Gwen John and Augustus John, at Tate Britain 2004

Date: 03-10-2004
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012      
Subject: 20th Century  19th Century        

“Gwen John and Augustus John”, at Tate Britain, is not just a tale of two artists, brother and sister, but of two startlingly contrasting posthumous reputations. As a preternaturally gifted student at the Slade School of Art, at the turn of the twentieth century, Augustus John was hyperbolically acclaimed by his teachers, including Sir Henry Tonks, as another Raphael or Michelangelo. During his early career he shouldered the burden of such expectations with considerable bravado. But after promising beginnings he subsided into a rather dull middle age, as a painter of conventional, albeit occasionally piercing, portraits. In his later years he drank so much and painted so many pictures of dubious quality that after his death in 1961, when his heirs were constrained by inheritance tax to dispose of the contents of his studio, the market was suddenly flooded with slapdash and painfully inferior paintings by his hand. Auction-room prices for his work hit rock bottom and his reputation suffered a reverse from which it has never subsequently recovered.

 

The wheel of critical fortune has been considerably kinder to Gwen John, whose career followed a more elusive and shorter trajectory. After studying at the Slade alongside her brother, she travelled to France, settling in Paris, where she modelled for Auguste Rodin. She embarked on a protracted but distinctly one-sided love affair with the sculptor (who was considerably her senior), which began, one day, when he stooped to kiss her as she posed for his statue Whistler’s Muse. After he broke off their relationship, she perversely chose to move to the Parisian suburb of Meudon, where Rodin had a second home. There she led a stifled life of disappointment, snatching distant glimpses of the object of her unrequited affections and taking consolation in her conversion to Catholicism. After Rodin’s death in 1917 she persisted in her self-imposed exile to France, moving from place to place and channelling much of her affection towards a succession of cats, which she both pampered and painted, in a saccharine style well adapted for future exploitation (it can only be a matter of time) by the greetings card industry.

Throughout her life she showed a preference for a restricted range of exclusively domestic subjects, particularly young women staring pensively into space in cloistered interiors. But her career was marked by long periods of inactivity and when she died alone in Dieppe, in 1939, at the age of 63, she had barely picked up a brush for ten years. Although she created a fraction of the number of paintings produced by her brother, her relatively meagre oeuvre was handled with strategically parsimonious care after her death. Relatively little was released for sale until as late as the 1970s, when the development of feminist art history created favourable conditions for the rediscovery of a hitherto unsung female British painter. Anthony d’Offay, one of the most talented art dealers and market-manipulators of his generation, handled most of the sales of works from her estate. Her stock rose dramatically during the following decades, when the more extravagant of her admirers sought to elevate her to the sainted status of a British Vermeer.

A stridently adulatory tone is struck by Lisa Tickner in her essay on Gwen John in the catalogue to the Tate’s new exhibition, where the artist’s paintings are not only compared with the works of such Old Masters as Vermeer and Chardin, but even said to evoke the three qualities of beauty defined by St Thomas Aquinas: “integritas, consonantia, claritas”. The catalogue contains no corresponding essay on the work of Augustus John, although there is a text comparing the life and work of brother with sister. Perhaps the organisers of the show are broadly reconciled to the current critical status quo, according to which Gwen was by far the more significant painter and Augustus was a disappointing mediocrity, more memorable for his colourful and polymorphously adulterous private life than for the quality of his art. But the works on display in the exhibition itself suggest that the truth is more complicated.

As might be expected, Augustus John emerges as a fitfully brilliant but ultimately disappointing artist, although visitors have been spared the worst of his decline. While he was still a student, in his late teens, he demonstrated uncanny abilities as a draughtsman and it was on the basis of his early life studies, his portrait drawings and copies after the Old Masters that Tonks rushed to judge him as a Renaissance master miraculously reborn. It is often said that he failed to build on that early promise, although his facility was inextricably linked to his weaknesses. From the start of his career, he was a brilliant pasticheur of the styles of others, a model academic student so at home in the world of museums that he quickly developed uncanny powers of impersonation. He himself admitted that the nature of his talent was fatally chameleon-like, and like many a mimic he never quite found a voice of his own.

His early drawings of Ida Nettleship, the fellow Slade student who became his first wife, are hatched with a Raphaelesque subtlety, although they also have a languorous and dreamy quality that recalls the femmes fatales of the pre-Raphaelites. Three early self-portraits, created in the years around the turn of the century, demonstrate in equal measure John’s theatrical sense of his own personality and his ventriloquistic gifts as a draughtsman. The earliest is a red-chalk drawing of the artist as a mischievous satyr, carried off with such pseudo-Baroque bravura that it might almost have been created for the market in Old Master fakes; the second is an etching of John, his eyes wild, his hair and beard electrically unkempt, which is evidently a homage to Rembrandt; while the third, showing him as an elegant but romantically fiery homme du monde, is pure – or perhaps not quite so pure – Delacroix.

During the years that followed, John lived a notoriously bohemian life, setting up a menage a trois with his wife Ida and girlfriend Dorelia McNeill that would last until 1907, the year of Ida’s death. Like Toad of Toad Hall, he flirted with the gypsy life, to the extent of taking his large and irregular family on the road, in the summer months, in a brightly painted caravan; and he experimented with various styles of painting which he had encountered in Paris, in the studios of the Fauves and Picasso, and which must have seemed, to him, at the time, to be appropriately unconventional. The works that he created during this period – which lasted until about mid-way through the First World War – are still his most highly regarded pictures, although like his juvenilia they are animated by an unmistakable spirit of impersonation. The smaller panel pictures of Dorelia and his various children communing with nature, painted in a palette of nearly Fauve brightness, have a mild, fey charm. But even when John was at his most self-consciously experimental, flattening the perspectives of his landscapes to a few bands of bright and simplified primary colour, he retained a habit of posing the human figure with an old-fashioned theatricality.

The large allegorical canvases that he painted in the years immediately before the First World War, Lyric Fantasy and The Mumpers, are his fullest realisations in art of the bohemian dream of getting back to nature, of living in a state of guiltless bliss among a bevy of compliant women and a brood of contented children. These were presumably John’s attempt to rival the monumental modern mythologies of Matisse and Picasso. But they are embarrassing, ill-composed, faux-naif daubs, which demonstrate more clearly than anything else in the exhibition his absence of imagination. John’s most impressive pictures are his portraits of the people that he cared for, painted in styles that evoke those of the Old Masters but do so with a pointed, knowing wit: the wonderful swagger portrait of Bill Nicholson, raising a disdainful eyebrow from the comfort of an easy chair in the artist’s studio; or the portrait of a smiling, flirtatious Dorelia in a scarlet smock, a gipsy Mona Lisa painted in the robust style of Frans Hals. It is in pictures like this – and the unaccountably omitted Madame Suggia, which the Tate actually owns – that John’s full-blooded relish in life and his magpie-like, academic eclecticism as an artist come together most memorably. It seems appropriate that his finest pictures should also be his most playful, because he gave the impression of having chosen art, lightheartedly, as a lifestyle rather than a vocation. “I was an unsatisfactory type of fellow,” he once wrote, “moody and unpredictable, with no sense of figures or respect for the value of money … perhaps Art might be just the thing for me, since it involved irregular hours, few social obligations and no arithmetic.”

To allow Gwen John to justify equal billing with her more prolific sibling, a rather high percentage of her meagre output has been placed on display – and this does her few favours. While she might always have been a more singleminded painter than her brother, she was also a considerably more repetitive one, and the experience of seeing her pictures en masse soon becomes rather wearisome. She painted many of her better works in early life, and among the most powerful of them are her first self-portraits, in which she seems already to confront the viewer with a slightly unnerving, severe, spinsterish stare – a look that establishes the mood of stifled emotion and yearning piety which prevails in almost all of her subsequent works.

Gwen John’s principal theme was the girl or woman alone in an interior, but such is the emotional consistency of the resulting pictures that they all come across as self-portraits – the products, at any rate, of a particular kind of spiritual self-absorption. Her early portrait of Dorelia McNeill sets the standard, showing her as a melancholy but virtuous student alone in a room with her books (a far cry from the earthy, sexy gypsy imagined by Augustus). In her pictures of the years from about 1910 to 1925, the artist painted numerous different sitters, but always the same wan ideal of solitary, virtuous, spiritual self-sufficiency. The keynote, a kind of sentimental asceticism, is struck by a direly repetitious series of pictures of nuns, and continued in numerous, increasingly pallid depictions of convalescent girls, painted in the colours of weak tea and porridge oats – frail creatures who seem almost to merge into the paint or wallpaper that decorates the hushed interiors which they occupy.

Some of these pictures are quietly distinctive. They have a calming appeal and might look well in a hospice. But the visitor to Tate Britain is enjoined by a wall-text to appreciate their radical inventiveness, the way in which they daringly push portraiture towards abstraction. They have an unusual, dusty, crumbly texture, but their principal interest is perhaps more pathological than aesthetic – images of a perpetually recurring dream of fading away, of disappearing into thin air. While Augustus John may emerge from this exhibition a little more warmly appreciated, the attempt to show Gwen John whole has had the unintended effect of laying bare her limitations.