The Nationwide Museum Cardiff is mounting a significant survey exhibition of probably the most well-known artists in its assortment, Gwen John (1876-1939), 9 a long time after it invested simply £20 on a portray by an artist then nearly unknown.
Gwen John: Unusual Beauties marks the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of John’s start in Wales and would be the most complete exhibition of the artist in a long time, with main loans from establishments such because the Tate and the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York. The present, which can journey to Scotland and the US, will purpose to emphasize John’s curiosity in kind, supplies and color concept, and can characteristic late watercolours that she by no means bought or exhibited however stored in her studio till her demise.
John’s work hardly ever bought in her lifetime, despite the fact that she was enormously admired by different artists, significantly her Paris contemporaries. Now although, those self same works are cherished by main museums and personal collectors internationally, whereas her life is widely known in biographies, movies and documentaries. The prophecy of her rambunctious brother Augustus John—who overshadowed his quiet sister—that fifty years after their demise she could be the extra well-known, has come true.
‘My little work’
Augustus championed his sister’s work and included eight of her work in an exhibition of latest Welsh artists—one in every of which, Woman in a Blue Costume, the Cardiff museum purchased in 1935 for £20. On the time, John had held only one solo exhibition, and of the few work she had ever bought, most had been within the US by her solely influential patron, the collector John Quinn. She wrote to David Kighley Baxandall, the museum’s assistant keeper of artwork, from her dwelling on the outskirts of Paris: “I’m very happy and honoured that you’ve got purchased one in every of my little work for the Museum, and I thanks on your reward and criticism of it. In an article on the exhibition, your competent and intuitive appreciation of my brother’s work has given me pleasure.”
John’s Flowers in a Jug Courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru—Museum Wales
The museum continued to gather her work, and in 1976 acquired the archive of over 900 drawings, letters, images and notes that she had stored in her studio till her demise in Dieppe in 1939, giving them the most important assortment of her work on this planet. The exhibition title, Unusual Beauties, comes from the artist’s description of herself as “a seer of unusual beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent employee”.
Lucy Wooden, the co-curator of the exhibition, believes the emphasis on John’s life—for instance, her passionate relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the notion of her as an eccentric recluse after its breakdown—and the studying of her work of solitary girls and empty rooms as autobiographical, has distracted from the significance of the work itself. “She has been seen as each a timid recluse and a paragon of feminism and neither view is wholly true,” Wooden says.
After months studying tons of of pages of primarily unpublished notes, letters and drawings within the archive, Wooden believes they reveal points of John’s life and work which have been overshadowed by the biographical emphasis of many exhibitions. Wooden sees John’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1913, and her shut relationship with the convent close to her dwelling, not as an extra retreat from life however as broadening her artwork, her topics and her methods.
The late watercolours reveal a wider color vary, typically utilizing new artificial paints, and extra various topics than the well-known grey-and-blue seated girls with their meekly folded palms. Wooden sees much less a wan recluse than a lady who determinedly made an area of her personal the place she might work, and an artist who was very conscious of the work of latest artists, thinkers and writers.
“The principle takeaway is that she was an extremely devoted and considerate girl, pushed by a ardour for artwork,” Wooden says. “She by no means stopped working to the very finish. She labored exhausting daily, thought deeply about color and kind, and wrote about what she did. That’s what we hope to indicate on this exhibition.”
• Gwen John: Unusual Beauties, Nationwide Museum Cardiff, 7 February-28 June; Nationwide Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh, 1 August-4 January 2027; Yale Middle for British Artwork, New Haven, 18 February 2027-20 June 2027; Nationwide Museum of Ladies within the Arts, Washington DC, 30 July 2027-28 November 2027
