"Robert Colquhoun's hand shakes as he lights a candle in the blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover, fellow artist, Robert Bobby MacBryde. They are known from Soho alleys to Bond Street galleries as the Two Roberts: inseparable, incandescent, often in trouble. Where is Bobby tonight? The Colony Room Club, probably. Safe, Robert hopes. Though never from himself. Bombers prowl the skies above. Who will survive the night? Fuck it, Robert mutters, fag dancing on his lip. And he picks up his brush."
"Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were born in Ayrshire just before the first world war, meeting at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 1933 then becoming stars as the bombs fell. They were the original Golden Boys of Bond Street: nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso, which they pretended not to love. Photographed in Vogue and filmed by Ken Russell, they were twin suns. Everybody else was in their orbit, if they were lucky."
"At one of their weekend-long studio parties at 77 Bedford Gardens you could share a whisky with Elizabeth Smart, birl with boys from the Royal Ballet or strain to hear Dylan Thomas over the music. Somehow, despite rationing, there was always plenty to eat and drink and smoke. Bobby could feed the five thousand with one fish. Robert was a beguilingly brooding host. You could feast on the gossip for weeks."
The world teeters under fascism, war, and transformative technological change. On an August night in 1944, Robert Colquhoun lights a candle in a blacked-out Notting Hill studio shared with his lover Bobby MacBryde as bombers prowl overhead. The Two Roberts rose from Ayrshire and the Glasgow School of Art in 1933 to become celebrated figures on Bond Street, nicknamed MacBraque and McPicasso. Photographed in Vogue and filmed by Ken Russell, they hosted lavish, raucous weekend parties attended by writers, dancers, and artists. Their lives combined ambition, generosity, danger, and enduring charisma.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]