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The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
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‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
.jpg)
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
.jpg)
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
.jpg)
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
.jpg)
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
The quiet power of Art and Life in London and Paris reflects that of its protagonist, Gwen John. It is her first solo exhibition in a generation, and for a generation that have come to know her through others. Tate curated John in conversation with her brother, Augustus. Many more have likely read contemporary artist Celia Paul’s book of letters to the artist. Indeed, it’s so significant that the city of Chichester has installed yellow road signs pointing directly to the exhibition, rather than its host, Pallant House.
John, like many turn-of-the-twentieth-century women artists, has been typified for her paintings of interior - as domestic - scenes. (Pallant House’s walls are freshly coated with muted hues; we’d expect nothing less from a show with an official paint partner.) Still, curator Dr. Alicia Foster is more concerned with breaking John out of them, re-viewing the artist as a social, and socially engaged, individual.
‘The myth of the recluse is incredibly seductive’, Foster admits; she too first succumbed to this conventional history at first glance. But here, she situates the artist within wider networks, much like the Gallery’s previous exhibitions, though John doesn’t get the same number of rooms.
Born in Wales, the artist practised in London and Paris, an active participant in the thriving cultures of both cities. Even from as far as New York, the American poet Jeanne Robert Foster would tell and write that everyone in Paris knows of her.
While a student of the Slade, and having worked alongside Camden Town artists and European post-Impressionists, Gwen scarcely gives a whiff of entitlement or ego. She was certainly a woman with a ‘wicked humour’ – who once sent younger students to draw corrupt Roman emperors in the British Museum – and the confidence to plainly assert how she preferred her own watercolours to Paul Cezanne’s. Art and Life doesn’t deprive the artist of her warmth or humanity, nor complexity – instead showing us a person who felt privileged to devote their life to their art, and who seized both with both hands.
John’s works evidence her engagements in artistic and intellectual conversations – and always on her own terms. Whilst her influences are almost all men, her subjects (or interests) are primarily women, depicted with more nuance in interior scenes. From Cezanne, she lends unsmiling faces; from her ‘mentor’ James McNeil Whistler to women in Japanese dress, who crop up here as children’s dolls. Maurice Denis offers some religious motifs, which the artist reworks in her series of sisters, all testament to how she interpreted other influences within her own practice.
With the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, she shared a mutual friend in Rainer Maria Rilke, and an interest in the female nude. Foster puts the two in a direct conversation, though we still don’t know if they ever even met.
Navigating between influence and individuality demands thought and care, a balancing act where Art and Life succeeds. The captions go heavy on the context; of how John’s submissions to the Salon didn’t need jury approval, she was told to ‘name her price’, and how others learned as much from her. At other times, Foster also lets the art and artist speak for themselves.
Like the artist, Foster makes subtle rebellions, in wording and placement. In the second room, she delights in de-centring John’s lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. His portrait in plaster is relegated to the corner; a terracotta by Ursula Tyrwhitt put front and centre, along with John’s fellow Paris-based praticienne, Hilde Flodin. (Tongue-in-cheek, she faces John’s wry-smiling and sulking nuns opposite her frank nudes.)
John is often stereotyped as boring; unlike her bohemian counterparts, ‘her idea of a good night out was a walk’. But dark garden scenes force us to reconsider her behaviours as even more remarkable; the radical act of a woman walking, and sometimes sleeping, outside alone.
Art and Life always spotlights the artist’s agency. It’s true that John was no bohemian, but only because she decided so, avowedly calling herself ‘artistique’ instead. (In any case, she dressed in ready-made clothes, ostrich feathers, and French fabrics from Bon Marché.)
Likewise, her intimate interiors take on new meanings, when afforded context. Yes, there are cats. But there are also chilling teapots in dark, windowless rooms, evidence of the refuge John sought in Paris during World War I. The inspiration she found in solitude – and Vincent van Gogh – is symbolised by the empty chair of the studio, her self-assertion as artist. We see many women reading, and perched next to piles of books, more visual sources of their intellect.
Then there’s John, in a painting flashed with the lemon yellow-jacket of a French paperback, another nod to the artist’s own taste for the subversive. We suspect she read Oscar Wilde – a portrait of the publisher Arthur Symons later proves it – whilst archive materials from the National Museums of Wales reveal a reading list weighted by Nietzsche, Zola, and Dostoyevsky.
We hear John in her own words, often in her letters to others. Art and Life also acknowledges our history of second-hand engagement but sees John through different perspectives - the eyes of her and our contemporary women.
Though conceived of as distinct exhibitions, similarities can be drawn with Pallant House’s concurrent show from contemporary artist Kaye Donachie. Both Donachie and John draw from literature and poetry, and rarely depict boys – when John does, she gives them a blank expression, her pencil sharpened by disdain.
Red chalk drawings of Gwen John by her contemporaries sit next to her most well-known works; the contrast between their stillness, and the dynamic artist who produced them, is thrilling. The curation acknowledges the plurality of personhood so often deprived of women and underscores the artist’s own self-awareness of how she was perceived by others.
This bothness matters, because John remains an artist stereotyped by her singularity. Her total output of paintings numbers just two hundred, all chalky oils similar in style and subject. Art historian Helena Anderson highlights John’s artistic intent and agency; she had a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve in paint in particular and set out to achieve it. Academics generally agree; but it’s visually evident in her works in series, efforts to develop her practice.
Best, we get a handful of her hundreds of works of paper – certainly worthy of an exhibition of their own. Her drawings of Paris are postcards of social relations in the city, both sketchy and photographic in their detail. It’s telling that when she finally got her hands on a Kodak in the 1920s, she never used it – or needed it.
The final work on paper is Foster’s own; an extensive biography, and heroic epic, recounted with the same poetry and pragmatism she attributes to the artist. It’s an alternative textbook, a refreshingly accessible approach to writing history. Foster has done a remarkable job to put the histories of women first; a credit to her creative interpretation of existing sources, but also one that prompts us to consider whether these stories have simply been hidden in plain sight.
We get even more detail on the mothers in her milieu including John’s own, Augusta, whose few existing watercolours were first wrongly attributed to her brother. For many of the women artists on display, these works are their only ones to survive. Foster’s biography coats fresh layers of context atop what we see at Pallant House, finishing sentences she can only start in these few rooms. From the title of the second, John’s words: ‘There are people, like plants, who cannot flourish in the cold. I want to flourish.’
Everything remains circa for John, though there’s little risk of her falling into posthumous obscurity. We can’t know for sure if John would have wanted to be curated alone, or amongst her contemporaries (though in life, she tried to collaborate with Tyrwhitt). But Art and Life breaks this binary and provides plural ways to engage with her work beyond the gallery walls.
More recently, she’s been overlooked, ‘already rediscovered’ during the feminist art/historical movement in the 1980s. Then, a biography, solo show, and TV film, all coincided to catapult John into the spotlight. Forty years later, both book and exhibition, Art and Life, will no doubt do the same.
Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris is on view at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until 8 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The first critical, illustrated biography of Gwen John, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, by Alicia Foster, is published by Thames & Hudson in association with Pallant House Gallery, £30 hardback.
