Gwen John: Strange Beauties art review – Tantalising mysteries
A new exhibition charting a dynamic artist who held open the door for other women
When Gwen John (1876–1939) wrote how ‘a beautiful life is one led, perhaps, in the shadow, but ordered, regular, harmonious’, it was a self-aware summation of her own quiet devotions, both in life and work. The Edinburgh leg of this major exhibition, in partnership with Amgueddfa Cymru/Museum Wales in Cardiff and prior to US dates at Yale Center For British Art and the National Museum Of Women In The Arts, marks the 150th anniversary of John’s birth. It brings together more than 200 of her paintings, contextualised here in such a way as to reveal the connections, repetitions and variations pursued by John with an understated but passionate intensity.
This runs throughout her portraits of unsmiling women, her beloved cat and the nuns she looked to after converting to Catholicism. With each set lined up in groups, you can play a game of spot the difference with the same enigmatic subjects posed against increasingly austere backdrops. There is mystery too in John’s depictions of the rooms she lived in after moving to France, each accoutrement offering a tantalising glimpse of the life lived there. For all her insularity, John opened a door for other women artists even as she pursued her singular vision in a room of her own.
Gwen John: Strange Beauties, National Galleries Of Scotland: Modern Two, until 4 January.