Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
To Be a Pilgrim
By Sanford Schwartz
Gwen John: A Life
by Sue Roe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $30.00
The critic and art historian Richard Cork chose exactly the right words when he said some years ago that Gwen John has a place in British art 'much cherished by men and women alike.' The Welsh-born painter, who died in 1939 at sixty-three, is scarcely known here, and even at home her pictures are regularly seen only in provincial museums (the about-to-be-expanded Tate Gallery at Millbank, now called Tate Britain, may rectify this). But once viewers make contact with John's generally small paintings, with their blearily beautiful colors and chalky, quivering surfaces—the great majority show a single, youngish woman, placed in a nearly bare setting—it's hard to dislodge her from your mind. Although John lived in Paris or its environs from 1903 on, and was aware of the heady developments in the art scene of those years, she isn't exactly thought of as a modernist—probably because she was untouched by Cubism. Yet she is one of the few British artists whose art has the qualities we associate not only with the modern movement but with the movement at its most heroic. As much, in her way, as Mondrian, say, or Pollock, she single-mindedly pushed to reduce her theme, her image of the lone woman, to its barest essentials.
Review, 4106 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |