Gwen John – self-portrait
The artist Gwen John found in her creativity something immense and profound that she could immerse herself in. Unusually for a woman of Gwen John’s time, she combined this artistic vocation with a passionate religious faith. While both model for and lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Gwen John met the poet Rilke – a friendship that hugely mattered to her, and whose belief that it was necessary to give one’s life entirely to one’s work greatly influenced her.
Rilke in his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ wrote: ‘Be ahead of all parting, as though it were already behind you’, and the same year John instructed herself: ‘Leave everybody and let them leave you. Then only will you be without fear.’ Losing a much-loved cat John wrote: ‘Now I think I should put all that energy of loving into my drawing.’
A year after Rilke’s death, John wrote a note to herself:
‘Rilke, hold my hand! You must hold me by the hand! Teach me, inspire me, make me know what to do. Take care of me when my mind is asleep, you began to help me, you must continue.’
Gwen John’s deep connection with her work needed someone or something that she considered to be of transcendent grandeur in her intimate life. There were friendships and Rodin and Rilke – all of whom fell short, and then there was her later, passionate relationship with God. Becoming an ardent Catholic, John met and made portraits of the theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain. She also read about Maritain’s thinking that belief in God allowed the penetration to the real and the absolute, that was often hidden by surface appearance.
John drew nuns and churchgoers as a way of attempting to connect with the absolute. In other words, her later work became expressions of spiritual truths; she wanted to capture others who were also involved in the same searching for God. Trying to understand human suffering and make something of it is found in the jottings of her note books.
She writes: ‘Do not despair. Perhaps good will come out of this suffering. You don’t know.’ This alongside a quote: ‘Suffering has always enlarged those who know how to endure it and listen to what it teaches.’ And a verse from a poem by the Comtesse de Noailles [friend of Rilke and Rodin]:
‘Solitude I loved, above all things,
Reason without fear, boredom with the vanities,
The struggle against time and what it takes apart,
Pleasure in nothingness, only eternity.’
Her art became a way of redemption – John wrote: ‘your pictures – the transformation of your sins your faults.’
By 1911 John was establishing a Rule of Life. The first rule was ‘to pray to God incessantly’, and the second, ‘to control your emotions. They are infidelities to God.’ Troubled by her intermittent relationship with Rodin who was trying to put distance between them, John writes:
‘I am better off alone … on this day the 19th November 1911 in answer to a prayer I see a little how degraded I am, how sensual I am, how strong is my amour-propre, how attached I am to the world, how little faith I have…’
Later adding after finding Rodin had gone to Italy … ‘I tired myself in shops and streets, but I did not feel God far off … If it is only the humiliation …, should I not rejoice in humiliation? Of course, humiliations are a great blessing.’