In the long essay I wrote over the winter, “Let a Body Venture at Last Out of its Shelter”, I remember discussions I had with J, the artist who was painting me in 1978. We talked endlessly about art. Gwen John was a painter we both agreed was so good, maybe even better than her dazzling brother Augustus. We talked about Lucian Freud, whose work I’d seen the previous year (1977) in London. J didn’t much like Freud’s paintings. Technique in abundance but he found the work too chilly. I was 23 and I made my own spirited defence. But to be honest, I wondered about Freud’s relationships with his models. Should it matter? There’s a debate about Picasso these days. Does his cruelty, his misongynistic treatment of his models and his wives (sometimes one and the same), negate the importance of his work? In one section of my essay, I look at Balthus and his supposed exploitation of his model, Thérèse Blanchard, specifically the painting, “Thérèse dreaming”. Did she pose against her will? What did her parents think? Did she talk about it? Was she 12, as some art historians have suggested, or 14, or 15? Would any of this make a difference? It’s complicated.
I thought my essay was finished and then I read a review of Celia Paul’s new book, Letters to Gwen John. Celia Paul is one of Britain’s finest artists. She was, as a very young woman, the lover of Lucian Freud. He painted her. She also painted him. I haven’t read her first book, Self Portrait, although (of course) I’ve ordered it. There is such stillness to her work, a similar stillness I see in Gwen John’s paintings and drawings. Gwen also had an intense relationship with an artist, Auguste Rodin. He drew her, he made sculpture of her, and she drew him, or at least observed him, and made drawings of some of his work. He was much older. I remember seeing some of his erotic drawings at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris years ago and now I know that some of them feature Gwen. Sometimes Gwen with another of Rodin’s models. The drawings were very beautiful. Gwen was anything but prim.
In Paul’s Letters to Gwen John, she addresses John across the years. She asks her questions, shares her own life story, difficulties with her health and work; I’m only about half-way through but I reach for the book when I wake in the night, first thing in the morning, and it’s what I’m reading last night before sleep. I have questions as I read, some of them answered almost incidentally, and some of them feel a little personal. Ones I’d ask both women if I had the opportunity. Questions about power, about coercion, or just about love.
Letters to Gwen John is beautifully written, somethings with a delicate brush and sometimes with a harder dark point. This morning I opened the file of my essay to add a new section but maybe I won’t stop there. There’s so much that is unspoken but maybe I will discover something about how an artist feels when she is the subject of a painting, what she’s thinking as her lover gazes at her and puts her onto paper, shapes her head in clay, loads pigment onto canvas and finds her in its colours. What she thinks, knowing about technique and process, about agency and the gradations of manipulation.
When a book finds you vulnerable, unsettled, it can provide something as rare and welcome as a kind of sisterhood across the years, the oceans. I felt alone as I wrote the essay and now as I revisit it, I know that considerations I believed were mine only belong to so many women. A book of letters from one artist to another, over time, has arrived in my house, my heart, at the time I needed it most.
...Theresa Kishkan 