![]() ![]() That was true for many women writers and artists. She had no private income her life was precarious and she needed to work for her living, whether as an artist or a model. While she was free to wander, to explore beyond the open window, a room of her own gave John this security and a place to work in peace. For Rilke, a close friend of John’s in her youth, the room was like the experience of life itself:įor if we think of the existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of the floor on which they walk up and down. For the Symbolists, it was an expression of the interior life for the Impressionists, a setting for modern living for Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group of artists (Augustus was a member for a short time), rented rooms were the last, often squalid, refuge of people hanging on to life. Since the late nineteenth century “the room” had gathered an accretion of meaning. Far from being a recluse cut off from the world, as she has often been described, she is shown as keenly alert to contemporary trends and ideas. John is presented throughout Foster’s book as embedded in such webs of connections. Similarly Foster notes a chain of links, through Rilke and the family of Ida Nettleship, the wife of John’s brother Augustus, to the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose interiors, with their restricted shades, are “sometimes empty apart from sunlight shining through a window and patterning the floor.” It was the way in which painting attained the heights, the power, of poetry.” It is typical of Foster’s attention to detail that she points out that John’s friend Arthur Symons had translated “Art Poétique” and that John possessed a volume of Verlaine’s poems. The literary equivalent, Alicia Foster writes in Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris, is found in the poetry of Paul Verlaine, specifically in his “Art Poétique” of 1882: “Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!” For John and Vuillard, Foster writes, “making tone the centre of art was more than just a trend of the period or a personal preference. She also shared with Vuillard a concern for delicate shades and tones and for borderlines between colors. She was far from alone in this and can be persuasively grouped with Vuillard and Bonnard. Gwen John was a painter of rooms, an interiorist. The titles have a brusque firmness, their repetition and difference reflecting the works themselves: A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris and A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (with Open Window). ![]() Nor are they paintings of absence: we are made keenly aware of the artist, brush in hand, looking and working. The comfortable cushion, the parasol, the recently picked flowers, and the book all imply a person. A coat suggests a walk an open book hints at quiet reading. There is more space in the room and the window is open-or rather half open, revealing the green of trees outside. In a second work, painted like the first between 19, the viewpoint is slightly farther back. Lace curtains hang to the ground, the light filtering through a parasol, a shawl, and a bunch of flowers on the table suggest a trip to the exterior that we cannot see. In one painting, a wicker chair stands at an angle by a window, below a sloping attic roof. Gwen John: Girl Reading at a Window, 1911 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |