Portrait of the Artist "Tete Farouche", Augustus John, c. 1899-1900. Etching. Courtesy The British Museum, London. © Courtesy the artist/ Bridgeman Art Library.
Helen Barrett made for Tate Britain to get a sneak preview of the Gwen John and Augustus John exhibition, on show from September 29 until January 9 2005.
This autumn Tate Britain is staging an exhibition of the work of Gwen and Augustus John, bringing together 140 paintings and drawings and re-opening the debate surrounding the lives and work of the siblings.
It will be the first time their paintings have hung together for nearly 80 years.
In accompanying exhibition literature Augustus is quoted as once writing: "With our common contempt for sentimentality, Gwen and I were not opposites, but much the same really".
Their work certainly developed in opposite directions: hers, introverted, restrained and psychologically charged; his, confident and exuberant. Yet, as co-curator Chris Stephens comments: "by bringing them together, certain complementary themes emerge".
Self-Portrait, Gwen John, 1902. Oil on canvas. Tate. Purchased 1942. © Estate of Gwen John. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2004.
Gwen and Augustus escaped an unhappy childhood in remote Pembrokeshire to study together at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. During the 1890s, the school was unique in allowing women students to work from the nude life-model. Gwen benefited; she was free to develop skills denied to her female contemporaries at more conservative art schools.
Both drifted into an easy acceptance at the centre of London’s avant-garde artistic circles. They lived together, painting one another’s portraits, their friends and their own reflections.
Augustus gained a reputation as one of the most promising young artists in London. Buoyed by fame, he was a compulsive womaniser; so good-looking that girls fainted when they saw him in the Café Royal.
The ambitious Gwen, meanwhile, left to study in France.
In 1903, Augustus met vivacious art student and model Dorelia McNeill. Despite being married he became infatuated, persuading her to become his muse, and with his wife Ida’s consent she became his lover. Gwen seems to have condoned the relationship, even sharing her brother’s infatuation.
Dorelia in a Black Dress, Gwen John, c. 1903-4. Oil on canvas. Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Duveen Paintings Fund 1949. © Estate of Gwen John. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2004.
Contrasting portraits of Dorelia by Gwen and Augustus are hung close together. As Chris Stephens notes: "It is almost as if she is a canvas on which they project their own fantasies". Augustus’s 1904 portrait Ardor, his nickname for Dorelia, shows her hair in disarray, mischievous and smirking, already in a sexual relationship with her painter.
Nearby is a gleeful full-length portrait of his wife, Ida Pregnant, painted in the same year and magnifying the oddness of the women’s acceptance of their ménage a trois.
Gwen’s portraits of Dorelia are more sober. In The Student, painted in 1903, Dorelia’s identity is disguised and she is presented as a plain, meditative woman hovering in a dim light, almost psychologically absent from our view as she contemplates a book.
With her famed interior paintings shown here, Gwen later dispensed with the human portrait for a while, leaving a series of simply furnished abandoned rooms which often hint at a human presence, using props like an open book or newspaper.
They are not only a celebration of an interior life, but also show us how she laboured with her technique.
A Corner of the Artist's Room in Paris (With Open Window), Gwen John, 1907-09. Oil on canvas on board. National Museums and Galleries of Wales. © Estate of Gwen John. DACS, London 2004.
By contrast, Augustus populated his paintings with his ever-expanding family. He was a fantasist, but his admiration for Romany life was genuine.
By 1905 he was living with both Ida and Dorelia and their children in a gypsy caravan, pursuing a bizarre notion of the idyllic family structure.
Chris Stephens points out that his paintings at this time: "emphasise the degree to which the works are personal fantasies".
Caravan – A Gypsy Encampment, painted at Dartmoor in 1905 is a sparkling family scene framed as though glimpsed through a curtain, like a piece of theatre. The group appear in a bright landscape of colour and sunshine.
Accompanying photographs of the bohemian John clan at the campsite suggest that their self-imposed living conditions were, in fact, squalid.
Dorelia and Three Children at Martigues, Augustus John, 1910. Oil on panel. See below for full caption.
Since his death, Augustus has fallen out of fashion. This exhibition calls us to reassess his work.
His sister almost disappeared from history, but her reputation has been revived; she’s been referred to by Country Life as: "a sort of modern Vermeer".
The ebb and flow of their fortunes has often detracted from their individual skills as painters.
Tate Britain’s exhibition reminds us that both were escapists: Gwen through the privacy of her interiors and intense technique, Augustus through his rejection of the so-called 'evils of modernity'.
Perhaps it is Augustus’ work that is most in need of reappraisal. Chris Stephens comments: "His excessive character has cast a shadow over his work. This exhibition allows us to show him at his best".
Courtesy The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. © The Estate of Augustus John/ Bridgeman Art Library.
