Brother and sister swap roles in death

Gwen John's contemplative self portraits made her a feminist icon after her death in 1939.

Art sometimes runs in families. The fine Raphael exhibition at London's National Gallery contains works by his father, who was a competent painter. Two other London exhibitions are family linked. The Tate Britain features a show by brother and sister, Augustus and Gwen John, and the Royal Academy has works by William Nicholson, the father of Ben Nicholson, one of Britain's first abstract artists.

Like everything else, families are subject to fashion. Both exhibitions contain some excellent art and exemplify the vagaries of fashion and reputation.

Augustus John was once among the most famous and admired artists in Britain. His sister was obscure. Now Gwen is universally admired and Augustus' reputation has faded.

There is an Auckland connection. Augustus John was a superb draftsman and his style of drawing was once familiar on the Auckland art scene.

The exhibition's many fine drawings recall the early years of the Elam School of Fine Art under director Archie Fisher, a powerfully energetic personality and a fine actor who was an average painter but an excellent draftsman.

His style was based on the work of Augustus John, so everyone at Elam was taught to draw like John. A show of student work looked like a patchy, one-man show.

At that time, the reputation of Augustus was high, but he said before he died in 1961, 20 years after his sister, "Fifty years after my death I shall be remembered as Gwen John's brother".

He was right. Gwen was 18 months older than her brother and both were trained at the Slade School of Art. Augustus was always in the news as a wild personality. Gwen was a recluse, who painted her tiny works in obscurity in Paris.

Augustus was always surrounded by women and had children by his wife and mistresses. He lived with gypsies, and wore a gold earring when such a thing was unthinkable among the respectable. Many of his drawings romanticise the gypsy life. He longed for some arcadia, an escape from the modern world.

The exhibition contains huge, mural-sized paintings in which Augustus tries to create a pastoral paradise. They are ambitious but thin and completely unsuccessful.

His fame was based on portraits which defined the image of luminaries of the literary world, such as W.B. Yeats' Lady Ottoline Morell. These portraits are the show's high point after the wonderful drawings.

The quality is emphasised by his single most famous portrayal which is displayed in a nearby corridor. It is of a cellist, Madam Suggia, whose profile and sweeping gesture with the bow are wildly romantic but very impressive.

Gwen, meanwhile, was in Paris where she worked as an artist's model and was the lover of the sculptor Rodin. In 1932, she moved to a suburb and gradually became a recluse, preoccupied with religion and her cats.

Her paintings are small, muted and contemplative. Some of the loveliest are of the interior of her studio. They are simple but filled with light and exact gradations of tone and colour.

She, too, painted portraits, all of women seated alone, often repeating the same subject. She did many self-portraits, others were of nuns and many included her cats.

Her concern was almost entirely with tone and colour and the paintings show no detail. They are filled with a pensive loneliness which comes from the magical harmonies of tone, making their simple, three-quarter length introspection painfully charged with feeling. They are subdued in colour but glow on the walls.

Gwen died in 1939. Without recognition in her lifetime, she became a feminist icon in the second half of the 20th century because of her concentration on women and her understanding of them.

The feminist view is only part of the reason for her posthumous fame. Her puzzling talent was highly individual and, in retrospect, was much more inventive and challenging than her brother's heroics.

Among Augustus' portraits in the exhibition is a large picture of William Nicholson, dandy in his bow tie, long coat and cane. In the early part of last century, Nicholson allied himself with his brother-in-law James Pryde to produce posters.

Their work was bold and simple and revolutionised poster design in Britain. They achieved dramatic shapes by cutting silhouettes from black paper and pasting it on to brown. Their simplicity set a fashion in advertising and carried over to their more artistic work in woodblock prints. They called themselves the Beggarstaff Brothers.