Letters to Gwen John

Paul interweaves John’s biography … with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John’s paintings … summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific. * Times Literary Supplement *
At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two… This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John. – Honor Clerk * Spectator *
Powerfully honest… Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage… a beautiful book. * Daily Mail *
It is really Paul who’s centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and the unlikely, singular way it turns. – Rachel Cooke * Observer *
An excellent new book… . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she addresses her letters to ‘Dear Gwen.’ It’s a risky conceit, but as the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us - their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do. – Drusilla Modjeska * New York Times Book Review *
An utterly revelatory piece of art writing. * Conversation, Best Art Books of 2022 *
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 *
Paul’s prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter’s eye in attention to colour, texture, and depth… The included paintings, both John’s and Paul’s, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to “live and paint truthfully.” * Publishers Weekly *
Remarkable dialectics of loneliness and desire, of love and manipulation, that Paul handles with patient - even disarming - frankness… Alongside the imaginative biography of John, and alongside the dated journal entries, the book is also a foray into Paul’s past. The effect is one of a dreamscape, a mesh of past and present, as the borders between the two female artists soften and start to give. – Victoria Baena * Baffler *
Celia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet is the place where truth emerges, hangs in the balance, is not quite distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John…is a profound act of truth-telling made possible by the thrilling risk of tarrying at that contested border. Paul’s writing is a kind of ritual, as well as a pilgrimage, in which she leads us into those hidden places where understanding is beside the point, and invites us simply to dwell with her and whomever else she summons. – Artforum * Jack Hanson *

Celia Paul is recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today. She was born in India in 1959, before moving to England as a young child. Her major solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art (2018) and The Huntington (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York (2015-16); and Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2012-13). Her work was included in the group exhibition All Too Human at Tate Britain (2018), and is in many collections, including the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Saatchi Collection and Metropolitan Museum, New York.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.