LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN
“A miraculous, door-opening book.” —Julia Blackburn, author of Time Song
Hardcover • $29.95 Color images throughout Also available as an e-book On sale April 26th
“Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart.”—Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19
Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John, who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin.
Through the epistolary form, Paul draws comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work.
Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic.
“It’s a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and supplication, and it’s filled with buoyant representations of both Paul’s and John’s work. A charge runs through it, the crackly static electricity of two connected souls touching hands across a century.” —Hillary Kelly, Vulture