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The Guardian
a day ago
- 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
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rachel Whiteread review – leafy woods, glorious views and beautiful, brutal blights
I feel like I've stumbled into a 1970s album cover for the Who or Led Zeppelin that juxtaposes nature and post-industrial malaise. Emerging from woodlands on the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, you see a massive concrete cast of a staircase in a lush green field – a spectacular, surreal collision of urban grit and English pastoral. This is Rachel Whiteread's Down and Up, a brutal intruder in the landscape. Leafy woods and glorious views – I contemplated Down and Up through a veil of rain but was assured you can see down to the sea on a sunny day – create a dramatic setting for her stark sepulchres. In a forest clearing stands another work, Untitled (Pair) – two bone-white rectangular slabs that look like death. That's no accident, for their shallow concave tops were cast from mortuary tables. Alone with this monument, the tall trees standing guard around me, I don't so much ponder mortality as silently scream. House, the famous, lost masterpiece that won Whiteread the 1993 Turner prize, also once stood in the open air, as ungainly and insistent against an east London sky as these remorseless objects look in a much more tranquil context. It was demolished in a culture war that's forgotten now, but Whiteread is no sensationalist. Her art hits you for a moment with harsh modernism, but then – unless you refuse to look and feel, as the local council did – its sombre poetry creeps up on you. Down and Up is cast from an old staircase in a synagogue in Bethnal Green, east London. You can see why these stairs fascinate her: they are curiously narrow and sloped, as if pushed out of shape by multitudes of long-gone feet. Odd, baffling details like this give her art warmth and passion, while the blank masses of cast material, in this case grey concrete, fill it with silence and terror. You can't care about life, her art suggests, without recognising death. She sees ghosts everywhere. Her exhibition launches the Goodwood Art Foundation. In its low-slung, partly glass-walled gallery, Whiteread's eye for decay and loss infects a new series of brightly coloured but emotionally serious photographs. Wherever she goes, in Essex or Italy, Whiteread in these pictures sees the crack in the teacup, the rusty stain on the mosaic floor. She notices bin bags like shrouds, a rotting community centre that refuses to be picturesque. Sometimes their foreboding is a bit false, even descending into bathos. We can all be spooked by crows gathering on a telephone wire and sometimes an abandoned child's toy is just that, however wretched it looks on the doorstep. Yet this is how Whiteread's imagination works: she sees a continuum between everyday melancholia and collective grief. In 2023, she had a show in Bergamo, Italy – which was severely hit by Covid – creating tombstone-like sculptures to mourn the lost. Some are here. Based on casts of the spaces under chairs – a favourite Whiteread motif – they are marked by recesses where legs and struts once were. She aspires to public monuments yet also flees into secret recesses of introspection and memory – which is why a pastoral landscape is such a resonant setting for her art. Two photographs in the gallery show rotting, abandoned places, a shed and a caravan, in each of which someone seems to have lived a hermitic existence, but these shelters rust and rot away, surrendering to weeds. In front of them she recreates this spectacle of solitude and dissolution in her sculpture Doppelgänger, a reconstruction of a smashed, forgotten shack, its broken walls pierced by fallen branches, painted in white emulsion, a ghostly covering that with brilliant simplicity makes reality metamorphosise into art. Outside in the woods, at the end of a long, narrow vista, she has placed a concrete cast of a sealed shed, its windows opaque, its door closed for ever. You feel more and more alone walking around it, trying to find the way in. It is called Detached II. This is a poem to solitude and here in the garden, surrounded by unruly spring growth, it feels as eccentric and lost as the rotting caravan and shack in her photographs. Dissolution and decay are part of nature. They are also part of our lives and time's arrow only points one way. Thoughts like these are not consoling but they feel as if they belong in the woods, like intoxicating mushrooms of melancholy. Whiteread is a great modern artist and her sculptures blight this pastoral, beautifully. Rachel Whiteread's exhibition is at Goodwood Art Foundation from 31 May to 2 November
Bloomberg
6 days ago
- General
- Bloomberg
Now with Colorful Blocks, Tirana's Pyramid Represents a Changing Albania
CityLab Design A monument to Albania's former dictator, remade as a tourist-friendly community center, points to the western design influences reshaping the capital city. The top of the Piramida, as residents of Tirana call it, is a great place to see the skyline of Albania's capital. The soaring, communist-era ode to longtime dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country for more than 40 years after World War II, offers clear views across downtown. From there, you can see the boxy silhouettes of the modernist apartment blocks built under his rule. Today those apartment buildings are overshadowed by stylized high-rises — and the monument itself has a new sheen, too.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gilbert and George go to hell and back while Marina Abramović sexes up Manchester – the week in art
Death Hope Life FearProvocative and personal, public yet intimate pictures created by Gilbert and George in the 1980s and 90s – including their first naked self-portraits. The Gilbert and George Centre, London until end of year Joseph Wright of Derby: Life on PaperDrawings by the brilliant 18th-century artist who painted Derby Museum's masterpiece The Orrery. Derby Museum and Art Gallery until 7 September Sussex ModernismJacob Epstein and Ivon Hitchens are among the modern artists associated with Sussex in this show that tells an ambitious local story. Towner Eastbourne until 28 September Elisabeth Frink: A View from WithinThe realist yet mythic world of this modern sculptor of people and animals. Salisbury Museum from 24 May until 28 September Impressions in WatercolourVisionary watercolours from the Romantic age, by the likes of Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman and – you guessed it – JMW Turner. Holburne Museum, Bath, until 14 September 'In our culture today, we label anything erotic as pornography.' So says Marina Abramović, whose immersive artwork Balkan Erotic Epic will have its world premiere in Manchester this October. Seventy performers will re-enact ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals such as Women Massaging Breasts, pictured above, at Aviva Studios. Those who squirmed and cringed at her earlier interactive nude works will want to make alternative plans. David Hockney's early work was hip and horny but in search of a style A new exhibition at the Barbican uses sound to shake you to your core Physique magazines showing finely muscled men had a gay following for decades Nnena Kalu is the first learning-disabled person to make the Turner shortlist Grayson Perry isn't bothered by AI using his work Aubrey Williams, part of the first abstract art to hit the UK, is getting a reappraisal The joyous art of married artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely is on joint display Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Eva, one half of performance art duo 'from the future' Eva & Adele, has died A Musical Party in a Courtyard by Pieter de Hooch, 1677 The contrast between the shady courtyard in the foreground, where people chat and play music around a table, and the sunny canal seen through a dark stone gateway, gives this painting a haunting, heart-catching subtlety of mood. But it's even more nuanced and poetic than that: a deep blue sky and bronzed clouds above reveal that we're seeing the last gleam of the day. This explains why the courtyard is already so dark while the buildings across the canal are bright. It also gives a moral unease to the scene. There's flirtation going on: to the sweet sounds of string music, the man and woman at the table laugh over drinks and snacks. His face is positively sinister as he looks at her from shaded eyes. Meanwhile, the man in the doorway is a devilishly dark figure against the light. It will soon be night, and all our sins will be upon us. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
King's Lynn concrete building named on 'endangered' list
A Grade II-listed concrete building, described as an "extraordinary early example" of modernist design, has been place on a list of endangered 33–39 St James Street, King's Lynn, Norfolk, was designed by architect A.F. Scott and dates fom an office, showroom and warehouse for a building materials company, it is now part-occupied by a Kwik Fit garage, and has been placed on The Victorian Society's top 10 endangered buildings list for 2025."This bold and brilliant building is an unheralded but pioneering example of early modernism," said James Hughes, director of the society. "It deserves urgent attention - not just to preserve its fabric, but to celebrate its place in European architectural history."The society campaigns for Victorian and Edwardian built heritage across England and buildings named on its list include a water tower in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, and Torquay Pavilion in buildings dating from before World War One are very rare. Connor McNeill, a senior conservation adviser at The Victorian Society, said: "You can go from anywhere in the world, from England to... the middle of the Amazonian jungle in Brazil and you'll find concrete buildings built in a similar way to what was being pioneered here in King's Lynn in in the early 20th Century. "I think that's what makes it such an interesting building, although it's perhaps not the most prepossessing building when you're looking at the street." Mr McNeill, who recently visited King's Lynn to photograph the outside of the building, said the town was "a bit of a paradise" for the "architectural history geek". Number 33–39 St James Street was initially built to house the Building Material Company (King's Lynn) offices, showroom and warehouse. The firm operated there for over six decades until its insolvency in 1968. Much of the building today is unused with a Kwik Fit garage occupying the Victorian Society and King's Lynn Civic Society have raised concerns about the condition of the building and the difficulties they have faced getting access inside. A Kwik Fit spokesperson told the BBC: "The building is structurally sound – inspections are carried out at least once a month and these have raised no concerns."The spokesperson said the firm remained open to possible uses of other sections of the building. King's Lynn Civic Society welcomed the news that the building was going on the hopes someone hears about the space and comes up with a plan to maintain and use it. Kim Leonard, the group's treasurer, said: "If it makes people look up and think 'Well, we need to do something about that', that's good. "The building itself is not for everyone; it's one of those 'Marmite' buildings. "But the more you look at it, the more you see value in it." Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
