Sibling rivalry: Susannah Woolmer examines the complex, contrasting lives and art of Gwen and Augustus John, as presented in a thought provoking exhibition at Tate Britain

It has been said that Gwen and Augustus John would not ever be exhibited together if they were not related, for a like reason fundamentally different were their approaches to their discipline. The exhibition at Tate Britain is the first to do thus and it does it tremendously, providing an absorbing if fragmentary glimpse into the worlds of sum of two units of Britain's most enigmatic artistic personalities. The thinking behind the present to view was that a critical reevaluation of Augustus was drawn out overdue, and a selection of carefully chosen works by dint of him and his sister has been brought together with the intention of aiding an understanding of 'the idiosyncracies' of each. The curators, David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Steven have taken great pains to emphasise that it was not conceived of as a 'compare and contrast' exercise, on the contrary inevitably it will, to a certain quantity of extent, be perceived as of that kind on both an artistic and a personal level

Gwen and Augustus had sturdy passionate personalities and it is difficult not to throw upon each work one's hold interpretation of the psyche behind it. As in the way that much of their art, baseed in portraiture, stems from their personal relationships, this is hardly surprising. They the two fell in love with the same woman, Dorothy 'Dorelia' McNeill, who went upon to live in an extraordinary menage a trois with Augustus and his wife, Ida; Gwen fl to France, where she embarked on a drawn-out and obsessive affair with Auguste Rodin, and remained there all her life. still they were close--bound to individual another by their shared unhappy upbringing and identical artistic teaching. the couple students at the Slade, they shared the same attitude toward traditional way s based on a strong graphic technique, and the one and the other remained stubbornly resistant to the art moves taking hold in London at the revolve of the century.

The opening latitude provides a compelling introduction to their early working lives. A linear, Slade-inspired formality is not absent in all the paintings and drawings here--portraits of their shut circle of family and friends, and self portraits--with the glimmer of individuality beginning to make itself felt Gwen's powerful and remarkably mature self-portraits--two of her best works in this exhibition (nos. 6 and 7)--stare proudly and defiantly at the viewer. We are introduced to Ida Nettleship, Augustus's wife, and Slade-school friend of Gwen, and Dorelia, whose relationship with the pair Gwen and Augustus is the material of legend.

Augustus's masterful draughtmanship is visible--perhaps to greatest effect--in his drawings of Ida and Dorelia, and thus too, in his self-portrait drawings, is his preposterous aggrandising faculty of perception of self (nos. 12 and 13) Dorelia was an percept of fantasy for both the John and their tellingly contrasting depictions of her reveal abundant about their own desires: Gwen portrays Dorelia as scholarly, intellectual and subdu in several exquisitely delicate drawings (nos. 22 23 25); for Augustus she is intoxicatingly alluring and vivacious (nos. 26 28)

As individual moves through the exhibition, Augustus's precocious and beguiling portrait mode of speech becomes more prominent. After 1914 he began to take upon occasional society portraits and started to receive commissions from artists and writers. He was at his best in this genre when the personalities he depicted were as powerful as his be in possession of and he could bypass traditional pictorial convention in favour of capturing the characters of his sitters, for example Wyndham Lewis and William Nicholson.

Gwen's portraits, in contrast, are quietly introspective and subdu in palette; her mut rather melancholy paintings of her friend Chloe Boughton-Leigh, of 1907 and 1910 provide an interesting counterbalance to Augustus's self-conscious flamboyance. Her interiors are outstanding. Effervescing with a peculiar inner luminescence, they are sublime meditations that tender an intimate glimpse into Gwen's private sanctuary, the Parisian flat Rodin flawed for her. Her presence in these destitute of contents rooms, suffused with a soft light, is evoked by a parasol propp against her basket chair or a volume open on the table; these paintings of her greatest in quantity intimate, cherished space are as revealing as any self-portrait.

Augustus's remarkable facility with oils is shown to wondrous result in a display of small, colourful portraits of his family. In 1910 Augustus took Dorelia and the children to Provence (Ida died in childbirth in 1907) where he made numerous small, vibrant oil studies of them in the landscape. Richly coloured, echoing the uncorrupted colouring of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse, they are at liberty of the contrived posturing of his later works. The influence of quattrocento painters also shines [i]or[/i] part of to the other in the Masaccioesque monumentality of a certain number of of his portrait groups (nos. 55 56) and the heavy cot [i]or[/i] cotes of the voluminous skirts his fortune-telling nomad muses wear.

Unfortunately, this purenes of colour and quiet elegance vanishes upon entering the third room, devot entirely to Augustus, in which several large murals adorn the walls. A selection of preparatory studies for them hangs apologetically to the left; these pencil drawings of Dorelia are animated and elegant, attributes sadly lacking from the paintings, Lisa Tickner in the Tare catalogue valiantly refer tos that Lyric fantasy (c. 1913-14) with its debit to Puvis de Chavannes is 'old fashioned' to our organ of sights because of its symbolist overtones, on the contrary it is simply a dreadful painting. The Mumper (1911-13) is perhaps plane worse, with its wooden, expressionless beggars assemblageed in ridiculous stylised and sentimental poses