VISUAL CULTURE
Lisa Tickner: Gwen John
’Augustus’s Sister’: Gwen John: Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance
First published in the catalogue Gwen and Augustus John (London: Tate Publishing, 2004) © Tate.
by Lisa Tickner
painting, though it has no hidden exits and shows everything at once on a single surface, possesses a strange and awesome capacity to dissimulate
Georges Didi-Huberman1
Prologue
Gwen John’s paintings are stubbornly resistant to language. As Walter Sickert once put it (talking about Millet), there is ‘something that only the pencil or the brush can give, an emotion whose bouquet will not survive decanting from the skin of painting into that of letters’[2]. In Gwen John’s case this is related to the extreme reticence of her canvases – the stillness of her sitters, the simple armatures of her compositions, the close-toned, desaturated colours – and to the impress of her artistic personality (fierce, but elusive). Her pictures are at once modest and monumental; her interests painterly, almost abstract, but also humanly attentive; her surfaces in their texture and opacity recognisably modernist but suggestive, at the same time, of the almost perceptible vibration of atmosphere in a silent room.
Paintings are not transparent to language and understanding, but that does not mean that there is nothing to be said – that a painting is not in fact kept resonant through time by our desire to respond to it, and to communicate that response in words. The works of Gwen John’s maturity (from about 1915), make their effects through what they communicate and what they present, as painted surfaces. The distinction is cloudy and all pictures, of course, do this to some degree: they convey or provoke ideas that are readily translatable into words while striking the eye (and the body) through the stubbornly material disposition of paint. As Georges Didi-Huberman puts it, speaking of Vermeer, there is ‘something very real at work in painting, almost a form of dazzlement’ which is ‘an effect of paint at work not as a descriptive sign but as coloured matter’[3].
In 1926 the ‘undiscovered’ Gwen John was described as ‘a sort of modern Vermeer’[4]. Her later paintings are made up of a mosaic of directional touches or ‘blobs’, not overlaid or teased in any way, and she often accents a neutral scheme with a few strokes of purer colour that obstinately retain their status as marks, resolving only with reluctance into the flowers on Mère Poussepin’s table or the red and blue feathers in The Japanese Doll. This renders the balance between ‘descriptive sign’ and ‘coloured matter’ particularly evident (and particularly fine)[5]. Didi-Huberman goes on to argue that to be struck by a sudden blaze of colour or lyricism of line is to be situated ‘at the extreme limit of two theoretical fields: a field of a phenomenological kind, and one of a semiological kind’ (the ‘whole problem of a theory of art’ resides in their articulation). And this in turn requires a delicate balance in the viewer, that between ‘losing oneself in immanence, inspired, but speechless’ and ‘talking too much’ or ‘thinking louder than the painting’[6].
Augustus and Gwen
Augustus John was briefly the rising star of British painting. He was a prodigy at the Slade in the 1890s and his reputation as a draughtsman is undiminished. He was held in high regard by those who saw him as an essentially British (or Celtic) bulwark against a tidal wave of continental modernism but he was also respected by its advocates7. His exhibition of Provençal Studies and Other Works, in November 1910, was favourably compared with Roger Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists, and in 1912 he was described as ‘whether he likes it or not, the leader of the [Post-Impressionist] movement in England’[8]. Fry and Clive Bell wanted him for the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912 – he agreed to show but later withdrew – and he was prominent in the Armory Show, which introduced modernism to New York in 19139. By 1914 he was a celebrity and had succeeded Sargent as the star portrait painter in London10.
Gwen John was both less prolific and much less visible. When she exhibited jointly with Augustus at the Carfax Gallery in 1903 she showed only two works to his forty-eight (he regretted that the critics had overlooked these ‘two rare blossoms from the most delicate of trees’)[11]. Between 1900-2 and 1908-11 she exhibited at the New English Art Club and after the first world war in the Paris Salons, with some success. From 1911 the American lawyer and collector John Quinn was a discerning and generous patron. Knowing that she was slow and self-critical, he wrote in 1915: ’Send me as many things as you can spare and let me know what you want for them. I shall take them all and I know that I shall like them all’[12]. (From 1920 he paid her a regular allowance of $750 per year.) He lent Girl Reading at the Window, the only painting he then owned by her, to the Armory Show in 1913, and five works that he had by then acquired to an exhibition of British art at The Sculptor’s Gallery in New York in 1922. In 1926, aged fifty, Gwen John exhibited forty pictures and four albums of drawings at the New Chenil Galleries. This was the only solo exhibition held in her life-time and it occasioned the first two articles on her work – ‘Gwen and Augustus John’ and ‘An Undiscovered Artist: Gwen John’ – published by Mary Chamot in Country Life13. She seems never to have regained an earlier momentum after Quinn’s death from cancer in 1924 and probably ceased painting altogether around 1930. Maynard Walker, then affiliated to the Ferargil Gallery in New York, visited her in Meudon in 1929 and again in 1930 and 1937; he was anxious to mount an exhibition of her work and they even selected paintings but over many years she failed to send them and the exhibition came to nothing14.
Gwen John was confident, however, that her paintings would have value: ‘I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world – and yet I know it will. . . because I am patient and recueillé, in some degree’[15]. Augustus, who admired them enormously, predicted that ‘fifty years from now I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John’ and her reputation has long been in the process of eclipsing his16. Among the cognoscenti, what Virginia Woolf called ‘The Age of Augustus John’ was fading by 1914 and already in the 1920s there was a sense that he had failed to live up to his early promise17. John Rothenstein, writing on Gwen John in Modern English Painters, published in 1952, counted her ‘one of the finest painters of our time and country’, while suggesting that as far as critical opinion was concerned Augustus was ‘on the way to becom[ing] the “forgotten man” of English painting’[18]. In 1987 he was omitted from the Royal Academy exhibition of British Art of the 20th Century and, his reputation as a painter now largely eclipsed by his fame as ‘the archetypal rebel artist and bohemian’, it is his best and early work that now stands in need of reappraisal19.
Gwen John has always seemed a marginal figure but her reputation has risen steadily and now her relation to modernism is being tentatively reassessed as part of the reassessment of modernism itself20. Alicia Foster has pointed out how her reputation as a recluse has obscured her familiarity with Paris as a modern city before 191421. David Peters Corbett has described her as the artist ‘responsible for defining a poetics of the privatisation of modernity’ in pictures of contemplation ‘which the scrubby, dry quality of the paint surface images as a gentle dissolution of the physical fabric of the body’[22]. And Charles Harrison, revisiting the concerns of his book on English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (1981) – a book in which Ben Nicholson plays a central role but there is no mention of Gwen John – has argued that changed historical circumstances have rendered Nicholson less compelling, and ‘it has become easier to perceive the relative technical and psychological sophistication of Gwen John’s work, and to connect that sophistication to a renewed sense of modernism.’[23]
Augustus and Gwen come yoked together in the critical literature. Since 1926 (the point at which Gwen, who always had admirers, emerged as a publicly recognised artist), the urge to compare them has proved irresistible. In her article on ‘Gwen and Augustus John’, Mary Chamot acknowledged that it ‘would be difficult to bring together two artists whose personalities and position in the art world present such a contrast’. She compared his ‘leonine’ presence as probably ‘the most talked of artist in the world’ with his sister’s elusive and retiring personality, his ‘buoyant vitality’, strong colour and vigorous line with her ‘cool, grey, monastic interiors’, his gypsy subjects and celebrity portraits with her ‘demure little nuns’ and – by extension – his ‘masculine fire and force’ with her ‘feminine gentleness, delicacy and refinement’[24].
And this, of course, is the key to their fascination as a pair. Siblings, with the same background, professional aspirations and training at the Slade, their lives and work appear to dramatise the structuring of temperament and talent by gender (rather than genes)[25]. If they weren’t related, would anyone hang them together? His bravura can make her seem prissy, her luminous concentration render him shallow and thin. John Rothenstein picked up the contrast in Modern English Painters in 1952: he was an improviser, she was methodical; he was expansive, she was concentrated; he was exuberant, she was chaste, subdued and sad; he was Dionysian, she was a devoted Catholic26. This is the Augustus-and-Gwen myth and there is on the surface something to support it. Wyndham Lewis described Augustus as ‘a great man of action into whose hands the fairies had put a paintbrush instead of a sword’. His vigorous portraits and large-scale, ambitious figure compositions, set in the open air, are at the furthest remove from his sister’s modest paintings of single women in domestic interiors27. His abilities as a draughtsman were honed at the Slade but as a painter he was more uneven: prolific, capable of brilliance, but profligate with his talents and subject to despair. He had been known to peer ‘fixedly, almost obsessively, at pictures by Gwen as though he could discern in them his own temperament in reverse’[28]. But knowing her as he did, he objected to Rothenstein that they were ‘not opposites but much the same really, but we took a different attitude’[29].
Mary Taubman has suggested that what she calls the ‘detached and tender intensity’ of Gwen John’s work was linked to her capacity to digest her influences, whereas Augustus was often dazzled and distracted by the painters he admired30. Gwen also removed herself, in Paris, from the turbulence of his personality (Wyndham Lewis, an early protégé, complained that: ‘Near John I can never paint, since his artistic personality is just too strong’)[31]. She told Quinn’s companion, Jeanne Robert Foster, that she could not live where Augustus, or anyone, could come in every five minutes and advise her to paint in this way or that (but in fact she appeared sublimely indifferent to his artistic influence and never discussed his work, while he was an outspoken champion of hers)[32].
There may be another way of looking at this. Jacqueline Rose, in an essay on Christina Rossetti, has discussed the ways in which siblings respond differently to their genetic inheritance and family environment. She suggests that we might ask not ‘why are the members of the same family so different, but what it is that they are carrying for each other?’ In creative family sagas such as that of the Rossettis (Christina, Dante Gabriel, Maria and William), or the Jameses (Henry, William and Alice), ‘it feels as if one member suffers so that another can write, or that one collapses at home so that another can be a citizen of the world, or one starts to fail at the very moment when another begins to recover and achieve’[33]. Perhaps living in France was for Gwen John not simply a way of escaping Augustus’s artistic influence or benign interference in her personal affairs, but a way of refusing this largely unconscious symbiosis, of avoiding picking up something he had left (rather as, after Ida’s death, she comforted him but avoided the maiden-aunt’s obligation to move in as surrogate mother to his extensive family)[34].
Notes
Thanks are due in particular to David Fraser Jenkins and Mary Bustin at Tate Britain; Kate Lowry and Julia Carter at the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; William Darby at Browse & Darby; and Sandy Nairne for comments on an earlier draft. Anyone writing on Gwen John is indebted to Michael Holroyd, Mary Taubman, Cecily Langdale and Sue Roe.
1 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer – the detail and the patch’, History of the Human Sciences 2 (June 1989), p. 135. I was drawn to this article by the discussion in Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996, pp. 175-9.
2 Walter Sickert, ‘The Royal Academy’, English Review, June 1912, republished in Anna Gruetzner Robins, ed., Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 315-321, quotation p. 318.
3 Didi-Huberman, p. 149. He objects to the tendency of iconographical studies to ignore or overlook ‘painting’s quintesential material element; coloured pigments’ (p. 146); and he reminds us of the tiny patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft, on which Proust’s character Bergotte fixes his gaze as he collapses and dies in Remembrance of Things Past (p. 147).
4 Mary Chamot, ‘An Undiscovered Artist: Gwen John’, Country Life, June 19 1926, p. 884.
5 There is a difference, for Didi-Huberman, between the detail, ‘which can be thought of as “rinsed clean of all matter”’ and ‘the blazing flash of a substance and a colour [that]... confronts us with its material opacity’ (p.153). (He is discussing the skeins of paint in the foreground of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker .)
6 Didi-Huberman, p. 161.
7 See for example the critic in Truth, 11 Dec. 1912, on The Mumpers: ‘Also it does uphold the banner of Neo-anglicanism against those foreign importations that seek to disestablish it’. (Cited from Walter Sickert’s press cuttings in Islington Public Library.)
8 Daily Chronicle, 26 Nov. 1912, a review largely dedicted to Matisse’s La Danse at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition and John’s The Mumpers at the winter exhibition of the New English Art Club. (Cited from Walter Sickert’s cuttings book, Islington Public Library.)
9 Charleston Papers, TGA 8010.2.389, Fry to Bell [Summer 1912]: ‘delighted that John wants to show’; 8010.2.406, John to Bell [summer 1912]: ‘I received your very enigmatic letter. I am sorry I cannot promise anything for the “Second Post-Impressionists”. For one reason I am away from town, for another I should hesitate to submit any work to so ambiguous a tribunal. No doubt my decision will be a relief – to everybody’. Augustus John showed twenty oils, including fifteen of the Provençal studies, fourteen drawings and three works in tempera at ‘the Armory Show’ (The International Exhibition of Modern Art, held in the Armory of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, New York, and afterwards in Chicago and Boston). See Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography, London: Chatto & Windus, 1996, p. 334.
10 Andrew Wilton, The Swagger Portrait: Grand Manner Portraiture in Great Britain from Van Dyke to Augustus John, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 14 Oct. 1992-10 Jan. 1993, p.62. Wilton argues that John transformed the swagger and ostentation of the aristocratic grand manner into a more demotic language (p.62). Alicia Foster has pointed out that Gwen John’s Self Portrait of c.1898-9 combines the brio of the swagger portrait with the image of the artist as a New Woman (Alicia Foster, Gwen John, London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999, pp. 12-16).
11 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories vol. II, p.65, quoted in Cecily Langdale, Gwen John, New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1987, p.24. Langdale publishes a Selected Exhibition List from 1900 (pp. 240-5).
12 NLW MS 2235C ff. 35-8, John Quinn to Gwen John, Aug. 17 1915. As Mary Taubman put it: ‘Seldom can a patron of the arts have begged so fervently to pay more than he was asked, or a painter so stubbornly refused’ (M. Taubman, Gwen John 1876-1939, Faerber and Maison, exh. cat., 13 Nov. – 12 Dec. 1964, unpaged).
13 Country Life, 5 June 1926, pp. 771-3; 19 June 1926, pp. 884-5. Augustus showed in a separate room (Gwen had first tried unsuccessfully to persuade Ursula Tyrwhitt to exhibit with her at the Leicester Galleries).
14 See for example NLW MS 22311C ff. 99-102, Maynard Walker to Gwen John, July 6 1930: his last visit to Meudon was ‘one of my most memorable experiences’; he has written to tell Mr Price of the Ferargil Gallery that she will send about thirty canvases on August 15 and perhaps ten more by November 1; he is sure that America will love her work.
15 NLW MS 21468D, ff. 38-40, Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, [?1910] Feb. 4. She adds – ‘but perhaps I am boasting even in that – indeed I think I am, somewhat’. Recueilli (collected, contemplative, meditative), was one of her favourite words. She wrote to Quinn’s companion Jeanne Robert Foster after his death in 1924 ‘you ought to be more recueilli perhaps (don’t you think that french word is beautiful – se recueillir, – it means I think to gather in, to be collected’ (TAM 21C 13/22, undated).
16 Holroyd, 1996, p. 49. After Gwen John’s death her nephew Edwin brought her pictures to England. Augustus, impressed, suggested they be exhibited immediately: ‘It will be a satisfaction to show them without dreaming for a moment that their exquisite reticence will excite the multitude – still there are a few people about who are possibly able to receive the secret message she whispered’ (Augustus to Edwin John, undated letter, probably 30 December 1939, quoted in Langdale, p. 121).
17 Holroyd, 1996, p. 331. In 1926, Anthony Bertram wrote: ‘that Mr John, whose accomplishment was already so brilliant, should suddenly crash into worthlessness is one of the cruellest disillusions that can be imagined’ (Saturday Review, 5 June 1926, pp. 676-7); and in 1928, Alfred H. Barr Jr. – soon to become the first director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York – praised Gwen’s three paintings in the Tate Gallery which ‘by their subtlety and color, make the work of her flashy brother seem awkward and uncertain’.
18 John Rothenstein Modern English Painters vol. 1, Sickert to Smith [1952] London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976, p. 161 (on Gwen) and p. 175 (on Augustus). William Rothenstein, the author’s father, had been a friend to both Johns.
19 Holroyd, 1996, dust jacket. Three paintings by Gwen John were included in this exhibition.
20 Gwen John was added as one of the ‘Missing Persons’ to the supplementary volume of the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1993 (Augustus was already in it, of course, in a lengthy entry by John Rothenstein).
21 Alicia Foster, 1999, Gwen John (London: Tate Publishing, 1999), Chapter Two, ‘Paris’, pp. 19-30. See also Alicia Foster, ‘She Shopped at the Bon Marché , Women’s Art Magazine, Jul.-Aug. 1995, pp. 10-15. Foster’s unpublished Ph.D., on Gwen John’s early works, develops the socio-historical feminist analysis laid out in Deborah Cherry and Jane Beckett, ‘Gwendolen Mary John (1876-1939)’, Art History, vol. 11, no. 3 (Sept. 1988), pp. 456-463.
22 David Peters Corbett, The Modernity of English Art 1914-1930, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 186.
23 Charles Harrison, ’”Englishness” and “Modernism” revisited’, Modernism/modernity, vol. 6 no. 1 (1999), pp. 75-90: ‘let me come clean, though I risk a certain loss of face in doing so. An interest in the art of Ben Nicholson was the principal motivating force for the work that led to English Art and Modernism. He played a central role in the story it was written to tell. The painter Gwen John, on the other hand, is not even mentioned in the book. Yet if I were now required to choose a work by one or the other – let us say to live with – it is the picture by Gwen John that I would take’ (p. 84). Harrison goes on to consider the possible determinants on this change of heart.
24 Mary Chamot, Country Life, 5 June 1926, pp 771-3. See also Anthony Bertram, who asked what Augustus could ‘conceivably find to do in his sister’s world, or she in his?’ Hers was ‘a world of pale, spinster passions’ compared with his fine, full-blooded, earthly world where Hals and Rubens would have felt at home (Saturday Review, 5 June 1926, pp. 676-7).
25 Mary Chamot, reviewing the Chenil Galleries exhibition in 1926 (with paintings by Augustus in the next room), wrote that: ‘One is tempted to draw comparisons. . . and try to establish wherein lies the feminine contribution to art. The problem is a new one, for this is the first generation to see almost as many women painters as men, and few of them are so truly feminine in the best sense of the word without any of the weaknesses it might imply’. Taking Gwen together with her Slade contemporaries – Ursula Tyrwhitt, Ethel Walker and Edna Clarke-Hall – Chamot observed what she believed to be ‘some common trait, indefinable at present except with negatives’ that might nonetheless ‘play its part in the development of art’ (Country Life, 19 June 1926, p. 885).
26 Rothenstein, 1976, p. 160. His chapter opens with the following sentence: ‘Gwen John was in almost ever respect the opposite of her brother Augustus’. This is modified from the typescript which originally read ‘in every consequent respect’ (TGA 981.20).
27 Holroyd, 1996, p. 44.
28 Rothenstein, 1976, p. 160.
29 In the third volume of his autobiography, Time’s Thievish Progress (London: Cassell, 1970), pp. 20-1, Rothenstein reprinted the letter in which Augustus – who had read the chapter on Gwen in draft a year before – set the record straight: ‘Gwen and I were not opposites but much the same really, but we took a different attitude. . . She wasn’t chaste or subdued, but amorous and proud. She didn’t steal through life, but preserved a haughty independence which some people mistook for humility. her passions for both men and women were outrageous and irrational. She was never “unnoticed” by those who had access to her’.
30 Taubman, Gwen John 1876-1939, exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery 3 – 26 Mar. 1976, unpaged.
31 Lewis, writing to his mother in 1906, quoted in Holroyd, 1996, p. 202.
32 Sue Roe, Gwen John: A Life, London: Chatto & Windus, 2001, p. 207. In her nephew Edwin John’s view it was simple conjecture that she moved to Paris to escape Augustus: ‘She liked France. She liked Paris (Roe, p. 334, n.62).
33 Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World_, London: Chatto & Windus, 2003, p.26. (The Brontes might be included here too.) Rose is concerned with why Maria and Christina Rossetti responded so differently to a shared commitment to Anglicanism – Maria with contentment, Christina with suffering.
34 Holroyd, 1996, p. 235.
First published in the catalogue Gwen and Augustus John (London: Tate Publishing, 2004) © Tate.