Talk

Darren Coffield – Muses, Models & Mavericks of Old Chelsea

Fri 21st Mar 2025 • 19:30 – 21:00

Organised by Lisa Marie Matta

£10 online • £10 on the door.

Darren Coffield, author of Queens of Bohemia: And Other Miss-Fits, talks about Chelsea, models and misfits, in conversation with Clive Jennings.

Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women’s rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending “Flapper”, who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for femmes fatales.

Meanwhile, London’s Bohemia was ruled by the “Queen of Clubs”, Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking “Tiger Woman”, Betty May; the original “Chelsea Girl”, Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the “Euston Road Venus”, Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse…

Darren Coffield is a British artist who has exhibited at venues ranging from the Courtauld Institute in London to the Voloshin Museum in Crimea. During the early 1990s Coffield worked with Joshua Compston on the formation of Factual Nonsense, the centre of the emerging Young British Artists scene. Coffield is the author of two previous books. The most recent of these was the widely reviewed Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia.

After a successful career as a fashion designer, whose staged shows in Paris, New York, and Tokyo, long-term Fitzrovia-resident Clive Jennings segued into dealing and curating contemporary art. He ran three central London galleries and founded the Contemporary Print Show at the Barbican. These days he concentrates on making his own art and writing in addition to working as the arts editor of both Fitzrovia News and The Soho Clarion.