Publication details
‘Love me in London & leave me alone in France’: On Keeping Distance in British Modernist Patronage
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Their contemporaneity and partially overlapping sets of acquaintances have always inspired rumours of rivalry between Sibyl Colefax and Ottoline Morrell. Colefax’s experience as a businesswoman is reflected in the way she conducts patronage and presides over her salons to a very different effect from Morrell’s own efforts, which were marked by her unfulfilled artistic desires and devoted spirituality. “[Colefax] ‘lives’ with Society of eminent men – as a harlot lives with a man,” Morrell commented controversially in her diary, highlighting her disrespect for the patronage of a more clearly transactional nature which Colefax was conducting, not fully aware of the complications that her own unquestionable championing of art brought. Since the almost reckless abandon with which Morrell approached patronage has influenced the whole course of her relationship with artists, it can already be seen manifested in the act of soliciting help—from careful approaches to a total disregard for Morrell’s wishes. Although these two major British patronesses of the first half of the twentieth century never clashed quite openly and largely tried to ignore each other’s presence in modernist circles, a comparison of their relationship with their beneficiaries reveals the difference establishing boundaries makes in patronage relationship and raises questions regarding the effectiveness of what could, at least in Morrell’s case, be seen as a more involved instance of modern patronage. |
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