Chantal Joffe: Personal Feeling is the Main Thing

by Chantal Joffe, Dorothy Price, Gemma Blackshaw

Personal Feeling Is the Main Thing sees the acclaimed British artist Chantal Joffe setting out on a journey with art historian Dorothy Price in the footsteps of the pioneering German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876 – 1907), the first female artist to paint a naked self-portrait. Returning to London, Joffe undertakes new paintings of her friends, the novelist and writer Olivia Laing and art historian Gemma Blackshaw, heavily pregnant.

Richly illustrated with works from throughout Joffe's career –  depicting her daughter Esme, friends, artists and writers – alongside works by Modersohn-Becker and Polaroids by Joffe of the artist's home in Worpswede, this book offers a rare window into Joffe's practice through the prism of Modersohn-Becker, working a century earlier.

Revealing texts by Dorothy Price, Gemma Blackshaw and Olivia Laing further illuminate the integrity, as well as the psychological and emotional force Joffe brings to figurative painting.    'Though separated in time and place, Modersohn-Becker's intensity of vision still speaks directly to Chantal Joffe; both artists are invested in an unflinching approach to their subject matter. They are at once fierce and tender in their acuity.' – Dorothy Price

Personal Feeling Is the Main Thing is published by Elephant in association with Victoria Miro Gallery.

176 pages, Hardcover

Published October 9, 2018

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How do you catch reality, the actual minute?” Personal Feeling Is The Main Thing, a book of Chantal Joffe’s paintings featuring essays by Dorothy Price, Gemma Blackshaw and Olivia Laing, presents over a decade’s accumulation of female bodies, faces and spaces, with self-portraits made during pregnancy, and then subsequent paintings of her daughter Esme, forming the primary through-line of this 2018 exhibition-turned-book. In the first two essays ‘Fierce Love’ and ‘Journeys’, art historian and curator Dorothy Price observes the “intensity of vision […] an unflinching approach to their subject matter” that defines not only Joffe but one of her major inspirations, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker. Price notes how “Joffe’s paintings […] trace a finger of time through the act of being alive, as a woman, an artist and a mother. They speak of an intertwining of relationships past and present”. Later, in the essay ‘Mother Figure’, Gemma Blackshaw (an art historian and writer), recounts sitting for Joffe — while heavily pregnant — “because her paintings seem to me to realise the creative potential in being divided.” And lastly, Olivia Laing writes about using “portraiture to get at something deeper”, both in painting and in writing, in the essay ‘It Never Actually Is’. With her signature eye, Laing describes “Paint as a device for stopping time”. Of Joffe’s slippages in time she muses that “You can’t paint reality; you can only paint your own place in it”.

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deft and affecting. Mesmerising images; quiet, illuminating text.