Small is big in Gwen John's work. None of her canvases are very large and many of her watercolours are tiny. The range of subjects which interested her was limited. She painted the same subject repeatedly with subtle differences. The curators of Strange Beauties, who lean heavily into her conversion to Catholicism and spirituality, highlight her adherence to St. Thérèse of Lisieux's Little Way. 'Smallness' and religion may seem off-putting, but John was neither restrictive nor ascetic. She went to church to sketch as much as to pray, and it was painting itself which drove her with an intense but almost scientific determination to explore the medium and the subject. Across a patchwork of watercolour squares you see notes and coded numbering as she applied and recorded new colour combinations. And the more you look at a line of superficially repetitive figures, the more you meditate on the small but deeply significant compositional and structural differences.
This is a big show of small works - nearly 200 of them - their lack of scale perhaps unhelpfully emphasised by the soaring height of the galleries at Cardiff's National Museum. Unlike the recent Pallant House/ Holburne exhibition, which focused on a limited period, this show is a full-blown retrospective, although, partly because of the nature of John's work, much of it will seem familiar to anyone who saw Alicia Foster's 2024 curation. Cardiff takes a broadly chronological but defiantly un-biographical stance. John's early life in Tenby and her Slade years are handled with barely a passing mention of Augustus, her more flamboyant and originally more famous brother. Sometimes, this approach verges on the coy, when brushing aside her 'romance' with Auguste Rodin, or her close friendships with women. Even for someone who dislikes the usual curatorial insistence on biography, there is an annoying inability to pin down Gwen John as a person, beyond the fact that she clearly did not want to be known.
Arguably, the most revealing self-image shows John drawing herself, standing naked in front of the mirror, sketchbook awkwardly balanced in her outstretched arm. It is entirely without artifice, embarrassment or allure, an academic exercise such as she was taught at the Slade, conveniently and cheaply reenacted in her own room. This steely self-reliance is everywhere, from the astonishing decision to walk to Rome with her friend Dorelia, to her independent existence in Paris and her unsentimental description of World War One bombs. It is also front and centre of every single painting she did of a female figure (and she never painted men): that inscrutable distance, the centered introversion. You could put a wimple of any of them and they would be plausible nuns.
The early portraits are the most individualised: Chloe Boughton-Leigh, bony and crumpled; Mrs Atkinson, Dickensian in her sallow-skinned shapelessness, Fenella Lovell sullenly defiant as she poses clothed and nude, but they all share that otherworldly disconnection. These are people John knows well, counts as friends, yet she retains a disinterested eye, treating them as flesh and blood still lifes, convenient vehicles through which to explore paint. Her experimentalism is dealt with too cursorily here. Her use of chalky grounds to dry pigment, her single layer brushstrokes which led to whole canvases being abandoned for a single misstep, the rigidly imposed restriction on colour. These details are perhaps difficult to convey in exhibition labelling. But get up close to any of her works and the surface is alive with texture, the paint taking on a granular, almost sculptural solidity.
The most successful section allows her church watercolours to speak for themselves in a cacophonous choir. Bizarrely the greens and purples and candid camera poses remind me of Toulouse Lautrec's nightclub scenes, chaotic conversation and interaction rather than religion. It is, however, difficult to escape a sense of tailing off. The works generally get smaller. One feels John gets less satisfied with her art the more she pushes the boundaries, and the final room with its unconvincing sketchy landscapes feels downbeat. It is worth returning to the two centrally placed versions of Pilgrim which bestride the gallery with weight and purpose. They have the presence of Medieval saints, timelessly clad yet distinctly modern, painted almost entirely in blue like a Whistlerian homage yet with none of his hazy ambivalence. John reminds me of her contemporary Helen Schjerbeck, currently on show in New York. They are both almost too idiosyncratic (always seen as a bad trait in a woman) for their own good.
Cardiff is the obvious place to hold this retrospective: the National Museum has the largest collection of John's works in the world, currently over 900 items, and many of the pieces here have rarely been seen in public. The exhibition is travelling to Edinburgh later this year and then on to the Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington: a proper tour which will surely bolster John's status on both sides of the Atlantic. So, this is by any measure an impressive exhibition. My fear, however, is that it reinforces cliches about John's art, rather than challenging them. Those who have already decided that she is cold, limited and essentially too gendered (a sad cat lady) will not find much to change their opinion; fans will love it. As for those coming to the artist for the first time, John requires thought and close looking. Small things come to those who wait.
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