A life of glamour and tragedy set against cultural and political movements of 20th century Europe. 'Toto' Koopman (1908-1991) like her contemporaries Lee Miller and Vita Sackville-West, lived with an independent spirit more typical of the men of her generation. She moved in the worlds of fashion, society, art and politics with an insouciant ease which stirred both admiration and envy. Sphinx-like and tantalising, Toto conducted her life as a game, driven by audacity and style. Her biographer chases his enigmatic subject through the many roles and lives she inhabited, though her beauty, charisma and taste for the extraordinary which made her an exuberant fixture of Paris fashion and café society, her intelligence and steely sense of self which drove her towards bigger things, culminating in espionage during World War Two for which she was imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbrück. After the horrors of the camp, she found solace in Erica Brausen, the German art dealer who launched the career of Francis Bacon, and the two women lived out their lives together, surrounded by cultural luminaries like Luchino Visconti, but even in her later decades, Toto remained impossible for anyone to possess. The book chases her from her childhood in Java to Paris where she was a celebrated model, the concentration camp, to the vibrant art scene of postwar London as muse of the Hanover Gallery and finally to Panarea, the remote Aeolian island where she and Erica presided over a glittering social scene. She flouted convention and had notorious affairs with famous men and women making our subject scandalous and beguiling. 244pp, mono photos. Tiny remainder mark.
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