David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Gwen and Augustus John
‘Gwen and Augustus John.’ Tate Britain, Millbank, London,
29 September 2004 to 9 January 2005.
Published as ‘People are like shadows’, The Times Literary
Supplement, 22 October 2004, p. 18.
Can Augustus John ever overcome his reputation as early twentieth-century London’s
Bohemian-in-chief? Can he, or his sister Gwen, ever transcend the endless comparisons
that are drawn between them? Do we love the man more than the art, or the art
more than the woman? Seemingly distancing themselves from such questions, the
curators of the Tate’s new exhibition claim that this is not intended
as a ‘compare and contrast’ show, nor is it a survey or a retrospective.
Rather, David Fraser Jenkins explains that he has omitted ‘whole categories’ of
Augustus’s work, presenting instead ‘a generous cluster of various
kinds of his art that are not only his best, but can be better understood in
relation to Gwen. To an extent her smaller oeuvre set the agenda, beside which
her brother’s paintings were selected – and this was not a constraint,
but a revelation.’
Indeed it is, and the relationship between the two artists as seen here remains
both troubling and fascinating. This is the first joint exhibition of the siblings’ work
in a major museum since Augustus died (twenty-two years after his sister) in
1961, and it was he himself observed who observed that ‘Fifty years after
my death I shall be remembered as Gwen John’s brother.’ It seems
inevitable, therefore, that comparisons and contrasts will be drawn from his
show. And the suspicion is that Augustus was right: it is Gwen’s luminous,
puzzling work that has stood the test of time.
Yet it was once all so different, when Augustus had been the *enfant terrible*
of the British art scene and Gwen had seemed the quiet, distant and rather prim
older sister. The Tate show opens with Augustus’s ‘Portrait of the
Artist: Tê[circumflex]te Farouche’, the remarkable etching of his
bearded, manic, god-like face lit in a halo of light. This is the Augustus John
of legend, the ‘bloody genius’ who ran away with the gypsies, sired
many children with both wife and mistress, and who told the artist Nina Hamnett
(who lost her virginity to a friend of Aleister Crowley’s), ‘We are
the sort of people our fathers warned us against!’
As a young man Augustus had electrified the London art scene. When Richard Nevinson,
then a student at St John’s Wood School of Art, first saw reproductions
of Augustus’s drawings he was amazed. In those exhibited at the Tate we
can see why: the tender beauty of the 1903 chalk sketch ‘Dorelia Asleep’,
or the fluid pencil drawings of Dorelia in Gypsy dress that span the years between
1907 and 1912. (Indeed, the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent considered
Augustus at his best to be one of the finest draughtsmen since the Renaissance.)
Though Nevinson’s teacher at St John’s Wood dismissed Augustus as ‘a
posing charlatan’ in gold earrings and a Salvation Army jersey, the drawings
were enough to direct Nevinson away from the Royal Academy and to Gwen and Augustus’s
*alma mater*, the Slade, and the demanding drawing regime of Professor Henry
Tonks. In what Tonks later called the Schools ‘second crisis of brilliance’ — the
first had been the years of the Johns, William Orpen and Wyndham Lewis — Nevinson
found himself surrounded by an array of sharp young talents: David Bomberg, Dora
Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Stanley Spencer. Many
of them, undoubtedly, had been drawn there by the combined reputations of John
and Tonks. Certainly Nevinson records his companions’ ‘wild excitement’ whenever
Augustus appeared at the Café Royal. And John took an interest in many
of these youngsters, taking time to talk with them, to drink and party drunkenly
with them, and even to exhibit alongside them.
These first two decades of the twentieth century were the period of Augustus’s
greatest paintings, some of which are exhibited here: portraits of W. B. Yeats,
Wyndham Lewis, William Nicholson, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and his beloved muse
and mistress, Dorelia, the celebrated ‘Woman Smiling’. There are,
too, his large scale commissions: ‘The Mumpers’ (acclaimed at the
time as ‘the best he has ever painted’ and exhibited back in Britain
for the first time since 1915), and the ‘Lyric Fantasy’, the many-peopled
work recalling his belief that the artist is one who ‘perhaps in a dream … has
caught a glimpse of the Golden Age and is in search of it’. And there are
the colourful figures in colourful landscapes painted in — or inspired
by — the Provencal countryside which, when exhibited in London, were compared
to the works of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse.
And then there is the drink-fuelled decline — which yet still has its moments
of distinction, such as 1937’s ‘Jamaican Girl’: exciting, vibrant,
cheeky. But Anthony Blunt, in reviewing the show of works painted during Augustus’s
Caribbean trip, wrote that all were agreed that John had been born ‘with
a quite exceptional talent ... and almost everyone is agreed that he has in some
way wasted it.’ Augustus’s star had shone in youth — and on
youth — and then faded. Many of those young men of the Slade had gone on
to outshine him. Nash, Nevinson, Gertler, Bomberg, Spencer all discovered something
in the years of the Great War that Augustus seemed only to lose. Perhaps it was
the death of his wife, Ida, that had so unsettled him, and left him treading
water: significantly, she continued to appear posthumously in his paintings.
Gwen’s life story also tails off into a sorry ending. She too studied at
the Slade, and here too at the Tate we have her defining self-image, the quietly
confident ‘Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse’ from 1902. In 1904 Gwen
set off to France with Dorelia, and from that date on she returned rarely to
Britain. Augustus did not share his sister’s affection for Paris, which
became her chief home: he felt that the atmosphere there, ‘usually so favourable
to the artist, ends by defeating him ... The people pass in endless procession,
animated and purposeful, leaving him to revolve like a foreign body in a back
eddy of the stream of life and getting nowhere. The boredom of this is excruciating.’ In
Paris Gwen earned a living as an artist’s model, and became for a while
Rodin’s lover. This exhibition includes two of her beautiful, sun-filled
interiors from this period, as well as some of her famous portraits of her cat.
For some time she stopped painting, writing, instead, an obsessive thousand letters
to her lover.
Yet when she did work Gwen obsessed similarly over her paintings, producing similar
paintings over and over again. In 1916 she told a friend, ‘I think a picture
ought to be done in 1 sitting or at most 2. For that one must paint a lot of
canvasses probably and waste them.’ It is slightly uncanny to see a whole
room — as we do at the Tate — filled with Gwen’s trademark
three-quarter length portraits of women. They are invariably seated alone, hands
clasped in their laps, impassive, thoughtful, lonely. Here there are four near-identical
paintings of nuns, as well as four similar-looking versions of ‘The Pilgrim’.
Also here are the two portraits of Fenella Lovell from 1909—10, with their
identical poses and identical backgrounds. In one she is dressed, and in the
other she is naked. ‘Nude Girl’ is in the Tate’s collection,
but ‘Girl with Bare Shoulders’ has come here from the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. It is unsettling to see them side-by-side.
What was Gwen seeking in this process of repetition? Was it painterly perfection?
Was it the capturing of a particular mood, or was it more to do with a curious
psychological need? ‘People are like shadows to me’ she once wrote, ‘& I
am like a shadow’. It is the same with her intimate still lives of empty
rooms, these subtle investigations into colour and tone: ‘I may never have
anything to express except this desire for a more interior life’, she told
a friend in 1912. Augustus thought her paintings were ‘almost painfully
charged with feeling’ — and acknowledged that his own were ‘painfully
empty of it’.
In 1932 Gwen moved into a run-down house with a small garden, and she seems
to have stopped painting in around 1933. Living ever more reclusively, surrounded
by her cats, she died in 1939. Another of Rodin’s former lovers, the sculptor
Camille Claudel, had lamented, ‘They reproach me (what a terrible crime)
for having lived alone, for spending my life with cats’. Like Claudel,
some have seen Gwen John as a feminist icon: an embodiment of sadness, loneliness,
insipient madness. Perhaps it was the lack of real lifetime recognition, or
having worked in the shadow of great men. Her work remains enigmatic, curious
and out
of reach.
Perhaps what one finally comes away with from this exhibition are the two Johns’ similarities
as people, rather than their differences (or similarities) as artists. Gwen said
that she believed ‘if we are to do beautiful pictures we ought to be free
from family conventions & ties … I think the family has had its day.’ Augustus
likewise created his own, strange family life. Their unhappy childhoods have
often been seen as the root-cause of this need for escape and reinvention.
This exhibition is thus as fascinating as a study in family psychology as it
is in
early twentieth-century British art. Both the lives and the works leave the
spectator filled with questions that can never quite be answered.
© David Boyd Haycock.