Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Madame X

“Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends,” currently showing at the Met, is a virtual vade mecum of l9th European culture, as seen from the perspective of the great and often quirky transatlantic portraitist. There is Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) and a sketch of Yeats (1908). The impressionist style of “Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood”(1885) shows Sargent’s mirror neurons at work. Henry James, whose novels provided a similar, albeit fictionalized portrait of European cultural life, is pictured with his thumb in his coat. Edmund Booth (1890) is the subject of a characteristically "dramatic" portrait. Rodin, who he painted, called him “the Vandyke of our times.” The curators point to the fact that his portrait of Madame X (the expatriate Madame Pierre Gautreau), shown bare shouldered in a sensual black gown with silver straps, was deemed scandalous and resulted in Sargent’s departure for England. "Dr. Pozzi at Home” (1881) evinces a similar swagger in its use of an ecclesiastical red to capture the estheticism of a renowned gynecologist. But it’s the poses that really distinguish these portraits. The current exhibit underscores the connection to Frans Hals’ “The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard,” (1616) in Sargent’s painting of of the artists Francois Flameng and Paul Helleu, with Flameng staring straight out and Helleu in profile. Sargent takes a similar tact in the painting of the children of the playwright Edouard Pailleron with Marie-Louise facing out with a look of self-possession that verges on possession and her brother Edouard staring away in distraction. In a “A Dinner Table at Night" (1884) his subject Edith Vickers commands our attention while her husband Alfred’s profile is cut short, drifting into oblivion at the edge of the frame. James and Sargent may have admired each other greatly, but looking at the current exhibit one begins to ask who was the novelist and who the painter? They both had similar themes but James painted with words and Sargent wrote novels in oil.

John Singer Sargent at the Brooklyn Museum

John Singer Sargent, Gourds (1908)

Contrary to the argument of the recent Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 show at MOMA, which is that abstraction came about at particular time and place in the history of art, one is perpetually astonished by the ubiquitousness and precociousness of the impulse to abstraction. Indeed abstraction preceded mimesis. What could be more abstract than a cave painting? The impulse to abstraction may also be a characteristic of certain media. Many watercolorists become inadvertent abstractionists because they can’t control the paint. But as the current show of John Singer Sargent watercolors at The Brooklyn Museum demonstrates, the lability of the medium can be the occasion for abstraction and representation both. Sargent was known for his portraits, but he may have even been an even greater watercolorist due to the sublime ways he used the medium to move from the abstract to an almost classical sense of perspective. In this regard Sargent was a painterly hermaphrodite. This is particularly exemplified in his Venetian paintings. In the foreground of Gondoliers (l906) we find two figures who are created with brilliant washes of the brush, while in the background Sargent employs the paint with an uncanny intuitive sense of control to capture the perspective. In his paintings based on Italian gardens, the abstraction predominates, with the work moving into territories that might be more associated with abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock. Gourds (1908), Magnolias (1908), Vines and Cypresses (1909) all became the occasions for organic abstraction, a kind of painterly taxidermy, in which the skin of the fruit, as it were, was removed--as is literally the case in Pomegranates (l908). There is a luminescence and almost effortless beauty to these works. It’s been said of Sargent that he worked hard to show that he wasn’t working hard.

The Beach

Watercolor (“Bad Dream”) by Hallie Cohen

The famed Italian writer Cesare Pavese was the author of a novel called The Beach, which contains the following lovely line, “We were at the age when a friend’s conversation seems like oneself talking.” Pavese later would commit suicide, but then there were The Beach Boys who wrote the classic Don’t Worry Baby, with its famous words, “Well it’s been building up inside of me/ For oh I don’t know how long…” And sandwiched between them in the 50’s The Wind by the Jesters, with it’s “when the cool summer breeze sends a chill down my spine…” Sargent was inspired by Venice. Music, literature and art have all owe something to the sea. There’s an old expression “children should be seen, but not heard,” which is less used in an age where we seek to empower children, but can’t we say the reverse for the sea? Should it not be heard rather than seen? It’s nice to pick up a shell and hear the ocean whispering its secrets but the actual sea is dangerous. It’s like they Scylla and Charybdis of recreation luring the intrepid adventurer to his or her death. Rip tides pull us out to sea and the sea magnetically draws depressives. Sylvia Plath might have ended it by sticking her head into an oven, but Virginia Woolf walked right into the sea and never came back. Beaches are filled with half clothed women who turn heads and  create neck injuries in glowering men. The famed l960’s CBS documentary Harvest of Shame, could easily spawn a sequel entitled Harvest of Melanoma, showing the effect of sun and sand on the human skin.