Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows

English Modernism was graced by five daring and gifted women who were in many respects well in advance of their native male counterparts: Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan in prose, Edith Sitwell in poetry, Elisabeth Lutyens in music and Barbara Hepworth in sculpture. Barbara Ker-Seymer is not remotely in this class. She took some attractive photo-portraits before the war in her studio above Asprey’s and that was it.

Not that Barbara cared. Though trained at the Chelsea School of Art, she had a deprecating attitude to her activity which was characteristic of English amateurism and is absolutely maddening when it comes to the arts at a proper level. Woolf, Kavan, Sitwell, Lutyens and Hepworth were deadly serious about their vocations. Barbara had no vocation. She’d carried on the photography business of her boss, the woman who’d taken her virginity, Olivia Wyndham, when Olivia flitted off to the USA to lay siege to Edna Thomas (who succumbed).

Barbara was born in 1905 into the gentry, but her father was penniless and he ensured, via gambling, that her mother became penniless too. She grew up in a small house near St Paul’s Girls’ School, which she attended, and was soon drinking, drugging and dancing round town. Her vital friendships were with gay men, especially Edward Burra and Frederick Ashton, and also Afro-Americans visiting London or who she met in New York.

The usual suspects (Nancy Cunard, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, the Lehmann sisters, Elizabeth Bowen, Oliver Messel) went up her stairs to be snapped in a cool 1930s style that – despite the urgings of her friend Brian Howard and the claims of her biographer Sarah Knights – never overstepped the mark into cutting-edge. The book’s preambles make much of her links to Jean Cocteau and Man Ray.