6th September, 2024 in Society & Culture, Women in History

The dark side of Bohemia

By Darren Coffield

By the beginning of the 20th century, a new generation of women had begun to turn the idea of Victorian respectability on its head. Not for them the conventional, stultifying lives of their forebears. They rejected the traditional family hierarchy and fashioned new identities through the arts. They were the earliest ‘Bohemians’.

Back then, the word was a term used, not always positively, for those who lived unconventional lives. One of the most famous was Isabel Rawsthorne: artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse for some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, including Picasso whom she considered “not a man any woman in her right mind could care for”. Living in 1930s Paris with her husband “Tom” Sefton Delmer, a highly intelligent and shrewd journalist for the Daily Express newspaper who’d interviewed Hitler and witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime first-hand. He had originally met Isabel in the most unlikely of circumstances at the Tate Gallery in the form of a bronze bust sculpted by Jacob Epstein in 1932. As soon as the journalist saw it, he was smitten with the sitter. “You,” he said to the bust, “are the girl I am going to marry”.

18 months later something extraordinary happened. Having been dispatched to France by the Express as head of its Paris bureau, he was sitting in a Café just off the Champs Elysee when his eye was caught by a striking girl a few tables away. As he looked at the slanting eyes above the red pouting mouth, it suddenly hit him. “Please Mademoiselle, excuse my intrusion,” he politely fumbled. “I’m Tom Delmer, Paris correspondent of the Express. I have been looking at you and I feel certain you must be the famous Isabel, of whom Epstein did that superb bust. Are you?” Isabel gazed at him with her wide-open friendly eyes and shrieked: “I certainly am Isabel,” she laughed.

That first night together, Isabel and Tom danced till dawn. She soon moved into his penthouse apartment and he showed her the fine art of Parisian living. She then rented a studio in Montparnasse and frequented the Dome Café to meet and model for many like-minded artists of the French Avant-Garde; Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, who liked to paint pubescent girls in erotic poses we now view as rather creepy. Isabel was using Balthus’s studio in Paris when the Germans invaded France. She headed north and luckily boarded the last ship to leave for Britain. Having volunteered to play her part in the war, she was then sent to one of several secret units on the Woburn Estate in Bedfordshire. These came under the wing of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Isabel’s section was devoted to broadcasting anti-Nazi propaganda to occupied Europe, masterminded by her husband, who’d been recruited by fellow SOE agent (and future James Bond author), Ian Fleming. They decided to use ‘radio-pornography’ to catch the Germans’ attention and invented a character called ‘Der Chef, a German patriot who told salacious stories about Hitler’s inner-circle. The recipe was an instant success. One German woman who worked for the Gestapo was denounced by ‘Der Chef’ for having insulted the honour of the German army by using an officer’s steel helmet as a chamber pot, during an orgy, received a stream of telephone calls from listeners denouncing her.

When not dreaming up new forms of sexual depravity to attribute to Hitler’s regime, Isabel used her artistic talents to design subversive greetings cards to be distributed by the resistance. Or as she put it: “What were humorously called ‘greeting cards’ were leaflets in colour of a highly sexual nature. This was great fun. Fancy being employed by the government to create pornography! One I much enjoyed was a picture painstakingly realistic of a foreign worker making love with a bright blonde German girl.” Isabel painted the images in the neo-classical style favoured by Hitler, and her secret agent friends ordered the leaflets by the thousands. Not because they sapped German morale, but because they found them excellent for the morale of their men distributing them; and Ian Fleming, was a frequent visitor: “He was our liaison with the Admiralty,” recalled Isabel. “Years later, when I read the James Bond stories, I understood that Bond was Ian’s fantasy, skilfully told. Ian thought himself Bond.”

A few weeks before they were put on the secret base, Isabel and Tom had invited Fleming to a dinner-party in Holborn, where an unexpected guest – a German bomb – gatecrashed the evening. After a huge jolt and a bang, Tom opened the dining room door to discover the staircase had disappeared. Isabel said she’d never seen anyone move as fast as Fleming, who effortlessly vaulted the missing stairs because he was worried about his lovely car parked outside. But Tom’s life of secrecy and subterfuge wasn’t the artistic life Isabel had aspired to. And little did her husband realise Isabel was harbouring a secret from her youth – far darker than anything he or Ian Fleming could have ever dreamed of. As a child, Isabel was forever drawing and had attended Liverpool School of Art, where she hung out with the rebellious male students. Together they visited an exhibition of Jacob Epstein’s controversial sculpture, Genesis, which depicted a naked pregnant woman with swollen breasts. Its slanting eyelids and chiselled cheekbones looked remarkably like Isabel’s and the notorious sculpture attracted over a thousand visitors per week, who paid to gawp at this modern twist on the classical nude.

After leaving Liverpool School of Art, Isabel won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art. Sadly, she didn’t have a wealthy family to support her, so she tried working as a life model, but every art school turned her down. Then Isabel’s friend had a brainwave. She should go and see Jacob Epstein. “She was convinced that he would want to make a portrait,” she recalled. “She was quite right. We went together to his house in Hyde Park Gardens and he immediately took me to his studio and asked me to start posing.” Isabel was a stunningly beautiful girl who used make-up in a painterly way to accentuate the ‘modern’ features of her face. She powdered it white like a blank canvas, before carving out her eyes with thick black eyeliner, to make it more angular.

Her style spoke of ‘savage’ sophistication to some and sinful excess to others. Epstein must have spotted Isabel’s striking similarity to his Genesis sculpture, and his wife knew Isabel was a vulnerable young woman with no money. If Mrs Epstein were alive today, she would be labelled a sex trafficker for aiding and abetting her husband’s behaviour. She welcomed Isabel into the household like a spider to a fly.

Whilst I was researching my new book Queens of Bohemia, it became clear that Epstein was a sexual predator with a set pattern of seduction. First, he’d sculpt a head then, once lulled into a false sense of security, he’d ask the model to pose nude before pouncing on her. That’s how he groomed Isabel. “After Epstein had been working on my head for a few weeks… he suggested that I come to live in his house, which would make my life much simpler,” she later recalled. Isabel and Epstein soon became a noticeable couple about town being photographed together at posh premieres and art openings. He sculpted large bronzes of her stripped naked to the waist and bearing her breasts. These were to be among the first of a long line of extraordinary artworks she inspired throughout her long life. But when Epstein got Isabel pregnant, she was quietly moved out of the public gaze and gave birth to a little boy in September 1934. The arrival of a child changed the dynamic of their menage a trois lifestyle.

Only one woman in the household would be socially accepted to carry out the role of mother and Epstein was already maintaining a second family with another mistress. To maintain a third, with Isabel, was beyond his financial means. Isabel changed her name to ‘Mrs Epstein’ during her pregnancy so that when the birth was recorded in every legal sense the child became Mrs Epstein’s son, as she’d done before with her ‘daughter’ from another of Epstein’s models. Mrs Epstein was infertile and had no qualms about using and abusing her husband’s many mistresses. She brought up their two children, and even shot one mistress, Kathleen Garmen, with a revolver. Kathleen, who would become Epstein’s second wife, survived but the Press had a field day. So, with a heavy heart, Isabel handed her baby over. She was seen soon after dressed in black, looking sad and tearful. With Epstein using his connections and wealth, Isabel was ‘paid-off’ and exiled to Paris. She never saw her child again.

Isabel must have had a quiet moment of reflection wondering about the son she’d given up when news came through that Margaret had fallen on the steps of her house and died in 1947. Another ex-lover, Alberto Giacommetti, compared Isabel to a big cat – ‘a man eater’ – when he sculpted her.. She was still a desirable woman and had many lovers including the infamous homosexual artist Francis Bacon, who painted her many times and claimed she was the only woman he’d ever slept with.

Isabel was always the life and soul of any party but did her wild shrieks of laughter hide and bohemian behaviour belie a sadness? She eventually moved to a cottage in Suffolk and lived the life of a recluse before descending in to alcoholism. She also kept a gun by her side to protect her precious art collection from burglars and began writing her memoirs.

But the eye disease, glaucoma soon meant she could no longer write or paint. Increasingly blind with rails fixed to the walls, she edged around the cottage like a shadow, On January 27, 1992, she decided she could take no more, standing at the top of the stairs she leapt and fell to her death. She was 79. Her body lay at the foot of the stairs for days, waiting to be discovered: a sad shattered beauty that had once inspired so many works of art.