Gwen John: A Painter's Life

By Sue Roe

Book Overview

A revealing, animated biography of a sexual and intellectual rebel and a great painter In 1942, at the height of his fame, Augustus John predicted that 'fifty years from now I shall be known as the brother of Gwen John'. Gwen John (1876-1939) is indeed now recognised as a great artistic innovator, yet for years her life remained shrouded in the myth of the solitary recluse. Born in Pembrokeshire, Gwen followed her brother to the Slade. Her future was bound up with Augustus, his women and his coteries, yet she was also daring and highly original, living determinedly in her own way. Defiant yet shy, she painted and modelled amid the Bohemian circles of early twentieth-century Paris and embarked on a long, intense love affair with France's most legendary artistic figure, the sculptor Rodin. A friend of Symbolist poets and post-Impressionist painters, later she turned increasingly to religion, achieving a deep serenity which masked her inner turbulence and creating her haunting paintings, described as delicate and austere, restrained and still. Based on her lively and passionate unpublished letters and lavishly illustrated, this vivid new biography challenges our prejudices about the ways we evaluate women artists and finally uncovers the life of this ardent and complicated personality, one of the finest artists of her day.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374113173
• ISBN13: 9780374113179
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Painter of Interiors

Gwen John (1876-1939),the Welsh painter,is the sister of the more reknown Augustus John but with a style of art distinctly her own. Gwen John is a painter of interiors and reticience, who allows the subject's state of being, both physical and spiritual, to dominate the canvas. As her teacher Whistler knew and praised John's use of use of colour and especially tone became her trademark. Ms. Roe has done an admirable job of combining the hidden life of this artist and the world of art in Paris from 1900-1939 in which she moved freely and with great competence. Ms. Roe has gone a long way in shattering the "Gwen John myth" of solitude and isolation and demonstrates that Ms. John continued to have and make friends and maintain her family ties until her death in 1939. Ms. Roe writes of John's early days in Paris a a model and lover of Rodin. Her later associations with Rilke,the American collector and her patron John Quinn and his companion poet Jeanne Robert Foster,as she lived in Paris during the heady days of the great new developments in modern art. In the 1930s John retired to a Parisian suburb with her cats and her wild garden but continued her work. Even in her 50s she considered herself a student and studied under Lhote. She was reknown for her perfectionism and her inability to meet arbitrary deadlines. John's own sense of what a painting should be, did not always meet the expectations of dealers and exhibitors. Her work was not commercial it was personal some have called it spiritual. Gwen John is far less known than her contemporaries Chagall, Picasso, Roualt yet she knew she had a place in art and so pursued her vision fearlessly. She had little reknown in her own lifetime but time has proven her vision and her reputation in art is now secure. I once met the art critic Sister Wendy Beckett at the Tate Museum, and she asked me whose works I had come to see. I told her Gwen John and Sister Wendy replied "Don't you just love her?." Gwen John,unique,ruthless,gentle,complex,gifted,restless and Celtic,Sue Roe shows us why those who admire Gwen John "just love her" and invites those who do not know her to do so.