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For an artist interested in stripping reality to basics, it made sense to dispense with clothes.She may have been a child of Victorian Wales but she saw nudity as natural. The two versions of her Self-Portrait, Nude, Sketching, from about 1908-9, use brownish paper and in one case white gouache like Rodin’s drawings, but here the nude is the artist. John is cool and unabashed as she stands naked with sketchbook in hand, studying herself in a mirror.
She has the same drive to escape the repressive, claustrophobic dishonesty of the world she was born into that drove male modernists of her time – Rodin but also Matisse, Klimt, Schiele. Clothes symbolise social trappings,hierarchies,lies that define and oppress.Better to be free and truthful, if a little chilly in an unheated Paris room. Yet in her search for a simplicity beyond social fuss, John was also attracted to the opposite, represented in a stunning row of portraits of nuns, their faces framed by white triangular headdresses.
These nuns were members of a Catholic religious community at Meudon, in the Paris suburbs, where John moved in 1911. She converted to Catholicism and was keen to serve the church artistically. Her nuns are paradoxically individualist: each woman comes across as characterful and unique inside her religious uniform. One, based on a print of the community’s 17th-century founder Mother Marie Poussepin, even smiles – the only smile in the show.
John’s mysticism doesn’t stop at nuns. The blue her young women wear so frequently enough is, in Christian art, the colour of purity and heaven. In The pilgrim, a woman sits meditatively in a huge blue cape as if ready to set out on a sacred quest that will be hard, lonely, necessary.
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