BATH.- The Holburne Museum, Bath, announced its presentation of the major exhibition, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, curated by Dr Alicia Foster, in partnership with Pallant House Gallery and the Holburne, the first retrospective of the artist Gwen John (1876–1939) in 20 years.
While the critically acclaimed show at Pallant House chronologically traces Gwen John’s 40-year career, placing her art in relation to the two cities where she chose to live and work, the Holburne show also focuses on the intense intimacy of the artist’s late work. As well as many of Gwen John’s major paintings, the exhibition in Bath introduces a significant number of her small works on paper, mostly from private collections and rarely seen in public. These tiny works demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the intimate minutiae of everyday life as well as with the mechanics of painting.
The show follows Gwen John’s development from her early years at the Slade School of Fine Art in London to her permanent move to Paris in 1904 and the life she built as an artist there. The exhibition draws on new research into John’s connections to her contemporaries and her personal library acquired by the National Library of Wales. Elements of her life touched upon within the exhibition’s narrative include the relationship of her work to that of her brother Augustus John (1878-1961), her ten-year affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (18401917), and her connections with her other contemporaries and women artists of her time, such as Ida Nettleship (1877-1907) and Ursula Tyrwhitt (1878-1966). The idea of the artist as an eccentric recluse is successfully challenged as she is shown as a networked, engaged, radical modern woman. Through her work as a model and as an artist, Gwen John courageously challenged the conventions of her time.
The exhibition begins in the late 1890s when John began her studies in London and first visited Paris. This period of intense training would be crucial to John’s art as she found herself immersed in the culture of the art schools at the time and the galleries and museums of both London and Paris. Her earliest works can be seen alongside those of her Slade contemporaries. Highlights include John’s early painting Landscape at Tenby with Figures (c.1896-1897, Tenby Museum and Art Gallery), depictions of the young John at work by her friends, and her portraits of Dorelia McNeill which John painted when the two women set out to walk from London to Rome in 1903.
In 1904 John moved to France permanently. There, she pursued her fascination with interior spaces and their inhabitants. Rather than an idiosyncrasy of John’s, capturing the interior was an obsession for many artists of the era. Her iconic A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (1907-9, Sheffield Museums Trust) and A Lady Reading (1909-11, Tate) can be seen alongside works by the likes of Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard and Vilhelm Hammershøi.
John’s affair with Rodin and her work as his model had a profound effect on her. His sinuous, startling life drawings will be shown alongside her studies of her cat, which marked a new sureness and fluidity in her drawing. These works signal the two artists’ difference in status: the famous sculptor with access to many life models and studios, contrasting with the woman living and working in one room. John’s watercolour painting of herself as a nude is also on display, revealing her experiments in identity at this time. John’s presence in Belle Époque Paris has been underlined by Rodin’s portrait of her, the plaster Head of Gwen John (Head of Whistler's Muse) (c.1906, Private Collection). John’s own gaze as an artist focused almost exclusively on women and the exhibition includes portraits from her early Paris years including some of her best-known works.
The years immediately following World War I saw a resurgence of interest in paintings of renaissance and renewal, and John created works which reflected the zeitgeist in Europe. Highlights from this period include two paintings from John’s magnificent series collectively known as The Convalescent (1918-1924) one from Tate paired with another from a private collection not exhibited for many years. These paintings depict a young woman reading in a wicker chair. The sitter is often seen as autobiographical, as one of John’s female friends was dying at the time, however the painting and John’s choice of title is also redolent of the collective longing for recovery from conflict in Europe. A group of John’s tender yet acute drawings of children, which were immediately successful in the Parisian Salons of the late 1910s and early 1920s as they caught the national mood of renewal, also are on display.
The final part of the exhibition looks at John’s later works made in the village of Meudon, near Paris, where she made her home. These drew from her newly found Catholic faith, and from the environment around her. John’s Slade-learned naturalism gave way to graphic modernism, taking inspiration from works by Maurice Denis (1870-1943). His call for a religious art that embraced modernism profoundly influenced John’s series of paintings of nuns from a Meudon order. Amongst those works she produced a series of portrayals of the Order’s founder, Mère Poussepin (1653-1744), two of which have been reunited in the exhibition.
Whilst she continued to paint into the 1930s, when increasingly poor health led her output to diminish, these later years were especially dominated by the small works on paper John produced in charcoal, watercolour or, most commonly, gouache. Building upon images of children that she had made previously when on holiday in Brittany, a large number of these were depictions of figures in church, especially the young, orphaned children cared for by the nuns. John would sit at the back of the church and make small, intimate drawings of closely observed groups at prayer or singing, alone or clustered together. Though they appear to depict captured moments, many of these compositions were repeated numerous times with only the tiniest of changes between versions. In fact, each gouache was made at home based on an original drawing sketched in situ. In a similar way, John made numerous small studies of flowers in vases and simple jugs, and of the streets and houses around her home. In their powerful intensity, these works, touchingly sensitive, closely observed, offer a fitting conclusion to a life dedicated to art by the most modern of women.
The exhibition includes loans from public institutions including Tate, National Museum Wales, The British Museum and other regional public collections, as well as rarely seen works from numerous private collections.
Dr Alicia Foster says, “A story of connection rather than isolation, this exhibition and book places Gwen John back into the cultural milieu of the cities of London and Paris where she chose to live and work throughout her career.”
Dr. Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne “Bringing Gwen John’s art to the Holburne fulfills a long-standing ambition. While its intimate scale and subject matter perfectly suits the Museum and its spaces, I am thrilled to present an exhibition that demonstrates the radical modernity of both John’s art and her life.”
