“I think Gwen John has been pushed to the peripheries because of how she’s been understood,” says Alicia Foster, the curator of Gwen John: Art and life in London and Paris at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. The exhibition will feature paintings, watercolors and drawings spanning John’s career, from her time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and her move to Paris, to works produced in Meudon, where she spent the last years of his life. The show promises to challenge John’s reputation “as a recluse, cut off from life and art” of his time, says Foster, a reputation that has significantly “diminished the resonance of his work”.
Featuring over 120 works, the exhibition will trace John’s development from the 1890s, represented by the first Munch-like painting. Landscape at Tenby with Figures (c. 1896-1897) – to his timeless and timeless portraits of young women and girls. Rare watercolors and sketches will offer new insight into the sureness of John’s drawing, while the exhibition will conclude with a series of late landscapes, revealing his sustained engagements with ongoing developments in modernism. Three versions of his silent masterpiece The Convalescent (1918-24) will also be reunited.
Wider meaning
Since her death in 1939, John’s significance has often been reduced to her association with her brother, Augustus, or the sculptor Auguste Rodin, for whom she modeled in Paris during their decade-long affair. While Foster’s exhibition restores John’s independence, it does so by broadening the scope of her artistic exchange, positioning her among a range of European contemporaries, from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to the various painters with whom the exhibition associates her work. , such as Édouard Vuillard, James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert. John’s paintings would also come into focus, by juxtaposition with several female contemporaries, particularly Mary Constance Lloyd and Ursula Tyrwhitt, while his hazy, tonal studies of domestic interiors, such as A corner of the artist’s room in Paris (circa 1907-09) – appear alongside Pierre Bonnard and Spencer Gore.
Foster hopes to re-illuminate John’s art with the exhibition as well as a new biography, examining not just “what it meant in his day,” she says, but “what it might mean in ours.”
- Gwen John: Art and life in London and Paris, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 13 May-8 October
