Desk Notes No.18

Time-Travelling: Victorian Virtual Reality & Letters to Gwen John

Oct 01, 2023

Dear friends,

Autumn has arrived and, as I write, storm Agnes threatens outside the window. The sky here is a blanket of deep grey, the yellowing leaves of the climbing hydrangeas trembling in the breeze. There’s an ominous feeling to the air. The seasons feel more fragile and extreme. Just a few weeks ago we were lazy and listless in thick, stifling heat pushed north by tropical storms. Beneath those transformative blue skies I travelled back to the mid-twentieth century, the heyday of the race track at Goodwood. This was Goodwood’s ‘Revival’. A place where classic Ferraris are exuberantly thrown into corners; where spectators don their vintage Sunday best, tweed jackets, ties, hats, lace gloves and stoles; where swing bands and rock & rollers play to whirling crowds; where you can eat coconut ice, ride the big wheel and the steam-powered carousel; where you can take a seat on the only swaying electric yachts still travelling today. Scenes of old-fashioned style and romance. Pure escapism. As the sun bounced off my pink patent shoes it was impossible not to smile. Oh where did those days go.

In this edition of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about in September.

Print — Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul, published by Jonathan Cape, 2022; and Gwen John: Art & Life in London & Paris at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 8 October 2023

Pictures — Victorian Virtual Reality, stereoscopic photographs at the Watts Gallery until 25 February 2024

Print

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

Gwen John: Art & Life in London & Paris at the Pallant Gallery, Chichester, until 8 October 2023

“Dearest Gwen
I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, ‘Time is a strange substance’; and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might not be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how: like tuning a radio so that the crackling sound of the airwaves is slipstreamed into words. Maybe the sound of surf, or rushing water, is actually the echo of voices that have been similarly distorted through time. I don’t suppose this is true, and you don’t, either. But I do feel mysteriously connected to you.”

So begins the dialogue between artist Celia Paul and Gwen John, whose portraits are being celebrated at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester. The connection between the two runs deep. Both were romantically involved with older male artists whose work overshadowed their own — Celia Paul with Lucian Freud, Gwen John with Auguste Rodin. Both studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. And both required intense solitude in order to paint.

I’m in awe of Celia Paul’s writing; the natural, seemingly effortless way she wanders in and out of ideas; the gentleness and intimacy of the difficult questions she poses. There is safety in conversation with a soul mate; an honesty that comes with thinking aloud. Reflecting on their complicated relationships with famous male artists, Celia Paul writes:

“We are neither of us considered as artists in our own right… Why are some women artists seen freely for what they are uniquely? What is it about us that keeps us tethered? Both of our talents are entirely separate from the men we have been attached to — we are neither of us derivative in any way. Do you think that, without fully understanding why, we are both of us culpable?”

Celia Paul explores the obsessive nature of Gwen’s relationships, the unattainability of both Rodin and Freud, and the effect of this emotional turbulence on their work. Sterile, unproductive periods and artistic failures reveal their need for emotional stillness and private space. Celia Paul describes her inability to focus on more than one project at a time; the need for calm, without deadlines or emotional disturbances: “My energy flows inwards, not outwards.” Somewhat controversially, Celia Paul chose not to live with her husband or her child, turning over the responsibility for her child’s care to her mother. She describes the anguish of this choice, the inescapability of maternal love. She tries to explain it to Gwen who never had a child and spoke about children with a sense of remoteness. Thinking about the women she has admired, Celia Paul realises they were all childless: “They could observe quietly without being distracted.”

This puts me in mind of a short story by Henry James that I read in earlier in the year (Desk Notes No.12). In The Lesson of the Master, an author and mentor convinces his protégé that in order to be a good writer he must rid himself of all romantic and domestic ties.

‘Well all I say is that one’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes. Marriage interferes’
‘You think then the artist shouldn’t marry?’
‘He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost.’
‘Not even when his wife is in sympathy with his work?’
‘She never is - she can’t be! Women don’t know what work is.’

The story ends ambiguously, with the suggestion that the protégé might have been double crossed. But it strikes me that the issue of domestic entanglements might be even more pertinent for female writers and artists, to whom the lion’s share of household duties continue to fall. It is difficult to prioritise ones-self, ones creative urges, around the rigid timescales of domestic life; around the timescales of another with whom one lives. Celia and Gwen’s need to live alone, in their own private space, on their own time, feels perfectly logical to me. And yet their interiority, which emerges as a subject in their art, is at odds with society’s expectations. I identify deeply with Celia’s intense desire to be with people and the conflicting reality of its effect upon her: “I wish I wasn’t always so lonely, yet unable to be in company for long… I know you understand and would forgive me my contrariness because I can’t seem to help it. It’s how I’ve always been, and so have you.”

The Pallant Gallery’s exhibition Gwen John: Art & Life in London & Paris, largely frees Gwen John from her romantic connection to Rodin. It explores, more intently, her creative relationships with a variety of other artists and the interiority that made her art possible. Displaying her work alongside that of other painters of interiors, such as Édouard Vuillard and Spencer Gore, reveals the unique stillness that defines her work. There is a sense of silence, or at least gentleness in the soundscape of her pictures. The lack of decorative clutter and pattern, as compared with those works of Vuillard, suggests the mental clarity and self-contained nature of the sitters. The absence of domestic details speaks to these women as individuals, independent of their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters.

In one of her earliest paintings, Portrait Group, Gwen John depicts her friends from The Slade. It’s a social picture, exciting because men and women were able to mix freely, entering each other’s private spaces in a premonition of modern university life. And yet Celia Paul explains how Gwen paints herself outside the group, glimpsed through the window arm-in-arm with her lover. It seems to sum up both sides of Gwen’s character, her essential conflict: the need to be alone; the intense desire for love.

“The sudden connection Gwen feels to a stranger is something I have experienced, though rarely. Because she and I are so solitary, the emotion we feel on discovering these rare unions is distilled to an almost unbearable intensity, which our fear of being taken over, and intruded upon, only adds to… These connections to people with whom we suddenly fall in love — out of the blue it were —shock us and make us lose our bearings. We strive to maintain our equilibrium at all costs.”

Pictures

Victorian Virtual Reality - stereoscopic photographs at the Watts Gallery until 25 February 2024

“In 1959, twelve-year-old Brian May discovered a stereoscopic photograph in a Weetabix cereal packet. Curious, he sent off for a 3D-viewer and embarked upon a lifelong passion for this photographic phenomenon.”

Over 60 years, Brian May’s collection swelled to an astonishing 200,000 stereoscopic photographs, a selection of which are currently on display at the Watt’s Gallery, where viewing glasses are provided for hours of Victorian-style entertainment. The technology behind the stereoscopes was invented in 1832, before the advent of photography itself, but burst into Victorian culture in the 1850s when stereoscopic photographs began to be mass produced. This was my first time seeing these Victorian images through a stereoscope viewer which converts two pictures of the same scene taken from slightly different angles (the position of each eye) into one 3D image. I was staggered by the clarity and detail of the images. In 1852, The London Illustrated News explained this was due to the fact stereoscopic images capture perspective:

“M. Claudet has a number of views of the interior of the [Great] Exhibition, and though but about two and a half inches square, the vast extent of the building, every column, girder, and article exhibited, can be seen standing out in its place, and with perfect solidity and distinctness as the very Crystal Palace and things themselves. Every piece of sculpture is there as sculpture: the tree stands out and shows the glass beyond, between every branch and leaf; it seems no picture, but a model beyond belief for its wonderful accuracy and comprehensiveness of detail… The reason is this, that in this instance the Daguerréotype shows us a view… of the building brought sufficiently near for the whole to be within the distance influenced by the angle of the eyes… so that, in this instance, the stereoscopic Daguerréotypes actually surpass the reality. No one has ever seen the interior of the Exhibition from end to end with such clearness as it is seen in M. Claudet’s pictures.”

There is a sharpness to these images that outstrips any moving pictures; a sense of movement that eclipses movement itself. In one image a woman is walking down steps, the breeze is palpable in the shape of her dress. In the next, a woman and her child are crossing a road. Carriages pass in the distance, advertising pops out from the buildings. The family glance towards the camera; they are almost talking to us.

Other fantastical cards reveal a very Victorian sense of whimsy. A pig-woman and a bird-woman chat in the street. In the background, an owl-man sells newspapers. Ghosts haunt people lying in their beds. Skeleton armies sit in a theatre criticising women’s taste for crinoline dresses. In others, skeletons revolt and attack. It’s amazing to think how people felt looking at these images 170 years ago — before film, before Ray Harryhausen, before Hollywood. Then there were celebrity portraits — Charles Dickens, Ellen Terry — and, for those who could afford it, family snapshots. Stereoscopic images from Europe and America enabled viewers to travel the world.

This is closest we will ever get to time travel. In the words of The Illustrated London News:

“These stereoscope pictures are not only curious, they are beautiful and useful. We may have, in future, galleries of portraits no fictions of painters, but the people as they were— not flat and framed, and hung along the walls, nor in cold marble, but round and real as they looked in life.”

How right they were.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this month’s issue and what you’ve been doing this September. Let me know in the comments.

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