London’s Vibrant Subcultures, Painted Over Four Decades
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Version 0 of 1. Over four decades, from the 1960s onwards, the artist Jo Brocklehurst painted the nocturnal life of London in all its peacock finery. A new exhibition, “Nobodies and Somebodies,” shows unseen portraits — many thought lost — of cabaret artists, bohemians, New Romantics, Punks, drag queens and fetish fans, as well as her drawings from the Berlin stage. “She was drawing every kind of scene,” recalls Isabelle Bricknall, a longtime model and collaborator of Brocklehurst’s, and co-curator of “Nobodies and Somebodies.” “Being in a situation like that and being non-judgmental, you’d meet all kinds of artists and designers — there was always a ‘fashion show’ — and you’d see everything that you wouldn’t expect to.” A precocious talent, Brocklehurst won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art in 1949, shortly before her 14th birthday. (She maintained close ties to the school, and later taught illustration, often in outrageous dress, to future generations of fashion designers.) Of Sri Lankan and white British parentage, and remembered as an extraordinary beauty, Brocklehurst felt an outsider, and in the 1960s, her interest in traditional fashion illustration gave way to a fascination with London’s club life. Dressed all in black, with her face hidden behind Cutler & Gross sunglasses, she would take large sheets of paper out with her in the evening and draw in situ: first in hashish-scented jazz dives and the strip joints of Soho; later at the Blitz club, where London’s New Romantics took pains to outdo one another in the wild extravagance of their dress. Brocklehurst’s first portrait of Bricknall was made while the latter performed as a couture model for the fashion illustrator Colin Barnes. She was clad in a typically outlandish Lacroix silhouette when Brocklehurst arrived for tea and demanded to be allowed to sketch her. Bricknall recalls an invigorating difference between the two drawings: In Barnes’s depiction, Bricknall is a perfectly elegant foil for the clothes. Brocklehurst, by contrast, focused on the woman within the garments, and left Bricknall looking not a little deranged. At the dawn of the 1980s, Brocklehurst had befriended a group of squatters responsible for the infamous punk zine Kill Your Pet Puppy. The Puppy Collective, as they were known, had occupied a building near her West Hampstead studio, and Brocklehurst persuaded them to sit for her: singly, in pairs and in various states of undress. Likenesses of Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol appear alongside a host of bright-haired, gender-indifferent rebels. Bricknall’s roommate Iggy is portrayed with a vertical crimson mane (above), dressed in a shredded black singlet and ‘No Future’ pants, cockily examining his own likeness in the mirror like a punk Narcissus. Over the coming decades, Brocklehurst became enmeshed in the inventive fetish scene that blossomed in London in the 1990s, and which likewise attracted the attention of designers such as Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier. She had a horror of being pigeonholed by anything so irrelevant as age, keeping her own a fiercely guarded secret. From the early 1990s onwards, Brocklehurst’s public appearances would be undertaken in a bobbed blonde wig, with a number of pairs of outsized sunglasses or spectacles stacked up her forehead and shielding her face from view. The most inventive extremes of London’s clubland became Brocklehurst’s catwalk, from which she would pluck fantastical characters to portray in her studio, much as a photographer might take their pick of seasonal fashion silhouettes. One of her last series showed regulars from the fetish scene reimagined as characters from a racy and radically re-gendered “Alice in Wonderland.” Bricknall appears among them (above), splendidly corseted, as a louche Queen of Hearts. |