Gwen John: Strange Beauties review – The great modern Welsh artist dazzles us with the glory of isolation | Art and design

THe’s straight john goin, no stalker. The National Museum Cardiff has put together a fascinating and chilling retrospective of the woman who is now perhaps the most famous Welsh artist. It is not a detailed biographical story of how she was born in Haverfordwest in 1876, how she and her brother Augustus loved art as children, how she insisted on going to the Slade School of Fine Arts like him, and then lived in bohemian France. Instead, the moment she enters the show, she is immersed in her austere spiritual existence. We meet her in the glory of her solitude, painting cats, the sparse rooms she rented in Paris, and women alone in moments of quiet reflection.

There is a row of variations of a young woman in a blue dress and long dark hair sitting languidly in an armchair, with a table at her elbow, all painted around 1920. In most of them there is a cup and teapot on the table, and in one of them is a bowl of soup. She looks down as she reads a letter, sometimes a book. Their titles also differ – The Epistle, The Sitting Woman, The Convalescence.

Their brilliance lies in what they don’t show. There are no fruit-covered hats, no chattering crowds, no omnibus, and none of the anecdotal details with which other British artists of her generation tended to distract themselves. John cuts through the social divide and captures the essence of the inner experience, the woman’s grief, illness, despair, and recovery as she sips and reads.

It took enormous intelligence and decisiveness to paint with such purity. Her early works are hardly busier than her more mature works. Painted circa 1898, Mrs. Atkinson sits in Victorian black, her aged face weathered by life, her eyes unsmiling, the fine details of the fireplace and wallpaper behind her underscoring the grim reality. The images of Dorelia, John’s friend, on their first trip together to France are already pared down, purified, and mystical. John began with the great denial of it. You will only draw what is necessary.

This does not mean that she is an artist without passion or desire. She was very fond of Dorelia, whom she depicted in the warm glow of a golden lamp at night in Toulouse. When John remained in Paris, obtaining work as a nude model including in the studio of Auguste Rodin, she began an affair with the already world-famous pioneer of modern sculpture. Her study of Rodin’s lion face is here. So is Rodin’s portrait of her, a sinuous bronze head embellished by inner turmoil. He wasn’t just looking at her body after all.

For an artist interested in stripping reality down to its essentials, it made sense to do without clothing. She may have been a child of Victorian Wales, but she saw nudity as normal. Two versions of her Self-Portrait, Nude, Drawing, from about 1908 to 1909, use brown paper and in one case white gouache like Rodin’s drawings, but here the nude is the artist. June looks gorgeous and unabashed as she poses naked with a sketchbook in hand and studies herself in the mirror.

She has the same drive to escape the oppressive and stifling dishonesty of the world she was born into that drove the male modernists of her day – Rodin but also Matisse, Klimt, and Schiele. Clothes symbolize social trappings, hierarchies and lies that define and oppress. It is better to be free and honest, if you are a bit cold in an unheated Parisian room. However, in her search for simplicity that transcended social fuss, June was also drawn to the opposite, represented by a striking row of portraits of nuns, their faces framed by triangular white hoods.

These nuns were members of a Catholic religious community in Meudon, on the outskirts of Paris, where John had moved in 1911. She converted to Catholicism and was keen to serve the Church artistically. Her nuns are paradoxically individual: each woman appears distinct and unique within her religious garb. One of them, inspired by a print of the community’s 17th-century founder, Mother Marie Possepin, even has her smiling — the only smile in the show.

John’s mysticism does not stop with the nuns. The color blue often worn by young women is, in Christian art, the color of purity and heaven. In “The Pilgrim,” a woman sits pensive in a huge blue cloak as if ready to set out on a sacred quest that will be difficult, lonely, and necessary.

In 1935 she wrote from Meudon to the curator at this museum after she had purchased her first work. “I am so happy and honored that you purchased one of my small paintings for the museum,” she says in a framed note here. They are really “little”. This is a gallery of small pictures in pale colors, so subtle that they are almost spectral, a blurry gathering of silent women in small rooms and long-dead cats. But in its emotional power, Gwen John’s art is massive, heavy, even overwhelming. Wells does full justice to her great modern artist.