Looking to the Past, an Artist Finds a Soul Mate in Gwen John

LETTERS TO GWEEN JOHN
By Celia Paul

“I hate the word ‘muse,’” Celia Paul writes in her excellent new book, “Letters to Gwen John.” She also hates being called “an artist in her own right.” It wasn’t until after Lucian Freud died in 2011 that she escaped either term. She was 52 years old, an internationally acclaimed artist, and had been married to Steven Kupfer for many years. The affair that branded her was well in the past, but it was only with Freud’s death that she could gain some control of the story.

For Paul, looking back in order to look forward, the artist who leaps across time is Gwen John — who was herself Auguste Rodin’s muse. Rodin was 36 when she became Rodin’s model and lover in 1904. She was famous, admired, and powerful. He was her favorite. maître.Freud was 37-years younger than Paul, when Freud enchanted her in 1978. She was only 18, and he was also monumental, lauded as powerful. “Concentration” was Freud’s word: concentration in the name of art, justifying all his behavior. Rodin, for his part, professed to abstain from daily trivialities in order to promote art.

Paul first wrote of these parallels in her 2019 memoir, “Self-Portrait.” Not only the chronic unfaithfulness of these men, but the longing and the waiting suffered by the women, and the profound effect on their own art. John turned inward and started to paint. Paul did not follow Freud’s harsh criticisms of his models. She wanted to paint her subjects like handwritten letters, with the artist’s character etched into them. She wanted to “paint truthfully,” as John had done.

John wrote many letters. It was a form of intimacy that guided her and kept her steady. Paul quotes them as she tracks their affinities in art, their complex journeys, and the isolation they were forced to endure. A woman can do a lot in the shadow realm, she says, but there comes a time when cellar living is only good for “potatoes.” Was that why the sea was so important to them both? Its wide horizon, its endless wash of time. John didn’t paint human aging — as, increasingly, Paul does — but she painted the passing of time, the fleeting glimpse as life happens.