Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John
LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN. BY CELIA PAUL. New York Evaluation Books, 2022. 352 pages.
IF TRUTH AND ARTIFICE WERE OPPOSED, we might don’t have any portray, no poetry, no speech, no life. But there’s rigidity, undoubtable, incorrigible, a catch within the stream of notion, thought, and deed, because the desires that reside in some unusual inside take form and enter the shared actuality of a piece. Celia Paul, in each her portray and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her personal internal life, in addition to a cautious chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that’s barely perceptible, hardly there in any respect, and but is the place the place reality emerges, hangs within the steadiness, isn’t fairly distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John, the British artist’s new epistolary memoir (following 2019’s Self-Portrait), is a profound act of truth-telling made doable by the thrilling danger of tarrying at that contested border. Paul’s writing is a sort of ritual, in addition to a pilgrimage, by which she leads us into these hidden locations the place understanding is irrelevant, and invitations us merely to dwell together with her and whomever else she summons.
The e-book includes a collection of letters to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), in addition to various brief essays reflecting on, as Paul places it, “Gwen John’s life because it intersects, or conflicts, with mine.” The plain biographical similarities between the 2 ladies—Paul was the lover of Lucian Freud, whereas John was the sister of well-known draughtsman Augustus and lover of Rodin, relationships that threatened to overshadow every lady’s work—give method to deeper affinities in artwork and in life.
Each are portraitists of extraordinary depth and perception. Their ladies particularly, usually bearing strained or vexed expressions, are totally residing, not a lot representations of an individual as that particular person dropped at life underneath a brand new facet. However equally in these work, in addition to their many landscapes and nonetheless lifes, there’s, within the limitation of coloration and distinction, a patina of remoteness, a sort of haze of self, as if to see the themes we should look by the painter. The vibrancy of life stays at a loving take away, which, over time, transforms into its personal sort of intimacy. Few maintain contraries with such tenderness as to show them into enhances. Those that can appear to know one another nicely.
In Letters to Gwen John, Paul refers to lots of her personal work as they relate to John’s, although the colour plates usually don’t instantly comply with or precede their descriptions. The reader both encounters them apparently with out remark, solely to search out their textual reference within the later pages—by which era an impression has fashioned which might be solely partially displaced by the writer’s provided interpretation—or else they seem some pages later, when a portray one has not but seen has already develop into a reminiscence. Such distance, once more, appears to behave not a lot as an obstacle to intimacy, however slightly its situation.
Tips on how to proceed from that delicate demarcation is what separates Celia Paul from Gwen John. The highly effective sexism of the tradition by which John labored appears to not have affected her profession as a lot as her personal scorn for public, to not say worldly, life, which expressed itself in her more and more excessive seclusion. She appears to have harbored intense ambivalence about those that needed to assist her professionally, and as her work started to garner some recognition, she withdrew additional, ultimately succumbing to her personal self-neglect in Meudon, outdoors Paris (although she died, as Paul emphasizes, having made one final journey to the ocean, an object of fascination for each artists). Her work, although well-known by now, has by no means reached the renown of Rodin’s, nor has she ever totally escaped his shadow, regardless of being represented, with the assistance of the American collector John Quinn, within the storied Armory Present of 1913, the identical yr she was obtained into the Catholic Church. She by no means married, had no kids, and her many infatuations following Rodin’s loss of life had been intense however fleeting, burning out or fading away, every break turning her nonetheless extra inward.
Paul, against this, has kind of escaped the pale of comparability, and appears to have discovered a method to steadiness her want for solitude with a richly populated life. She has been the topic of solo and group exhibitions in main galleries for the reason that late Eighties; a collaboration with Hilton Als resulted in, amongst different issues, reveals at Gallery Met in New York (2015) and the Yale Middle for British Artwork (2019). Paul discusses this intensely loving friendship as a change in her private {and professional} life, which had at all times been intertwined, however by no means earlier than so fortunately. She expresses a persistent, gnawing ache, even remorse, at her personal dealing with of relationships: with Freud; with their baby, Frank; together with her mom and father and sisters. However now, at age sixty-one, she displays internationally and lives alone by alternative whereas having fun with an in depth bond together with her son and his younger household. In early passages she describes her mom’s need for withdrawal and solitude, a craving that acts as a bridge, connecting herself, her mom, and John. By the top of the e-book, Paul has nursed her mom in her last sickness and is making ready to do the identical for her husband, the thinker Steven Kupfer.
Kupfer has since died, seemingly between the e-book’s composition and manufacturing, and Paul closes the acknowledgments with a last phrase on what he has meant to her: “Phrases can not describe how I really feel. I’ve been portray him in his rowing boat on the lake in Austria: a prayer of gratitude for his life which he shared with me.” This portray seems some 120 pages earlier within the textual content, a blue wash overwhelming the tiny determine in a means harking back to Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, but shot by with a mesmerizing tenderness, in order that nature appears to not annihilate the rower, however slightly to welcome him into itself, which is to say, dwelling. The letter previous this replica signifies that he’s ailing, and Paul asks John to wish for them. By the point we study the context of the portray’s emergence, Kupfer has joined John on the opposite facet of the divide, the place a lot of Paul’s longing appears to take her.
Via Covid-19 lockdowns, visions of environmental collapse, the upcoming lack of her husband, reminiscences of ache, Paul struggles, or maybe merely lingers, on the boundary, nonetheless ephemeral, between all of her worldly issues and the endless questioning of her work:
I take into consideration how you can reconcile residing and valuing life whereas on the similar time renouncing it, and the way it is likely to be doable for me to tame and curb my longing, nervousness and loneliness by realizing when a portray is finished or an individual has left, realizing how you can transfer on purposefully, with out resignation, however with peace.
At instances, she needs she had been extra like John, or, extra exactly, she needs she might reside extra totally within the facet of herself that resembles her ghostly correspondent, abandoning the flesh for the spirit, the day by day issues of life, even within the steadiness Paul has struck, lastly eclipsed by the necessities of artwork.
This need factors to Paul’s idiosyncratically Christian perspective, an affinity she glances towards however doesn’t instantly illuminate. However then, her father was an Anglican missionary and later a bishop. Her sister Jane is a theologian and married to former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (who wrote the textual content to {the catalogue} of the 2012 exhibition: Gwen John and Celia Paul: Painters in Parallel). She will need to have heard over and over that within the Gospels Jesus calls for that his followers forsake not solely their possessions, however their households, as nicely. An excessive name, to make certain: The apostolic life can also be the lifetime of the martyr. Few select it, and none achieve this completely. However maybe there isn’t a purity in following one’s vocation, no last readability that will affirm that one was sincere, one was good. Paul closes the e-book by bidding farewell to John, asking her for assist in attaining peace not for now and at all times, however “on the final.” Till then, there’s solely the continued work, the cautious upkeep of its situations, and the individuals, residing on this world or the following, whom one may name and be known as by.
— Jack Hanson
