column put it, “Mr. Hat sat in a wheeled chair, a morose, taciturn figure, with a marked German accent, a moustache worthy of Harry Tate and smoked glasses. In one hand he held a thin cheroot, in the other a glass of iced coffee, and as he sipped and puffed he grumbled about the colour of the walls and about the publicity he was receiving.”

The work was well received, nevertheless, which amused the hosts, because Bruno Hat was a fraud.

For those in search of perpetual entertainment, pranks are a good standby. While Guinness was touted for “discovering” Hat, it was the other Brian, Brian Howard (note the initials), who hatched the idea and brought the works to life in the studio of his friend, painter John Banting. It was Diana’s brother Tom who donned the wig and whiskers for the show, affecting that mittel-European growl. The “bath chair” he sat in had been “a mad idea,” Diana later decided, for, if  Hat was “a cripple … how was that it he had managed to paint all the large pictures which covered the walls?”

The hoax made all the papers. Among the cognoscenti who had fallen for it, there appeared to be no hard feelings. (Many claimed later to have been in on the joke, as Strachey clearly was.) “An excellent Hat trick,” chuckled the Daily Express.

The Scene: Why you’re glad you missed it

The sparkle of Hat-induced laughter couldn’t last long for the Bright Young Things, as Waugh foreshadowed in Vile Bodies. Like a knife slashing through canvas, doubt, betrayal and a world at war destroyed their bright veneer, and death, dissipation and divorce all too quickly ruptured their playful bubble.

The “death” of Bruno Hat, for starters, also put paid to the artistic dreams of his supposed benefactor, Brian Howard. Seeing Hat’s work treated as no more than a prank, “I believe in his heart of hearts Brian was very disappointed,” Diana wrote. “He had hoped for a Hollywood-style miracle, and that he would be ‘discovered’ by an astonished art world as a master.”

But Howard, a noted dilettante, lacked the diligence to yoke his artistic talents. Though he took credit for the Hat oeuvre, the paintings most likely owed their finesse to the far more skilled Banting, Howard’s friend and a modernist painter of some renown (who sometimes frames his own canvasses in rope). “In later life,” according to the Leicester Galleries essay on Bruno Hat, “Banting played down his part in [the paintings'] execution. In 1964 he was to write: ‘as there was not quite enough work to show, I filled in the empty spaces in Brian’s unfinished canvases.’”

More than paintings testified to the sadly unfulfilled promise of young Howard, who dared to live about as openly homosexual a life as his era would tolerate. (The bond with Banting was platonic.) Writer and critic V.S. Pritchett recalled him as dangerous and brilliant, “a plaguing character of wasted talent.”

“It is hard to say why he achieved nothing at all,” Diana mused of Howard. “I suppose he wanted the palm without the dust, but more disastrously he despised what was within his range. He might have made a success in journalism, or even fashion, but he aspired to greatness and thought such things beneath him. He wanted to be Rilke, or Nietzsche, or Picasso.” Instead, depression, drugs and discontent plagued him until his death from an overdose in 1958, the faithful Banting at his side.

Bryan and Diana, too, unknowingly faced dark times. Though they joyously parented two cherubic boys in short order, Diana soon after committed marital hara-kiri by falling in love with  a charismatic  politician, Oswald Mosley. Mosley,  a handsome cad, hewed to a warped set of ethics that said he could sleep with Diana but never leave his wife. (Never mind that he had slept with both his wife’s sisters.) Diana didn’t care. She leased a small house in which to receive her lover and sought divorce from Bryan, who, though humiliated, proved surprisingly sportsmanlike. (He later remarried.)

Diana’s commitment to Mosley consigned her forever to the fringes of society, less for deserting Bryan than for loyally following Mosley, politically as well as personally. Founder of the British Union of Fascists, he was an ardent fan of Hitler and Mussolini. After he was unexpectedly widowed, he and Diana married — in the Goebbels family’s parlor.

Heil! Tom and sister Diana (Unity?) Mitford in Germany, 1930s

The British upper classes, and Diana’s family in particular, were rife with Nazi sympathies before the war. But Mosley took matters too far by creating the British Union of Fascists, complete with goose-stepping, black-shirted goons. When war broke out, he and Diana were locked up as “politicals.” Interned at the grim Holloway Prison, Diana characteristically introduced as much party atmosphere as grim conditions allowed. She shared with her mostly working-class fellow inmates the occasional creature comforts — like a Victrola and occasional food packets — afforded her through the efforts of well-placed friends and relatives (including Winston Churchill).

Years later, one of the wardresses remarked, “We’ve never had such laughs since Lady Mosley left.”

The Mosleys lived their later years in comfort near Paris, where they socialized frequently with those even more notorious Nazi sympathizers — Wallis Simpson and the former King Edward VIII, known since his abdication as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Diana referred to him jocularly as “the Dook.”

Of “Bruno Hat” himself — or, more accurately, his bewigged portrayer — there is even less to report: Despite admiring Nazi Germany, where he spent happy sojourns throughout the 1930s, handsome Tom Mitford joined his country’s army when war  began. In 1944, having fought in Italy and North Africa, he sought a posting in the East because, he told a friend, “he does not wish to go to Germany killing German civilians whom he likes. He prefers to kill Japanese whom he does not like.”

Assigned a staff position on arrival in Burma, he quickly maneuvered to join a fighting unit as brigade major. In March 1945, he took several bullets when his Devonshire Regiment came under fire. One of them, in his spine, left him paralyzed. Surgery was planned but, before the month was out, Mitford was dead from pneumonia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary Lovell.

Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History

Essay on Bruno Hat from Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries.

A Life of Contrasts, by Diana Mitford.

Hons and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford.

Photo of Bruno Hat, "Still Life With Pears," courtesy of Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries.
Photos of 10 Buckingham Place courtesy of The Lord Taverners, a current occupant.