If you don’t know the art of Gwen John and your mind is open to her subtle talent, the National Museum’s exhibition, Gwen John: strange beauties, will be a revelation. If you do, it will still be a revelation. That’s for two reasons. First, it assembles a large number of her works, from around the UK and much further afield, which are rarely, if ever, seen together. And second, it includes many late works from the Museum’s own collection that have never been exhibited before.
As Laura Cumming has pointed out, the show’s curators concentrate on the art itself – its materials, techniques and development – rather than Gwen John’s much written about life. So, we’re not encouraged to dwell on her upbringing in Haverfordwest and Tenby, her close relationships with other women and with Auguste Rodin, her conversion to Catholicism or her supposed reclusiveness. Biographical information is relegated to the catalogue, and to timelines on the wall. The art is the thing.
Like many artists, Gwen John was attracted, after her early period, to the theme with variations. Drawing and painting the same subject, but with almost endless changes of composition, colour and tone, seemed come naturally and make the most of her artistic gifts. Juxtaposing different versions of the same sitter, as in the series of the ‘convalescent’ or the young woman with bobbed hair, allows you to watch John experiment with subtle turns of a woman’s body, or alterations of colour or texture in her clothing.
In the case of paintings, some are whole, others incomplete. Whether John regarded the unfinished ones as effectively sketches or whether she was dissatisfied with them, it isn’t always easy to tell. Occasionally the unfinished versions, for me at least, seem more appealing than the completed ones.
The main revelation for me was the final room, which contains a sample of the nearly 1,000 sketches John left in her studio when she died in 1939, and which were bought by the National Museum in 1976. Almost all of these were new to me. In size, they’re small, sometimes not much larger than a postage stamp. By this time John had given up larger-scale works – her health was beginning to fail – but her interest in watercolour painting was still strong. Because these works on paper have lain undisturbed for so long, without being exposed to light, they’ve kept their surprisingly fresh colours.
The subjects are modest. There are sketches of women and children in church, seen from behind or from the side, of St Thérèse of Lisieux and her sister. of flowers or leaves, and of small views from John’s house in Meudon on the outskirts of Paris.
Again, there are many variations on the same subject. John was preoccupied with making small but critical alterations in the colours and colour combinations she used. In an illuminating short film to accompany the exhibition the Museum’s paper conservator, Fiona McLees, shows how John sometimes noted in meticulous detail the exact colours she’s used to gain the effect she need. Elsewhere in the exhibition you can see examples of where she used numbers to code the colours, and you can read pages from Gwen John’s letters and notebooks, on loan from the National Library of Wales, in which she discusses her art techniques – and many other things.
These tiny painting are small miracles. On the surface they look like throwaway sketches in miniature on scraps of reused paper, their figures outlined apparently roughly and with an improvised feel. But in reality they were carefully planned, intended to be seen side by side with other variants to bring out small differences in form and colour. There’s little internal detail in most, so they often take on a near-abstract appearance. I was particularly taken with the tiny landscape fragments, utterly simple, but with a strange, valedictory mood to them.
Gwen John went her own way as an artist, unmoved by other artists’ movements and styles. Hers wasn’t a loud voice, but it was insistent, and she wanted it to be heard. In the National Museum’s exhibition it speaks to us with clarity and grace.
Leave a Reply