Gwen John, Pallant House review — painting herself into the picture

No one does wan like Gwen John. Take “Girl in a Blue Dress” (1914-15), a painting of a woman framed by a terracotta wall. At first you notice only how her skimmed-milk complexion contrasts with her dark frock. But keep looking and her chill pallor accentuates the subtle colour of the cloth. That carceral wall gently wavers. You notice the sensual lap of the shadow along the model’s body; the way her long hair caresses her neck. Are her hands demurely folded? Or subtly clenched?

Who was Gwen John and how should we read her paintings? Since her death in Dieppe in 1939 she has been pigeonholed as the sister of the more famous Augustus, as reticent as the women and roomscapes that are her signature subjects. Her conversion to Catholicism and the letters she scribbled to Rodin — for whom she was model, muse and mistress — reinforced her reputation as a reclusive, pious, lovesick spinster choosing art and solitude as the heart’s balm.

At Pallant House this summer, curator Alicia Foster reclaims John as a woman and artist who, in her own words, wanted “to flourish”; who dubbed Cézanne’s watercolours “very good but I prefer my own”; and who admitted that she could not imagine “why my vision will have some value in the world — and yet I know it will”.

Nevertheless, John was a mistress of the hermetic and transient, more entranced by a fleeting glance of light than the grandeur of flesh and form. The Chichester show opens with works that show her concerns took root early. Painted in 1896-97, when John was barely in her twenties, “Landscape at Tenby with Figures” shows her Pembrokeshire home town splashed with sunshine in front of a murky beach where waif-like figures wander and gossip. The contrast of shades is too harsh for the painting to entirely work, but it announces John’s determination to exploit her economy of means — light, shade, ethereal solids — as thoroughly as possible.

The Slade School of Art supplied John’s early education. That it was the only school to permit women to learn life drawing speaks volumes for a world where John’s friend Gwen Salmond would describe being a girl as an “awful curse”.

Including not just John but also works by her female contemporaries, the show reveals how fiercely women artists resisted the suppression of their ambitions. Her fellow student Mary Constance Lloyd, for example, delivers a sumptuous 1905 oil of John naked, reading on a bed. Her body and bedroom moulded out of whipped-cream whites and milky pinks, spiced with hints of lilac, sage and lemon, John is at once sensuous and untouchable — more absorbed in her book than by any artist or lover.

That enigmatic friction bristles through John’s own work. An enlightening juxtaposition of paintings of Dorelia McNeill, one by John and one by her brother Augustus, reveals that the latter, who became McNeill’s life-long partner, used lush, extravagant strokes to conjure a blushing, rose-lipped beauty. Gwen, on the other hand, paints McNeill as an inscrutable, black-clad observer, her arms folded protectively across her belly, only her coral lipstick and matching kerchief hinting at the banked fires within.

Painted in 1903-04, her portrait of McNeill marks a period when the pair walked through France, sleeping alfresco and selling drawings to make ends meet. It’s possible they were lovers — John had several intense female attachments. However, after arriving in Paris in 1904, McNeill returned to London, while John chose to remain.

In Paris, where she modelled to earn money, John fell into an exalted orbit that included Rilke, Matisse and, of course, Rodin, with whom she was involved for the best part of a decade. But her need for solitude — “a picture . . . requires . . . a very long time of a quiet mind,” she once said — pulsed more strongly than any sexual longing.

With paintings such as “The Courtyard Room” (1907-08) and “A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris” (1907-09), we see how John poured her impulse for solitude into pictures assembled from a simple lexicon of pale curtains, open windows and a wicker chair accessorised with a posy, book or cat. In a palette of silvery whites, chalky greys and neutrals — biscuit, gold, coffee, tawny, sandstone — these paintings are shy, fastidious hymns to the passage of daylight as it glides across wall, floor, the chair’s pale lattice, a violet’s petal. Evanescent yet meticulous, poised as withheld breath, they tease us with the possibility of their own absence.

Even when John paints herself into the picture, as she does in “A Lady Reading” (1909-11), so insubstantial is her figure that she verges on erasing herself. Among her successors must be Francesca Woodman, who managed to haunt her own photographs. Forerunners include Vermeer, though the light that filters through his salons is less humble than John’s beams. At Pallant we see her in the company of contemporary interior specialists such as Vilhelm Hammershøi — almost too precise in comparison — and Édouard Vuillard, whose blurry offerings suddenly look a little slapdash.

In 1911, John moved to Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, where Rodin had a second home and studio. By now she had a US patron, John Quinn, who ensured her work was shown in New York. In 1913, she converted to Catholicism, a move which, along with her stated desire to become “God’s little artist” and the collapse of her bond with Rodin, cemented her reputation as a wayward ascetic. Her notebooks brimmed with negative injunctions — “Do not listen to people . . . do not look at people.” But that desire for renunciation clashed with her strong sexual appetite. “I desire you so much my Master that I can’t take pleasure in my room now,” she wrote to Rodin at one point, even telling a friend that “everything interests me more than painting”.

Was it shame at carnal avarice that caused John to represent herself nude in a 1909 self-portrait with such buttoned-up reticence she could be fully dressed? Perhaps the flesh interested her less as an artist than as a woman. She once said, “A cat or a man, it’s the same thing . . . the object is of no importance.” Nevertheless, John was queen of cats. Drawings of her beloved feline — curled nose to tail, washing herself — capture her as both cuddly and self-contained, like John herself.

During the first world war, John worked as a translator in Paris. In 1917, Rodin died. A postwar series of paintings titled The Convalescent feature a woman reading, sometimes with a teacup beside her. It’s the same dark-haired model, and a similar dress, as the one who posed for “Girl in a Blue Dress”. But now she is as insular as her stony-hued surroundings; her dress less the cerulean of a summer sky than the indigo of the inner eye, designed to cool senses overheated by war and misbegotten passion.

There are no paintings from John’s last years. Several works on paper tell us she turned to the flowers and landscape around her Meudon home. That none are memorable does nothing to detract from her wondrous best. By the time she died, she had shown in London, New York and Paris. (In the last city, one dealer said she could “name her price”.) Were she a man, critics would be less absorbed by her love life. But only a woman could have chronicled such an ecstatic affair with a room of her own.

To October 8, pallant.org.uk

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