VISUAL CULTURE
Lisa Tickner: Gwen John [2]
’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
[cont’d]
Women artists
Gwen John belonged to a great upswell of women artists, trained in the art schools and ateliers of the 1890s and 1900s, making independent careers in a field transformed by the breakdown of the old academic hierarchies and by the emerging modernisms of the twentieth century35. The easy assumption that certain kinds of subject matter or handling were appropriate to, or expressive of, the essential nature of masculinity or femininity had been undermined. Women, too, were capable of vigorous draughtsmanship and male artists from Renoir to Vuillard and Matisse were developing the domestic subject-matter and decorative handling conventionally associated with the ‘feminine’ in art.
But the idea of the woman artist, if more familiar, was still contested. In 1871 the Slade had been one of the first art schools ‘thrown open to male and female students on precisely the same terms, and giving to both sexes fair and equal opportunities’[36]. In the mid-1890s two thirds of the students were women. The question that remained was whether women were any different, or any good. In 1897, during Gwen John’s tenure at the Slade, one of the tutors, Miss Elder, insisted that although men and women were equal, a woman could not compete with a man on the same ground: ‘there has never been any very great woman painter, which goes to show that man has a greater creative, more imaginative force than a woman – and the woman has more intuitiveness of refinement, grace and beauty in drawing. . . woman must. . .never attempt to do things as a man’[37].
It was the same in Paris, a Mecca for women artists since the 1880s, where Gwen John lived permanently from 190438. In his book The Modern Parisienne, published in 1910, Octave Uzanne complained that a ‘perfect army of women painters’ threatened ‘to become a veritable plague, a fearful confusion, and a terrifying stream of mediocrity’[39]. Reviewers condescended to women, and called at the same time for a specifically ‘feminine’ art, although insofar as this was identified it seemed merely to reproduce the values conventionally ascribed to middle class feminine gentility. Images of women, children, flowers or interiors, delicate or decorative handling, soft tones and desaturated colours – in the work of women – were seen as the unproblematic consequence of a naturally ‘feminine’ mode of perception and expression.
This could be seen positively. An increasing interest in child-, folk-, tribal- and other forms of ‘primitive’ art among the avant-garde encouraged a tacit assumption that women, too, as partial outsiders, might discover something distinctively theirs. In an article on ‘Les Peintresses’ in 1912, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire identified a particular style in which women brought to art ‘not technical innovation, but rather taste, instinct, and a vision which is new. . . Charm is the really French artistic quality that Mme Marval and Mlle Laurencin have been able to preserve in art’[40].
Marie Laurencin’s delicate, faux-naif style encouraged critics to see her work as the natural expression of an intuitive sensibility (although it drew on images of women already in circulation in the high, popular and decorative arts). Through her painting and the projection of a calculated self-image, Laurencin helped consolidate the idea of ‘a marketable “feminine” art, inhabited by femmes-enfants, and produced by the quintessentially “feminine” artist’[41]. Instead of fighting a critical vocabulary of sexual difference she embraced it with gusto: it was difficult to discuss her pictures in other than gendered terms and, in terms of gender, other than through the delicate and decorative attributes of a conventional femininity.
Laurencin is interesting in this context because she was another enthusiasm of John Quinn’s. He wrote to Gwen John in October 1920 that: ‘You are the only two women artists that I know in whose work I am interested, and. . .[the only two] who paint like women. . .most women artists try to paint like men and so they paint badly’. He was anxious to show them together in a joint exhibition at the De Zayas Gallery in New York, and assured Gwen John that she need not fear the comparison: ‘Her paintings are much more mannered than yours. Your paintings show your own individual style’[42]. There was no exhibition and Quinn tired of Laurencin in the early 1920s, complaining in 1921 of ‘a good deal of monotony in the colour and theme’ of her works and objecting in 1923 to her ‘being boomed’ (by the dealer Paul Rosenberg)[43].
Gwen John did not reply to these points in her correspondence with Quinn. She knew that he thought her work ‘feminine’ but her views on the topical question of women’s art went unrecorded. She did, however, copy into one of her notebooks, without comment, an extract from a review of Gina Ferrero’s The Soul of Woman, published in The Times Literary Supplement in 192444_. According to the reviewer, Ferrero claimed that ‘the inequality of which woman is the victim’ was rooted not only in social injustice but more deeply, in ‘the very nature of woman herself’. Since her true happiness was invested in the well-being of her dependents she was incapable of intellectual enjoyment for its own sake. The future of woman lay in those fields in which her powers of intuition and observation could be brought into play: agriculture, medicine and teaching were recommended as careers for women, but it would have been entirely reasonable for Gwen John to have imagined figure-painting as a suitable addition to the list.
In fact she did have a particular sense of herself, not as female or expatriate Welsh or School of Paris, but as a Catholic artist. She once remarked that her religion and her art were all her life, and in aspiring to be ‘God’s little artist’ she made them the same thing45. The unexamined life was not for her. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1913 encouraged spiritual reflection and her attitude to painting was dedicated and self-critical46. The notebooks are full of admonitions and self injunctions. To become a better artist, or a better person (to aspire to be a saint), required constant vigilance and application47. And although she once remarked that she did her painting like she did her housework, because it had to be done, and without much pleasure, at moments she was confident, writing to Quinn, whose recent purchases she had seen at the shipping agents’, that she thought her Mère Poussepin the best picture there48. (Quinn, among the most distinguished collectors of early modernism, bought Seurat, Cézanne, Derain, Douanier Rousseau, Picasso and Matisse.)
Augustus insisted that her ‘apparent timidity and evasiveness disguised a noble pride and an inflexible will’, that she was ‘capable of exaltation combined with ruthlessness’ and rarely did anything out of duty or from social convention49. Her attachments were intense, if not always reciprocated. Her letters to Rodin often address him as ‘Mon Maître’ (they are not such as a feminist altogether wants to read), and are sometimes almost indistinguishable from those written twenty years later to ‘My Master’, Chanoine Piermé[50]. This was a passionately willed submission (and hence, in a sense, not a submission at all). Simone de Beauvoir quotes a patient of the psychologist Pierre Janet, who sought to submit to a perfect and ideal love so that: ‘I will no longer need to think what to do in life or to watch over myself’. Such a surrender, Beauvoir suggests, is paradoxical: ‘this dream of annihilaton is in fact an avid will to exist. . . When woman gives herself completely to her idol, she hopes that he will give her at once possession of herself and of the universe he represents’[51]. Gwen John positioned Rodin to do this for her and then, as their liaison cooled, turned to others and to God, finding in their recognition a passionate, spiritual and artistic identity of her own52.
This was perhaps not so much an alternative to the dismal category of ‘lady artist’ as a clever negotiation of it. It was a kind of surrender – superficially feminine or childlike – that gave her permission to do what she liked. She was not answerable to patrons, dealers or reviewers; she was answerable to God. When Véra Oumançoff, a Catholic neighbour to whom she was attached in the late 1920s, upraided her for drawing in church, she responded confidently that Jesus wanted her to do it53. Mère Poussepin, before she smiled down at the nuns, smiled back at Gwen John, in the role of ‘God’s Little Artist: a seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker’[54]. She lacked the advantages of a sisterly community but seems to have produced for herself in later years an atmosphere of austere and devotional intensity, closer to that of a mediaeval scriptorium than to the studio of a twentieth-century artist. This was a clever if intuitive knight’s move: it reconciled the social contradiction between femininity and creativity that many women artists had had to negotiate. By dedicating herself to a religious tradition in which women had been prominent she established a particular if eccentric position from which to work. And if Quinn for a time bracketed them together, her paintings, though still described as ‘feminine’ by later critics, are at the furthest remove from the secular, fashionable and highly marketable ‘feminine style’ that made Marie Laurencin a social celebrity and sustained her reputation as a portraitist in the 1920s and 1930s55.
Notes [cont’d]
35 Women were becoming artists with a new sense of ambition and self-consciousness. Societies of women artists were less defensive and more vocal. Ellen Clayton’s English Female Artists (London, 1876) was published in the year of Gwen John’s birth and Clara Erskine Clement’s encyclopaedic study of Women in the Fine Arts from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (Cambridge, Mass., 1904) in the year that she moved to Paris. Ernst Guhl, Die Frauen in der kunstgeschichte appeared in 1858, Elizabeth Ellet, Women Artists in All Ages and Countries in 1859, Marius Vachon, La Femme dans l’art in 1893 and Walter Shaw Sparrow’s Women Painters of the World in 1905.
36 Charlotte Weeks, ‘Women at Work: The Slade Girls’, Magazine of Art, 1883, p.325. (The Slade Professor in 1883 was Alphonse Legros.)
37 Wyn George diary entry, 15 May 1897, University College Archives, quoted by Alicia Foster, ‘Gwen John’s Self-Portrait: art, identity and women students at the Slade School’, in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry eds., English Art 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity, Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 170. Foster suggests that the tutor was Louise Alice Elder.
38 See Clive Holland, ‘Lady Art Students’ Life in Paris’, Studio, Dec. 1903, pp. 225-30.
39 Octave Uzanne, Parisiennes de ce temps, Paris 1910, transl. as The Modern Parisienne, London: Heinemann, 1912, p. 129. Quoted here from Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 7.
40 Apollinaire, ‘Les Peintresses, Chroniques d’Art, Le Petit Bleu, 5 April 1912, quoted in Perry, 1995, p. 115. In London Roger Fry, reviewing the work of Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in the Nation and finding it ‘frankly feminine’, added that: ‘It is surely a hopeful sign that women artists are at last confessing to their sex’ (Wendy Baron, Ethel Sands and her Circle, London: Peter Owen, 1977, p. 93).
41 Perry , 1995, p. 110. As she notes, ‘the Laurencin type did not appear on the canvas through some kind of intuitive “feminine” sensibility’ but was derived from images of women already in circulation in the ‘high’,popular and decorative arts, also drawn on by other School of Paris portraitists, notably Kees Van Dongen (p. 111).
42 John Quinn to Gwen John, 9 Oct. 1920, quoted in Langdale, 1987, p. 76. At this point Quinn wrote that he had five important paintings and eight or nine watercolours and drawings by Laurencin, and four paintings, ten or eleven drawings and nine watercolours by Gwen John. She failed to send the necessary pictures and the exhibition never materialised.
43 NLW MS 22309C ff. 86-92, John Quinn to Gwen John, 11 April 1921; NLW MS 22309C ff. 126-7, John Quinn to Gwen John, Nov. 13 1923.
44 NLW MS 22283B, exercise book c.1913-1926, with published extracts, mainly literary and philosophical, ff. 10-11. See also NLW MS 22296D, 1911-1919 and n.d., which includes religious and philosophical extracts from Diderot, Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde and various saints, together with an unidentified extract in French from ‘Gillet’ (f.1), recommending that woman engage herself above all with her own experience, and apply herself to her intellectual and emotional education.
45 Gwen John to her neighbour Louise Roche quoted in Rothenstein, 1976, p. 172: ‘My religion and my art, they are all my life’. See also NLW MS 22293C f.88, Feb. 6 1919: ‘Sainte Therèse in the church at Pléneuf. I must be a sainte [sic] too. I must be a sainte in my work’. ‘God’s little artist’ is a phrase that recurs in Gwen John’s notebooks; see for example NLW MS 22293C, ff. 97, 101, 106, 155.
46 Gwen John was receiving instruction in the Catholic faith in Meudon by October 1912 and was received into the Catholic faith early in 1913, although her notes from 1910-12 already include religious extracts and advice on prayer and meditation. There are many admonitions to herself in her notes, for example NLW MS 22281B f.4v-5, 3 Mar. 1912: ten ‘Rules to Keep the World Away’, among them ‘Do not listen to people (more than is necessary)’; ‘Do not look at people (more than is necessary)’; ‘Have as little intercourse with people as possible’ (odd advice for a figure-painter).
47 NLW MS 21468D ff. 27-9, Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt (1908, Nov.13).
48 Gwen John to John Quinn, 9 May 1922 (though she liked the Seurat landscape, View of Le Crotoy). She also observed of Cézanne’s watercolours, that they were ‘very good, but I prefer my own’ (Augustus John, foreword to the exh. cat., Gwen John Memorial Exhibition, the Matthiesen Gallery, 19 Sept. – 12 Oct. 1946). Both comments are quoted in Langdale, 1987, p.1. Quinn, a discerning collector, wrote that ‘If I had to make a choice between the painting by you that I bought from the nuns [Mère Poussepin] and the Picassos I should cheerfully sacrifice the Picassos’ (Quinn to Gwen John, Dec. 30 1921, TGA 838.2).
49 Augustus John, Matthiesen Gallery memorial exhibition 1946, pp. 8-9. Holroyd, 1996, remarks that John would have furthered his own talent if he could have effected her ‘tenuous self-sufficiency’: ‘For she, in her prison-like rooms, was comparatively free; while he, restlessly patrolling here and darting somewhere else, would be encumbered by the claims of voluminous and irregular families’ (p. 95). She was, paradoxically, reticent and confident, modest and demanding, passionate and indifferent. As Keith Roberts once remarked, in a nice turn of phrase: ‘In all Gwen John’s work there is a conflict between sackcloth and silk, between visual indulgence and denial, the sense that although the world may be well lost for the sake of a pink cup and saucer, it is also a vale of tears where cups and saucers, however lustrous, are of no possible account’. Keith Roberts, ‘Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: London’, the Burlington Magazine, vol. CX, no. 780 (March 1968), pp. 168.
50 Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan, Gwen John: Papers at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales, 1988, p. 25. See also Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, Gwen John Papers: A Schedule of Papers Purchased in 1984 and 1987, Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales, 1988.
51 These quotations are taken from Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988, p.116.
52 Gwen John noted on 30 July 1913: ‘Went to meet R[odin] this morning but he would not come back with me. I think of God more often oh that that thought would become my refuge, my stronghold, my tour d’ivoire’. Quoted Langdale, 1987, p. 127, n. 43.
53 NLW MS 22308D f. 143, Véra Oumançoff to Gwen John, Jul. 27 1927; NLW MS 22301B, f.4, Gwen John draft letter to Véra Oumançoff.
54 NLW MS 22293C f.101, Feb. 8 [19]22. After Quinn purchased Mère Poussepin from the nuns in 1921, in an unexpected twist, she smiled down on the lawyer and collector in his New York apartment.
55 Gwen John is usually counted ‘feminine’ on the grounds of her austere and fastidious manner of painting. See for example Denys Sutton’s review of her memorial exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery, ‘Gwen John’, Country Life Oct. 25, 1946, p. 762: ‘Few artists have so completely characterised the virtues of the feminine approach to painting. . .The simplicity, the neatness of her art, swept and garnished like some convent cell, recalls the chaste and simple poetry of Christina Rossetti’.
First published in the catalogue Gwen and Augustus John (London: Tate Publishing, 2004) © Tate.