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<\/p>\nThe National Museum Cardiff is mounting a major survey exhibition of one of the most famous artists in its collection, Gwen John (1876-1939), nine decades after it invested just \u00a320 on a painting by an artist then almost unknown.<\/p>\n
Gwen John: Strange Beauties marks the 150th anniversary of John\u2019s birth in Wales and will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist in decades, with major loans from institutions such as the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show, which will travel to Scotland and the US, will aim to emphasise John\u2019s interest in form, materials and colour theory, and will feature late watercolours that she never sold or exhibited but kept in her studio until her death.<\/p>\n
John\u2019s work rarely sold in her lifetime, even though she was greatly admired by other artists, particularly her Paris contemporaries. Now though, those same works are cherished by major museums and private collectors across the world, while her life is celebrated in biographies, films and documentaries. The prophecy of her rambunctious brother Augustus John\u2014who overshadowed his quiet sister\u2014that 50 years after their death she would be the more famous, has come true.<\/p>\n
\u2018My little paintings\u2019<\/p>\n
Augustus championed his sister\u2019s work and included eight of her paintings in an exhibition of contemporary Welsh artists\u2014one of which, Girl in a Blue Dress, the Cardiff museum bought in 1935 for \u00a320. At the time, John had held just one solo exhibition, and of the few paintings she had ever sold, most were in the US through her only influential patron, the collector John Quinn. She wrote to David Kighley Baxandall, the museum\u2019s assistant keeper of art, from her home on the outskirts of Paris: \u201cI am very pleased and honoured that you have bought one of my little paintings for the Museum, and I thank you for your praise and criticism of it. In an article on the exhibition, your competent and intuitive appreciation of my brother\u2019s work has given me pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n
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John\u2019s Flowers in a Jug Courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru\u2014Museum Wales<\/p>\n
The museum continued to collect her work, and in 1976 acquired the archive of over 900 drawings, letters, photographs and notes that she had kept in her studio until her death in Dieppe in 1939, giving them the largest collection of her work in the world. The exhibition title, Strange Beauties, comes from the artist\u2019s description of herself as \u201ca seer of strange beauties, a teller of harmonies, a diligent worker\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lucy Wood, the co-curator of the exhibition, believes the emphasis on John\u2019s life\u2014for example, her passionate relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the perception of her as an eccentric recluse after its breakdown\u2014and the reading of her paintings of solitary women and empty rooms as autobiographical, has distracted from the importance of the work itself. \u201cShe has been seen as both a timid recluse and a paragon of feminism and neither view is wholly true,\u201d Wood says.<\/p>\n
After months reading hundreds of pages of mainly unpublished notes, letters and drawings in the archive, Wood believes they reveal aspects of John\u2019s life and work that have been overshadowed by the biographical emphasis of many exhibitions. Wood sees John\u2019s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1913, and her close relationship with the convent near her home, not as a further retreat from life but as broadening her art, her subjects and her techniques.<\/p>\n
The late watercolours reveal a wider colour range, often using new synthetic paints, and more diverse subjects than the famous grey-and-blue seated women with their meekly folded hands. Wood sees less a wan recluse than a woman who determinedly made a space of her own where she could work, and an artist who was very aware of the work of contemporary artists, thinkers and writers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main takeaway is that she was an incredibly dedicated and thoughtful woman, driven by a passion for art,\u201d Wood says. \u201cShe never stopped working to the very end. She worked hard every day, thought deeply about colour and form, and wrote about what she did. That\u2019s what we hope to show in this exhibition.\u201d<\/p>\n