Gwen John: Strange Beauties, Edinburgh Art Festival review: 'no easy answers'
Gwen John’s work may be relatively small in scale, generally restrained and undemonstrative, yet the attention is sharpened by it, writes Susan Mansfield
Gwen John: Strange Beauties, National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh ★★★★★
The first major exhibition devoted to Gwen John in four decades arrives in Scotland this summer from Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. Created in partnership with National Galleries Scotland, the Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, it is in Edinburgh for the remainder of the year before heading across the Atlantic.
If John is known at all these days, it is likely because of her life story, which is remarkable. Born in Wales in 1876, the daughter of a solicitor, she followed her brother Augustus John to the Slade School of Art, the only art school at the time which admitted women. She studied under Whistler in Paris, and a few years later made the city her home, working as an artists’ model in order to live independently. She brushed shoulders with the giants of modernism, and modelled for Rodin who became her mentor and lover. She had relationships with men and with women.
In later life, she moved to the suburban village of Meudon where she lived quietly and converted to Catholicism. While she was successful in her lifetime, showing work at the Paris salons, in London and, thanks to her American patron, John Quinn, at the Armoury Show in New York, her focus was always on her practice. The aim of this show is to move a step away from the biography and take a long, slow look at the work.
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John’s reputation has grown since her death, and her paintings are in major galleries around the world. However, the cumulative effect of bringing together around 200 paintings and drawings is still understated. In all the clamour of Edinburgh in August, this is a show which invites the viewer to be quiet, spend time, look carefully. These works are acts of sustained looking, and the more we look at them the more we will see.
She looks out at us from a self portrait on the first wall of the exhibition with a calm, clear-eyed expression, her dark hair pulled back, her pose austere. She actually looks a bit like Emily Dickinson, a likeness which might bear further comparison: both women chose a kind of solitude, putting the rigorous pursuit of their work above all else.
John’s talent as a painter is clear from the beginning in a portrait of her sister Winifred, painted when she was 19, and some works from her time at the Slade: Young Woman with a Violin, and Mrs Atkinson, a portrait of her landlady. Here, she revels in her subject’s expressive, lined face, the strong form of her black dress, the details of the Victorian interior. Later, she will forswear detail almost completely, but that’s still to come.
In a succession of rented rooms in Montparnasse, she created a space for herself. She makes two drawings of herself nude in which her gaze is serious, unflinching. Before Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, she painted her room in works such as A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris: sparse possessions, a wicker chair by a window, an open book.
Often a cat, too, after her first, Edgar Quinet, a tortoiseshell named after the boulevard where she was found. She drew them constantly, as she later did parishioners in church when she moved to Meudon. She was a perceptive observer and a wonderful, fluid draughtswoman and both skills needed exercising.
But, in John’s time, a serious artist needed to be an oil painter, and in this medium she worked more slowly. She was determined and systematic, analysing her process, developing lists of rules and her own numerical system for colour harmonies. She experimented with paint, adding chalk to make it drier and give it greater luminosity, so she could lay down single brushstrokes with greater control. A significant thrust of this show is about unpicking this process, where preparatory drawings and unfinished works allow us to see beneath the surface.
Her central subject is a woman, usually anonymous, often seated and shown in three-quarters form. She worked in series, sometimes with as many as 11 pictures of the same model in the same pose, making slight variations each time. She once wrote that “a cat or a man, it’s the same thing… it’s an affair of volumes” suggesting that what mattered to her more than the subject was the act of painting itself, the thorny problem of pushing oneself to do better and better.
There are three paintings in the show from her “woman in a blue dress” series, five from her series known as “The Convalescent” in which the same model sits in a wicker chair, sometimes reading, sometimes with a pot of tea beside her. Sometimes a few strands of hair fall across her face. Her expression is hard to read: is she recovering, or reconciling herself to a different fate?
Portrait of a Girl in Grey is a more consciously religious subject (John once called herself “God’s little painter”): the woman holds a rosary among the folds of her dress and wears a blue-grey pilgrim’s cloak. When John moved to Meudon, she became friends with the local Dominican nuns and was commissioned to paint their 17th-century founder, Mere Marie Poussepin, from her image on a prayer card. She responded by painting the nuns themselves, including making two searing sketches of a nun on her deathbed. In her eventual portrait, Mere Poussepin has a bright, sharp face and a half smile, but the woman in A Young Nun looks into the middle distance, face demure, unreadable. It’s as if she fulfilled the commission, then went back to painting mystery.
There is a range of work here: a few beautiful still lifes; vibrant sketches of children in Pléneuf, Brittany. From the last 15 years of her life when she painted little in oils; there are semi-abstract watercolours from her window in Meudon and tiny, intriguing paintings of lighted windows at night.
But the centre of the practice is painting the seated woman. Within this, there are shifts, but they are subtle: a muted blue-grey palette takes on more pinks and lilacs; there are fewer objects, less background, a sense, perhaps, of ever greater focus, a vision which is being honed, perfected.
John described herself as “a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker”. One of her schematics of painting begins with “the strange form”. It seems that she sought a distance from the subject in order to see more clearly, perhaps to see the subject as a subject, a tool in the greater pursuit of becoming a better painter.
The kind of psychological realism of early works like Mrs Atkinson decreases in her later work. The faces are less detailed, less readable. The work is not about the private, inner world of her sitters. Or, if it is, it is one which remains private, a state of solitude or contemplation which cannot be shared.
Edinburgh, at festival time, is full of the promise of instant gratification, with hundreds of shows promising amusement, drama, spectacle. John doesn’t do that. Her works asks for time and attention, and promise no easy answers.
Her work is relatively small in scale, generally restrained and undemonstrative. Yet, the attention is sharpened by it. The longer one spends with it, the most one starts to feel convinced that it isn’t really small. Or it’s small in the way that Emily Dickinson’s verses are small, but contain the whole world.
Until 4 January
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