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The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Artists, Siblings, Visionaries by Judith Mackrell review – the remarkable lives of Gwen and Augustus John
A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John's painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell's outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude. The quietness of a life spent largely alone in single rooms, reading, drawing, painting and occasionally having wild sex with the sculptor Rodin, is counterpointed in this epic narrative by the crowded, relentless, almost insanely overstimulated life of Augustus John. Lion of the arts in early 20th-century Britain, he was a bigamist, adulterer, father of so many children you lose track (so did he), and an utterly forgettable painter. Today, we take Gwen John's posthumous triumph over her brother for granted. While 'Gus' – as he was known in their childhood in Tenby, Wales, and to her always – was toweringly famous in his lifetime, portraitist of Lawrence of Arabia and James Joyce, he's dust now. Growing up in Wales, I liked his portrait of Dylan Thomas on the cover of a biography: curly-haired, baby-faced, rebellious. I didn't have any idea of the story behind it. As Mackrell relates, Augustus began a relationship with a teenager, Caitlin Macnamara, which she would come to see as abusive, punishing him by having a very physical flirtation with Thomas in front of him. Soon afterwards, she married the poet. Guilty and confused, Augustus would leave money in his coat pockets for the penniless couple to steal. Augustus's exploitation of the future Caitlin Thomas is the only occasion Mackrell judges him. By this time, in the 1930s, we've had some jaw-dropping antics. Gwen and Augustus both studied at the Slade, the first British art school to admit women, in the 1890s. Gus married Ida Nettleship, also a Slade student and Gwen's friend. How romantic, except he rapidly fell for model Dorothy McNeill whom he rechristened 'Dorelia', persuading his wife to accept Dorelia in a menage that was to last until Ida died after giving birth to her and Augustus's fifth child. No one in their circle complained – except Ida's mother. Gwen was no cardboard saint either. She shared her brother's belief that being an artist meant freedom from the Victorian bourgeois morality they'd been born into – Gwen in 1876, Augustus in 1878. All her life she would have sexual feelings for women as well as men. She persuaded Dorelia to sail to France with her and walk to Rome. They made it as far as Toulouse where Gwen portrayed her beautifully. In Dorelia in a Black Dress, she wears a flare of pink on her shoulder and gazes at us with unkempt hair and a subtle half smile. Even when it came to painting Augustus's muse, Gwen outdid her brother. His 1908-9 painting of Dorelia, Woman Smiling, was once acclaimed as a modern Mona Lisa but now looks ridiculous: Dorelia's grin is foolishly broad, she wears what Augustus saw as 'gypsy' garb and poses heftily in a pastiche of Rubens. It is Gwen who captures what made Dorelia magnetic. That's easy for us to say and see. In the early 20th century it was Augustus who looked like the star. One reason is obvious: he was a man. He bounded on to the art scene, a good-looking youth who learned from his elder Whistler to wear memorable hats and an artist's beard, seducing women after training himself on a Belgian brothel tour, a rebel dandy who was fascinated by the Romany. Gwen was shy, introverted, hard to know. 'I don't pretend to know anybody well,' she confessed. 'People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.' Augustus and Gwen had grown up together, both enthusiastic child artists, energetic thorns in the side of their widowed father. Is the contrast in their personalities the scar of gendered expectation? Mackrell goes far beyond a simplistic schema in mapping these lives. Gus is not a pantomime patriarchal villain, nor Gwen a feminist idol: they're human. The brother had a captivating generosity while his sister could be a tricky customer. Gwen complained that Augustus wasn't replying to her letters at a time when Dorelia (who stayed with him for life) was ill and his son dying of meningitis. 'There was a streak of ruthless self-absorption in her,' Mackrell writes , 'a lack of charity and self-awareness.' Gus was quite supportive, but his own life was so complex, tragically so; he got distracted. One of the siblings' worst fallings-out was over Gwen's relationship with Rodin. When she confessed she was not only modelling nude for the great sculptor but sleeping with him, her brother expressed disgust that she was being used by this old man, 36 years her senior. Rodin told her she had un corps admirable. Mackrell agrees. As a dance critic she brings an informed perspective to Gwen's work as a model, judging that her 'body, though small, was flexible and strong. She was elegantly proportioned, with small high breasts, narrow hips, long muscled legs, and a graceful neck – a woman who looked powerful in her nakedness.' That nakedness is preserved in Rodin's plaster statue of her as a Muse, looking gravely downward, for his unfinished Monument to Whistler. Gwen John had stepped into modern art. The story of these two lives is the story of British art in the early 20th century. Artists like Augustus, despite walking – and shagging – like avant gardists, just could not break out of the expectations of 'proper' painting demanded by the British public. In 1910, Van Gogh, Cézanne and other 'post-impressionists' were introduced to Britain in a show organised by Roger Fry. Augustus felt crushed by this shock of the new. Meanwhile, in her pared-down, conceptual images of women alone, Gwen in Paris was a born modernist. Her affair with Rodin was the great relationship of her life. He filled her with joy and agony, then moved on. Friends, including the poet Rilke, tried to help. But it took God to fill the void. When Gwen converted to Catholicism, Augustus was again shocked, for they had both been atheistic rebels against their Baptist upbringing. Gwen's life, from the outside, looked lonely, impoverished, eccentric, sad. She died after years of sickness at Dieppe in 1939, on a last trip to the sea, her burial site lost in the chaos of war. Yet her dedication to love, God and art seems fierce and wondrous now, her art a piercingly true autobiography. Meanwhile, Augustus is as slapdash in his paintings as his life. Biography can be a glib genre, but Mackrell approaches her subjects with an almost novelistic sensibility. What is success, what is failure? This book raises big questions about how we can judge or know others. One of Augustus's best paintings is a 1907 portrait of WB Yeats that gives the poet black, mystical eyes as if he's having a vision. I can't help wondering whether Yeats thought of him when he wrote that the artist 'is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work'. This riot of a man believed he could have the two, and got neither. His sister, in her mystery, got both. Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell is published by Picador (£30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The art, rage and illicit love affairs of Augustus and Gwen John
Augustus John once ate a hedgehog. Born in 1878, by his 20s he was one of the country's most famous artists, known for his dazzling draughtsmanship, Bohemian leanings and fascination with Romani encampments (where he dined on said hedgehog stew). Over the course of his marriage, his wife, Ida, slowly resigned herself to his affairs, eventually inviting his lover, Dorelia McNeill, to move in with them. Their ménage grew to include children by both women; one painting of their family life is called Caravan: A Gypsy Encampment. Never one to resist what he desired, Augustus had plucked Dorelia from an intense friendship with his artist sister, Gwen. Both siblings studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, but where Augustus's output was vast, wayward and produced at pace, Gwen, 18 months his senior, was happy if she managed 'one beautiful square inch in a day'. She said that she was 'born to love' (both men and women), but it was love of a different kind to her brother's fly-by-night promiscuity. Her most famous affair, with Auguste Rodin, 35 years older, soon suffered from the intensity of her devotion. Judith Mackrell has produced a fine portrait of these two artists in her double biography, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. Forged in the same unremarkable Welsh childhood, each in different ways threw off society in order to paint and love. Augustus's early career was a dazzle of technical brilliance, deeply influenced by Rembrandt. Gwen was indebted to figures such as Whistler and Vuillard, masters of the misty and the muted. Her quiet and mottled interiors, of women alone or cradling cats, have a glowing stillness and piercing precision that make her brother's verve seem merely bumptious. Mackrell's approach is nuanced, with no trace of gushing bar the title (I hope the three-noun formula doesn't catch on). The delicacy of Gwen's painting is never mistaken for meekness or fragility of character, and Mackrell avoids the cliché of contrasting Gwen's introspection with her brother's extrovert panache. Beneath Augustus's relish for life lay struggles with anxiety and depression. And Gwen could be socially gregarious and physically adventurous. On holiday in Dorset, she plunged on impulse into the churning sea and nearly drowned, but was thrilled by the 'delicious danger'. The book refers always to 'Gus', a nickname used only by Gwen, as if each sibling were narrating the other's story. Mackrell places herself unfashionably, but rewardingly, in the background. She has an eye for the telling detail, where her silence can be as revealing as any high-handed ticking-off; she quotes Augustus dribbling over Dorelia – 'your fat entices me enormously, I long to inspect it' – and no more needs to be said. Empathy for her subjects does not reduce her compassion for those caught in the siblings' turbulent slipstream. Augustus, for example, was accused of rape by Caitlin Macnamara (to whom he introduced her future husband, Dylan Thomas). Mackrell permits herself a moment of accusation, the more powerful for its rarity: 'the hard truth remains that she'd been little more than a child, a very damaged child, when he seduced her, and, in that, he was guilty of abuse.' The book is thrifty with dates, sometimes leaving the reader temporally adrift, and I would have welcomed lengthier quotations from letters, especially in the compelling stretch devoted to Gwen's affair with Rodin, during which, at his urging, she poured her desire into the written word. Mackrell enticingly describes a series of graphic letters blazing with 'supplication, anger and sexual provocation', but sticks mainly to paraphrase. This is the fourth book on Gwen to appear in recent years (following Celia Paul 's acclaimed Letters to Gwen John and studies by Alicia Foster and by Emma Chambers). As for Augustus, Michael Holroyd's 1974 biography has not been superseded, and Mackrell leans on it heavily: around half of her endnotes cite his work, and she offers little new material. But as Ida wrote to a friend before she married Augustus, 'these Johns, you know, have a hold that never ceases.' The value of interweaving the two lives within a single frame more than justifies the repackaging, and the two strands are tightly braided rather than laid out in alternate chapters. Augustus always said that his sister was the greater painter; it's hard to disagree. Gwen slowly retreated into a world of cats and Catholicism, painting for herself and for God, and then not painting at all; she died in 1939, having produced little for some while. Augustus survived her for 22 years, a period of physical and artistic decline covered here in a single chapter. Most of his final portraits, lazy and lumpen, were bashed out for money; there were many mouths to feed. Officially he fathered 13 children, but legend had it that, walking through Chelsea as an old man, he would pat the head of any passing infant, just in case it was his.
Scroll.in
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
June global nonfiction: From 14th to 21st century, six new books tell humanity's essential stories
All information sourced from publishers. Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, Ferris Jabr The notion of a living world is one of humanity's oldest beliefs. Though once scorned by many scientists, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. Life not only adapts to its surroundings – it also shapes them in dramatic and enduring ways. Over billions of years, life transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into the atmosphere, concocting the modern oceans, and turning rock into fertile soil. Life is intertwined with Earth's capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance. Through compelling narrative, evocative descriptions and lucid explanations, Becoming Earth shows us how Earth became the world we've known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come. Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John, Judith Mackrell In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, biographer Judith Mackrell turns her attention to British brother and sister artists Gwen and Augustus John. In many ways, they were polar opposites. Augustus was the larger of the two; vivid, volatile and promiscuous, he was a hero among romantics and bohemians, celebrated as one of the great British talents of his generation. As a woman, Gwen's place in the art world was much smaller, and her private way of working and reserved nature meant it was only long after her death that her tremendous gifts were fully acknowledged. But her temperament was as turbulent as her brother's. She formed passionate attachments to men and women, including a long affair with the sculptor Rodin. And there were other ways in which the two Johns were remarkably alike, as Mackrell vividly reveals. The result is a powerful portrait of two prodigiously talented artists and visionaries, whose experiments with form and colour created some of the most memorable work of the early 20th century. Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, Amanda Montell What makes 'cults' so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge-watch Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we're looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join – and more importantly, stay in – extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell's argument is that, on some level, it already has … Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of 'brainwashing.' But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear – and are influenced by – every single day. Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, Augustine Sedgewick What is fatherhood, and where did it come from? How has the role of men in families and society changed across thousands of years? What does the history of fatherhood reveal about what it means to be a dad today? From the anxious philosophers of ancient Athens and Henry VIII's obsessive quest for an heir, to Charles Darwin's theories of human origins, Bob Dylan's take down of 'The Man', and beyond, Sedgewick shows how successive generations of men have shaped our understanding of what it means to be and have a father, and in turn our ideas of who we are, where we come from and what we are capable of. Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century, Helen Carr The death of Edward I in 1307 marked the beginning of a period of intense turmoil and change in England. The 14th century ushered in the beginning of the bloody Hundred Years' War with France, an epic conflict with Scotland that would last into the 16th century, famine in Northern Europe and the largest human catastrophe in known history, the Black Death. Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of bubonic plague, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, this book tells the story of the 14th century via the lives of Edward II, Edward III and Richard II – three very different monarchs, each with their own egos and ambitions, each with their own ideas about England and what it meant to wield power. Alongside the lives of the last Plantagenets, it also uncovers lesser-known voices and untold stories to give a new portrait of a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic. Sceptred Isle is a narrative account of a century of revolution, shifting power and great change – social, political and cultural – shedding new light on a pivotal period of English history and the people who lived it. Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser Author Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and 80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing? As Murderland indelibly maps the lives and careers of Bundy and his infamous peers in mayhem – the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, even Charles Manson – Fraser's Northwestern death trip begins to uncover a deeper mystery and an overlapping pattern of environmental destruction. At ground zero in Ted Bundy's Tacoma, stood one of the most poisonous lead, copper, and arsenic smelters in the world, but it was only one among many that dotted the area. As Fraser's investigation inexorably proceeds, evidence mounts that the plumes of western smelters not only sickened and blighted millions of lives but also warped young minds, spawning a generation of serial killers.
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fights, flings and fabulous paintings: how sibling rivals Augustus and Gwen John tormented each other
When I began researching the lives of Gwen and Augustus John, the image I held in my mind was of the two of them, as very small siblings, sketching together on the coast around Tenby. For both to have escaped the narrowness of their modest provincial home, and established themselves at the heart of early 20th-century art, was a remarkable journey – and I was intrigued by what possible forces of temperament and upbringing might have driven them. It is hard to credit, now, the scale of Augustus's celebrity. His youthful drawings were compared to Raphael; he was briefly acclaimed as the leader of British post-impressionism, then celebrated as the pre-eminent portrait-painter of his age. And while recognition came slower to Gwen, the singularity of her vision, drawing on early expressionism and abstraction, as well as her own mystic embrace of Catholicism, earned her a significant place in the modernist canon. But if there are early clues to the Johns' success they aren't simple to find, because, apart from their mother's amateur talent for watercolours, they had no other role models. Their childhood, in fact, was unusually forlorn. When their mother died in 1884, Gwen was just eight, Augustus six and a half, and their father was so felled by anxiety and grief he had no idea how to comfort them. 'I used to cry all the time,' Gwen wrote, while Augustus would recall that, along with their two other siblings, they became a farouche little tribe, retreating behind a wall 'of invincible shyness'. Yet it was misery that bred in the Johns a rebellious longing for escape – and, for Gwen and Augustus, their first and best escape was in art. They drew from the moment they were able to hold pencils, sketching portraits of the world around them. While they had only the vaguest idea of where their sketching might lead, when a teacher suggested that Augustus might do well at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Gwen insisted that she must go there too. The Slade felt like a miracle. The Johns were learning their craft, but they were also experimenting with love, with ideas, with the rackety fun of London. They were also as close as a brother and sister could be, understanding each other as no one else could, equally hungry for lives that would fill the void of their motherless upbringing. Yet beneath the intimacy there was also, always, an itch of sibling antagonism. At its roots lay Augustus's childish, bullying resentment at being the younger of the two, and Gwen's furious attempts to fight back. When their lives began to diverge, as Augustus and his work began to achieve a precocious fame, that itch could flare up again. Part of the issue was the flamboyantly bohemian image Augustus had constructed around himself, to counteract the 'invincible' John shyness. Beautiful and wild, he grew his hair long and wore hooped golden earrings. He lived in a menage a trois and had numerous affairs. When he travelled around England in a horse-drawn caravan, he had several run-ins with the police. And while the gossip columnists and most of the art critics adored him, the clamour of his success was difficult for Gwen. Even though she never doubted the value of her own work, and even though her life was no less unconventional – she went to Paris, she fell in love with both women and men, including the sculptor Auguste Rodin – she was increasingly impelled to distance herself from her brother. Augustus was hurt by that. He was also frustrated by Gwen's growing inclination to keep her art to herself. Her pictures were like children to her, and while she needed praise as much as any artist, she often found it hard to send her work out into the world. She knew how much better she painted without the pressure of exhibitions and sales – and, while she could be very grateful to Augustus when he tried to promote her career, her instinct was often to reject what she regarded as his despotic interference. There was another set of reasons for this disparity in their fame. These lay, more starkly, in the fact that Augustus, as a man, had always enjoyed more opportunities than Gwen. The art world at the time was overwhelmingly male: almost all of the galleries and schools were run by men; and even at the Slade, which was unusually progressive in admitting students of both sexes, the teaching staff as well as the artists who dominated the curriculum were male. When one of Gwen's fellow students, Edna Waugh, was told she might become 'a second Burne-Jones', she was spirited enough to reply: 'I would rather be known as the first Edna Waugh.' Yet it was already clear to the women at the Slade that, once they graduated, the odds were stacked against them making professional names for themselves. While Augustus was rapidly taken up by a network of sympathetic (male) artists and buyers, and was able to survive on commissions and sales, Gwen had to support herself as an artists' model. The fees she earned were 'ruinous' but, even at the risk of poverty, she swore never to sacrifice her independence for the security of marriage. 'I think if we are to make beautiful pictures, we ought to be free of family conventions and ties,' she wrote, and she only had to look at the fates of Waugh and Ida Nettleship (Augustus's wife) to see that most of her married friends ended up with little or no time for their art. There were so many factors – cultural, financial and personal – that shaped the trajectories by which Augustus and his art became so famous, while Gwen remained known to a small circle of connoisseurs. But the trajectories didn't end there because, after their deaths, the reputations of the two Johns underwent a radical volte-face. There is no question that the quality of Augustus's work declined during the second half of his career. Drink, combined with an incurable restlessness, corroded his talent, and so did the pressures of providing for family (he fathered at least 13 children and was, ironically, more compromised by 'conventions and ties' than Gwen). After his death in 1961, his standing was further damaged by the volume of late, mediocre works coming on to the market, and by the inevitable fading of the legend that had once given such thrilling glamour (and marketability) to his name. In fact, the behaviour that had once fed that legend, the promiscuity and the wildness, was now more likely to be disparaged than cheered. This change in the political culture was one reason why Gwen's own stock began to rise. Her relative obscurity had continued until 40 years after her death, in 1939, when her estate was taken over by the gallerist Anthony d'Offay. While the exhibitions and sales D'Offay masterminded were crucial to the explosion of interest in Gwen, so too was the campaign among late 20th-century scholars to restore female artists to their proper place in history. Gwen, according to Augustus's granddaughter Rebecca John, had always been regarded as a 'family secret', yet from the mid-1980s onwards, she became the subject of numerous articles, biographies and even novels. Now, to a degree that would have flabbergasted most of her contemporaries, Gwen is the more famous John. The one person who wouldn't have been surprised, however, was Augustus. Always the harshest critic of his own work, and the most loyal supporter of his sister's, he once prophesied that in 50 years, he would be known 'as the brother of Gwen John'. It was a prophesy uttered in a moment of gloom, but it spoke volumes about his relationship with his sister. The two of them, as siblings, might have become separated by time, circumstance and mutual exasperation, yet the bond between them was one that Augustus, in particular, was unable to break. Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John, by Judith Mackrell, is published by Picador on 19 June
