Gwen John comes into her own at this excellent show at Pallant House, finds Gertrude Clark.
Gwen John is invariably – and inevitably – described as the sister of Augustus John, but the curator of Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, Alicia Foster (who wrote about her in last month’s issue), is keen to present Gwen as something other than the wan recluse of her reputation. She seizes on Augustus’s recollection that “I am rarely exuberant, but she was always so”. But what’s striking in this excellent show is the quality of reflective interiority that comes across in her paintings. Actually it’s not just spiritual interiority you encounter – John, as was the fashion of the time, did focus on actual interiors. The lovely A Corner of the Artist’s House in Paris shows an umbrella propped up against a chair, a bowl of flowers on a table in a light-filled room, and it says everything about the artist.
She followed Augustus into the Slade School of Art, and there’s an affectionate sketch by her brother here of Gwen at her easel, with confident profile, closely scrutinising the changes a tutor was making to her work. Something of the cheerful bohemian life they led in Camden can be seen in her lively A Portrait Group of young artists, men and women.
Gwen John was a Catholic convert, and declared that she wanted to be a saint, but there are few paintings on actual religious subjects, though some of the most famous are of Dominican nuns. What you get instead is a kind of reflected spirituality, a quality that transmutes paintings on other subjects, especially portraits of women. She once wrote: “‘I saw that God is a God of quietness and so we must be quiet.”
For Catholic viewers, the most striking pictures are her Annunciations, except they’re not called that. They were painted a couple of years before her conversion in 1913.
Both are of girls standing by a window, reading in a still room – and in so many Annunciations, the Virgin is disturbed in her sacred reading by the arrival of the archangel. But of the Angel himself there is no sign here. Instead, what you get is light through the window, thrown onto the girl. The first, A Lady Reading, gives the lady a head modelled on a Madonna by Albrecht Dürer; the second, Girl Reading at the Window, has even more light, and the young woman in the simple black dress has Gwen John’s own face. It’s quite something to endow the Virgin with your features, though let’s remember that Dürer gave his own face to Christ. What this seems to be is a working out of the idea of her friend Rainer Maria Rilke, in his poem “The Annunciation (Words of the Angel)”, that the Angel is invisible to Mary:
“But still you keep your solitude
And hardly notice me;
I’m but a breeze within the wood,
You, Lady, are the tree.”
These paintings would have been made around 1911, when Gwen’s relationship with Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, was on the wane. She first posed for Rodin as a model; they began an affair. He was not her first lover; she had had a relationship with a fellow student at the Slade, Ambrose McEvoy. But her affair with Rodin was intense and when – inevitably – he moved on to another woman, she was bereft.
She was his model for his 1908 bronze Monument to Whistler – Study for the Naked Muse, without Arms, his homage to the artist whose art school she attended; she prided herself on being able to keep difficult poses. Indeed, there’s a very large version of the photograph of a nude Gwen as artist’s model here; she was unperturbed by nudity, and because she was so poor when she came to Paris, it was an obvious way for her to earn money. She was often her own model: there’s a dispassionate self-portrait here, matter-of-factly standing naked in a bathroom, her pubic hair evident.
In fact, she seems not to have been particularly bothered by the sexual proprieties. One of the early portraits here, of Dorothy McNeill – Dorelia in a Black Dress – was of a London typist who, though married, became her brother Augustus’s mistress, a relationship that Gwen seems to have encouraged. Both siblings painted Dorelia in 1903-4, and the paintings are juxtaposed here. Augustus made a kind of romantic gypsy of her, while Gwen shows a watchful, contained girl, with interior strength.
The affair with Rodin may have been intense but to a modern observer, it seems to have something exploitative (not to say creepy) about it, and not just because he was in his sixties and she in her twenties. He would get her and another female model to embrace in front of him; meanwhile, he would sketch furiously. There’s one of those lesbian sketches here, Two Women Embracing, where the faces are hidden and the focus is on the entwined bodies. Gwen, meanwhile, was painting cats; there are some charming studies, too.
Her interest in religion was already lively during her relationship with Rodin, but his rejection – “It is despised love that hurts so much” – maybe expedited her conversion. “I think of God more often. Oh that that thought would become my refuge, my stronghold, my tour d’ivoire,” she wrote at this time.
And so we come to the series of paintings of Dominican nuns. In 1911, she had moved to Meudon, a suburb of Paris where Rodin had a studio. Here she painted her Convalescent series: we see a young woman in a blue dress, sitting in a chair.
The nuns of the Dominican convent were a great help to her, especially the Mother Superior, who became her godmother. Years later, in 1926, she would buy a tumbledown wooden shack in the Rue de Babie in Meudon, where she could focus on her garden, her cats, on prayer. But in 1913, the Dominicans asked her to paint a portrait of their 18th-century founder, Mère Marie Poussepin. We see here the little prayer card picture she based the paintings on, and it’s quite remarkable how that unremarkable image is turned here into portraits of a strong and vivid personality. She also paints other sisters, one with a humorous and determined expression.
There’s a lovely study here of children in church, their backs to the viewer. Gwen told Vera Oumançoff, – Jacques Maritain’s Ukrainian sister-in-law, on whom Gwen developed a kind of (unrequited) spiritual crush – that she could not pray for long at a stretch, and so occupied herself with sketching at Mass. Rather meanly, the curé told her this was a sin, so she confined herself to drawing at Vespers and in retreats.
“Now those moments when my spirit looks at exterior things have become so long that not much time is left for prayer. The orphans with those black hats and white ribbons and their black dresses with little white collars charm me… if I cut off all that there would not be enough happiness in my life.”
Augustus John once spoke of “peering fixedly” at his sister’s work. And that’s the way to treat this excellent little exhibition which is, by the way, enlivened by several works by John’s distinguished contemporaries.
Stand, look and reflect.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 8 October.
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