The Latest Breaking News from Gwen John

Women artists have always struggled to maintain an art practice as the primary focus of their lives. Going it alone, they’ve needed to contrive ways to survive, or accept that with commitment to a human “other” comes domestic concerns – and very likely, the demands of motherhood.

Artists as varied as Sarah Lucas, Gwen John and Georg Baselitz are called upon by critic-curator Hilton Als to chime with the writer of Wide Sargasso Sea

Our critics’ high points include a ceramic wedding cake you can climb inside to Alice Neel’s fearless portraits, plus a new children’s V&A and a school with lumpy yellow walls

Looking for something to do this Summer? Our experts have gone to some of the best exhibitions around the UK and given us their take on it. From retrospectives of painter Peter Howson’s work in Edinburgh and filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst’s work in Belfast to a groundbreaking photography exhibition in…

The quiet Welsh painter Gwen John was not like any other artist, male or female – she was genuinely unique. She was neither an heiress, like most unmarried modernist women, nor a conventional academic artist, like most women who had to make a living with their art.

The Welsh-born painter Gwen John is generally remembered as a “fragile”, isolated figure, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Neglected for some time after her death, John (1876-1939) was rediscovered in the 1980s, when she was reassessed as a reclusive talent overshadowed by two “bombastic male egos”: her brother, the…

Flawed, preoccupied and animated, Donachie’s vivid portraits intrigue and charm in a lively exhibition; Gwen John feels anaemic by comparison

Tensile and hard-won, the artist’s singular work is occasionally lost in the scrum of a show keen to situate her in a social, sexual and painterly whirl

She is famous for painting solitary women. But, far from being the recluse of popular myth, this pupil of Whistler, admirer of Cézanne and lover of Rodin was ahead of her time