John Singer Sargent
Gitlin, Todd
THE VAGARIES of artistic reputation are a recurrent fascination of cultural life. Canons boom but also redeploy. There is a time to gather respect and a time to cast it away. The movements of...
...Sargent was not a great society painter, he was a great painter who painted society--that is, capital-S Society when it was a confident, self-conscious class, radiant with possessions and composure, convinced that its members had been singled out to deserve the best...
...His paintings are streaked with light as if light were an active element, an ether animating the world in unexpected places...
...But his aesthetic hubris was a youthful phase, and the artifice and intimations of sexuality are not what stand out a century later...
...What prevailed, and what continues to prevail, for Sargent is luminosity, a luminosity that goes beyond the sumptuousness of his subjects' possessions...
...In this light, Sargent might seem the anti-Whitney: In your face, Hans Haacke...
...There's a paradox that goes to the heart of Sargent's achievement: he was a connoisseur of material glory who transcended materialism...
...In these transcendent paintings are the visual signs of what T. S. Eliot called "the intersection of the timeless with time...
...TODD GITLIN, professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University, is the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, and most recently, Sacrifice, a novel...
...He wanted to cast a light through the surfaces, to reveal—O, prepostmodern ambition!—their depth...
...They don't seem to care that much about the actual texture of the things they crave, hoard, and covet...
...Hence his appeal beyond class envy amid our present-day spiritual groping...
...He knew what to offer to the society patrons that Edith Wharton wickedly describes in The Custom of the Country: "All they asked of a portrait was that the costume should be sufficiently 'lifelike,' and the face not too much so...
...Sociologist Philip Slater once wrote that, far from being materialistic in the strict sense, Americans tend to be indifferent to actual material...
...Nor does Sargent turn out to be what one expects...
...It is as true in our own Gilded Age as in Sargent's that conspicuous consumption commands more beauty than public expenditure...
...They like getting and spending, acquiring things, piling them up, but they also throw them away with aplomb...
...The estimable Robert Hughes writes in a weak moment that Sargent "was a painter of surfaces...
...sufficiently to keep it off display until she died in 1924...
...98 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 (These were flattering enough, softening John D.'s face more than photographs do, but---or therefore—they rank among Sargent's least inspired portraits...
...Socio-economic climate links our age and his...
...But it would be unwise to leap to the assumption that Sargent is back simply because today's patrons love the material world he painted, or because they are America Firsters, or because they automatically approve of the lives and work of the worthies who could afford Sargent's attentions...
...When he forsook portraiture, he lost luminosity...
...RIGHTEOUSNESS was not Sargent's métier...
...Having achieved financial independence, he turned, instead, to murals and landscapes...
...The characteristic light of his portraits, and of many other paintings, is more than skin-deep...
...Hardly anyone else in the two centuries between them had such a fine appreciation for what a beam of light does to a face, a body, clothing, so that the very existence of physical forms seems miraculous...
...Public motives eluded him...
...Offered a hundred thousand dollars, at a time when a hundred thousand dollars was a hundred thousand dollars, to paint five Rockefeller family portraits, he placated them with two paintings of the patriarch alone...
...The conventional wisdom on Sargent is that, in the words of Richard Ormond's copy for the beautifully printed catalogue of last year's show (published by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), he was "concerned with the surface look of things...
...He became a huge success not for his arresting paintings of street life in Venice—there, he was partial to odd corners and working-class life— but because the wellborn and successful, the arrivistes and the old money alike were in the ageless business of self-flattery...
...For a welcome case of a rising artistic stock, consider John Singer Sargent...
...In fact, during his final years, his landscapes— with an eye for the unobtrusive detail and the surprising angle—are vastly superior to the celebrations of righteous Western Civilization that his high-minded institutional patrons wanted to pay for...
...His 1884 portrait of the bare-shouldered Madame Gautreau, or Madame X , as he called her, with her low-cut bodice, incandescent skin, and high disdain, was scandalous enough to shock the French, whereupon, at age twenty-seven, Sargent moved to London, settling in James McNeill Whistler's old house, there to make his home for most of the rest of his life...
...Sargent tantalizes, as did his friend Henry James in prose, and in one similar way: a sense that what you get is more than what you see...
...In these last decades, his symbolism is forced, cartoonish, propagandistic, many of the figures uncharacteristically flat and awkward...
...He shares this propensity, and talent, with another great portraitist, Rembrandt, who also hired out to the rich in a gilded time, also ennobled them, and also mingled awareness of their mortality with appreciation of their finery...
...His 1888 portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner as a sort of wasp-waisted goddess with a stylized halo (Woman, An Enigma) apparently irritated her husband (and her...
...Without thick sanctimony or forced "spirituality," but like Whitman and James in their vastly different voices, this profligate lover of the depth of existence was a master of a spiritual affirmation that dares not speak its name...
...Yet he tired of the grand manner, and in 1907 slacked off on oil portraits in favor of charcoal sketches he called "mug shots" that required no more than a single sitting...
...THOUGH NOT of radical inclinations, at least in any political sense, he did know how to outrage...
...Sargent found grandeur in private persons...
...Sargent knew what his clients were paying for, yet in an age of grandiosity he wanted to do more than flatter...
...In middle age, Sargent was not content to unveil the depths behind surfaces...
...I suspect, without any evidence from focus groups or surveys, that what many viewers find compelling in his paintings is the translucence of surfaces— the way in which the actual loveliness beneath things shines through appearances...
...for the Museum of Fine Arts, classical figures...
...No, the outstanding thing about Sargent was not his capacity to shock...
...It should not surprise us that hordes would gather to inspect and mingle with portraits of the wealthy around the turn of the last century in a spirit of awe and conspicuous admiration...
...Sargent loved the material he depicted...
...A man finally limited by his Gilded Age and its personal celebrations of wealth, Sargent was not up to war, nationalism, or formal religion...
...To portray the ecstasies and agonies of monotheistic—or for that matter, military— experience was beyond him...
...The light that strikes the faces of his figures is both within and without them—it is not always clear just where, in the NOTEBOOK painting's terms, the glow comes from...
...The gas-blinded soldiers he painted for Widener are stiff...
...Nationalism, then, might seem to be a crude sociological reason for Sargent's revival as a hot art ticket, a draw for crowds in Washington and Boston recently and then for followup shows at New York's Jewish Museum and New York University...
...In front of his peak work, they behold intimations that something exists beyond the material splendor that money can buy...
...As objects of fascination, the rich, after all, we shall always have with us, especially during Gilded Age II...
...The movements of conventional wisdom up and down, to and fro, are frequently hilarious, sometimes depressing, occasionally thrilling...
...Whatever motivates people to turn to his work, they find themselves facing something deeper and more mysterious than the pleasures of beautiful faces, beautiful gowns, and beautiful skin...
...when he tried to evoke public values that transcended individuals, what he produced was grandiose...
...He had an aristocratic disdain for the mere surface of surfaces...
...In 1898, a prime year, he painted twenty portraits, cramming in three sittings a day...
...He aspired to public art, and spent much his last quarter century painting murals in the Boston area: for the Public Library, scenes from the history of religion...
...He found energy and nobility in private life on the easel, not public life or allegory on a fresco scale...
...The force of his strongest work does not come simply from a gorgeous rendering of appearances...
...Some sense of grand duty called him to a realm of public feeling that he didn't know how to paint...
...He is, unexpectedly, a spiritual painter, trailing whiffs of transcendence that even the most prosperous art-goers crave...
...luminosity was...
...this is not sacrifice in behalf of republican virtue...
...This misses Sargent's power and mystery...
...He was, no mistake, hugely talented and original, by turns bold and subtle, lavish in praise of beauty but no sentimentalist, witty though not subversive, an aesthete's aesthete, one of the first American painters to gain respect on both sides of the Atlantic...
...for Harvard's Widener Library, at the behest of President A. Lawrence Lowell, World War I. But sincere as was Sargent's late-coming commitment to the Big Statement, he could not interpret public symbols in public settings...
...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 99...
...He was in a vastly higher league than Wharton's portraitist but must have faced the DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 97 NOTEBOOK Madame X, 1884, John Singer Sargent, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston same philistine expectations, and his genius was to satisfy those who paid to sit for him—he knew enough to render his women's waists tiny, for example—yet without embalming them...
...In most of his portraits, the excitement is quiet, even formal—odd angles and unexpected cropping, as in Degas...
...On one Widener wall, soldiers look back yearningly toward their families...
...Born in Florence, trained in Paris, and thus not exactly home-grown, he was admired by Henry James and Claude Monet, and can be proudly brandished as our guy among highstatus cosmopolitans, an American link between the Salons and the moderns, able to hold his head up with the Impressionists, with whom he was once (misleadingly) linked...
Vol. 47 • July 2000 • No. 3
