With a new Gwen John exhibition in Chichester, Alicia Foster, the curator and author of a new biography, explains the artist’s conversion.
On 18 November 1911, Gwen John made a list of new rules for herself. “Pray to God incessantly,” reads the first, the second “Controle [sic] your emotions. They are infidelities to God.” She had begun instruction to convert to Catholicism a year earlier, a decision partly prompted by a crisis in her relationship with her lover, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He had briefly renounced his art career as a young man to enter a religious order (the founder of the order, noticing his talent, persuaded him back to the studio), and his belief perhaps influenced her, and of course in her adopted home of France, the Catholic Church was predominant, infusing every aspect of the culture. By the beginning of 1913, John’s conversion was complete and she was receiving the sacrament.
Gwen John’s attempts to unite her new faith and her art began around the same time. A painting of 1910-11 can be understood as a modern portrayal of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary. A Lady Reading takes from early Flemish and Renaissance antecedents the plain dark clothes of the Virgin and the book in her hand. John “borrowed” Mary’s features from a Madonna by Albrecht Dürer, placing her, though, in a contemporary room.
The writing of her friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, may have given Gwen John an idea of how this subject matter might be made afresh. The standard form in Annunciation paintings was to show Mary with the Angel Gabriel. By contrast, in Rilke’s poem “Annunciation: Words of the Angel”, the angel’s speech suggests that he is invisible to Mary, he is felt rather than seen by her,
But still you keep your solitude
And hardly notice me:
I’m but a breeze within the wood,
You, Lady, are the tree
The angel in Gwen John’s A Lady Reading is perhaps a painterly version of the “breeze within the wood”, the light itself, which illuminates the checked curtain that reaches from the window towards the young woman. John painted an everyday physical reality – the sun coming through a domestic window – as a moment of profound religious illumination, telling a 2,000-year-old story with no recourse to the clichés of haloes and angel wings.
John also portrayed Catholic figures of her own time, making drawings of Pope Benedict XV and St Thérèse de Lisieux. St Thérèse’s mother had died of breast cancer when she was small, and Thérèse contracted the tuberculosis that would kill her at 24 while elaborating her “little way” towards heaven through humble poverty rather than great acts.
For John, St Thérèse’s humility might have been inspiring, but self-abnegation was not exactly how the artist wished to emulate her. In 1912, when she was still undergoing instruction in her new faith, she had written: “Unless you have the will to be great you will fall into mediocrity…
1. God, your Lover, is waiting for you.
2. Make the step now that will bring you nearer to being a Saint.
3. Ask God to strengthen your will to be a great Saint.”
John wanted to be counted among the holiest, and would never be content to be merely a handmaiden. When it came to painting in oils, though, John pictured a very different kind of religious figure, a revered woman of the Church who had lived to a ripe old age (from 1653-1744) and founded a community of Dominican nuns who were the artist’s neighbours in the village of Meudon, on the outskirts of Paris. The six portraits of Mère Poussepin are among John’s greatest works, as subtle in technique and satisfying in the conjuring of human presence as anything she ever painted. Mère Poussepin has the light of intelligence in her eyes and the impression she gives is of radiant spirituality.
Alongside the portraits of Mère Poussepin, John made a series of paintings of young nuns in the same pose whose fresh faces are a moving counterpoint to their severe costume and restrained comportment. The contrast between this rigidity and the vital woman concealed beneath echoed John’s battle between her self-imposed rules and her nature.
The very method and material of Gwen John’s art, as much as her subject matter, was altered profoundly by her Catholic faith, in emulation of the French Catholic modernist Maurice Denis, who argued “Christian truth defines not only the purpose of art but also the means that must be used.” The oil painting technique that emerged in John’s Mère Poussepin portraits and characterised her work then on was entirely new and original.
Light-toned, chalky yet luminous paint barely covers the surfaces at times and is confined to tiny variations in colour and tone, just as a poet condenses the language to reach a spare equilibrium that sings. For Gwen John, from 1910 and for the rest of her life, art and faith were inextricably bound together. She had become, as she put it, “God’s little artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies. A diligent worker.”
Gwen John; Art and Life in London and Paris is published by Thames & Hudson. The exhibition of the same name at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester runs until 8 October.
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