The classic astute portrait painter John Singer Singer is often identified as an American, but he did not belong to any country. Born in Florence, Italy, to expand parents who moved the family in Europe with the seasons, Sargent (1856-1925) spent a formative decade in Paris before he made London his basis for a nomadic life (including long stints in Boston and New York). He went to Spain And Italy Often enough to have inspired museum exhibitions in time there. He was cosmopolitan until the end; When he died, in his sleep in London at the age of 69, death noted that he had read Voltaire.
France, however, was where Sargent chose to start his career, and in the transport exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum “Sargent and Paris” We see exactly how he did it: with a lot of Savoir-Faire and a touch of the Enfant terrible. A collaboration between the with and the Musée d’OrsayWhere the exhibition will appear in the fall, the Sargent show follows from his arrival in the French capital as an 18-year-old in 1874 by his salon triumphs of the early 1880s to the controversy around his arrested portrait “Madame X‘From 1883-4.
Organized by the Met-Curator Stephanie L. Herdrich (with the help of the research assistant Caroline Elenowitz-Hess of the museum and the Musée d’Orsay curators Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Paul Perrin), the show builds up into a climame around “Madicame Xen” with long-lines of the tunnel’s tunnel lines Famous Paris of this famous Paris of this famous Paris of the Precarious dressed Paris. Amélie Avegno Gautreau. The work is a highlight of the collection of the with the Museum since Sargent it sold to the museum in 1916 and the director said: “I suppose this is the best I have done.”
Perhaps because it leans so heavily on a well-known painting and the environment, “Sargent and Paris” does not break much new land (in contrast to, for example, the recent “formed by Sargent” exhibition in MFA Boston and Tate Great Britain, which shed light on the performative, collaborative process of the artist). “Madame X” and her circle have been treated extensively, also in the book by Deborah Davis “Paving“And Gioia Diliberto’s work of historical fiction”I am Madame X. “
It is a suggestive look at the Belle Époque city where a young Sargent hit his pass. And the way in which he did it – diligent networks, close study of the greats, an instinctive feeling of what was contemporary, and a carefully granted soup of fame – now feels educational for artists. Emerging artists can also admire the fluidity with which the polyglot Sargent has moved between countries (which is currently more difficult to emulate).
Not that it was so easy at the time. American-European relations were tense, like today, by trade wars and rates and claims of nationalism. Protectionist impulses extended to art. (A French gossip columnist wrote that Americans have painters, such as Mr. Sargent, who take away our medals, and beautiful women, such as Madame Gauthereau [sic]That our darkened … ‘) But in a third Republic of Paris in which the new rich mixed with aristocrats and their own status -confirming portraits, Sargent found material and intellectual support.
Traveling facilitated the rapid rise in Sargent. Training under the commercially successful portrait painter Carolus-Duran, he was sent to Spain and the Netherlands to study works by his idols Velazquez and Frans Hals. His copy of a figure of Hals’s “The banquet of the officers of the St. George Civic Guard,” Made on a journey from 1880 to Haarlem, with the powerful white-white brush work that would be his signature.
He also visited Morocco and Italy, partly to satisfy the appetite of the Paris salons for exotic scenes. Although he fiddled a few of them, as in the openly sensual painting of a Tangier woman who parfumed herself in “Fumée d’Ambre Gris”, he crossed the expectations elsewhere with shady Venetian Palazzo interiors who shed the lightly felled channels of the city. A family friend described Sargent as looking for “what nobody else searched here – non -picturesque subjects, absence of color, absence of sunlight.”
However, it was a portrait that strengthened his reputation in Paris. The subject of Amalia Subercaseaux, the wife of a Chilean diplomat, was in a suitable way. When Madame Subercaseaux’s painting was in a daring dress on the piano with a stairwear black and white ruffles in the Paris-Salon of 1880, Sargent earned a prize with which he could circumvent the jury for future salons. When the photo introduces a gallery with daring portraits that focus on “Dr. Pozzi Thuis” -Sargent’s Rogusse and yet royal image of the gynecologist and Samuel Jean Pozzi of man, the renowned lover of Gautreau, among other things, in a sazende Scharlakker.
Sargent’s travel to Spain influenced the work he did in Paris. His next big salon moment came in 1882, with “El Jaleo” -A monumental, intensely atmospheric scene of an Andalusian dancer in the middle of Gyration. A group portrait Of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit is opposed to a copy of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” From his student pilgrimage to the Prado.
Outside the salons, Sargent cultivated a strong network of supporters of them formidable, creative women, such as the writers Vernon Lee and Judith Gautier, represented by the representative representation of informal, sketchy portraits. (Lee described the image of Sargent of her, approving, as “rather bright and grumpy.”)
Sargent was also surrounded in Paris by the female archetype of the “Parisienne” in her fashionable black dress. Examples in the Whistler, Renoir and Manet show (who died in 1883 and would have been in Sargent’s thoughts around the time he painted Gautreau) witnesses of this image of female beauty and modernity about the imagination of very different artists.
By the time that “Madame X” makes her entrance, we are ready to see the subject as an individual and a type – and to recognize her and Sargent as makers of this sustainable daring work. As we know from the abundant literature about the painting, both Sargent and Gautreau were looking for a sensational moment and they got it in the Salon of 1884 (although not in the way one of them expected).
Critics objected to the fallen shoulder strap of the Gautreau dress (who later adapted Sargent in an upright position, as it appears today), as well as her heavy makeup and her avoidance of eye contact with the viewer. They ignored the classic lines and symbols of the work, such as the Halve Maan ornament associated with the virgin hunter Diana. And they casted both artist and subject and American invaders. (Part of the comments focused on the Creole roots of Gautreau.)
The no -sayers were right about one thing, namely that the work was very a joint effort. At the with “madame x” is surrounded by preparatory sketches of Gautreau who celebrate her as a work of art in itself. Most show her in profile, nodding after the tradition of the cameo or quattroto portraits of women.
And the heavy make -up that can be seen so insulted Salongoers as a painting of a painting -something that Sargent’s colleague salon artist Marie Bashkirtseff seemed to understand when she wrote: “The beautiful lady is terribly in daylight because she uses too much make -up … This cooling paint is nice on gips.”
Sargent’s reputation in Paris has largely recovered from the disastrous reception of “Madame X.” (Gautreau’s not.) But by that time he realized London, where he moved in in 1886.
He continued to see his own artistic identity through a French filter – ‘American by birth, French by the brush’, as an article from 1884 had from a Belgian newspaper.
In small portraits, he paid tribute to his artists’ friends Rodin and Monet, even accepted his own style of the impressionist for a beautiful small square-Air scene of him at work in the forest in Giverny. Here too, a more formal treatment of the heiress winaretta singer of the sewing machine is; As the label tells us, both Sargent and Singer have made great contributions to the fund to acquire the “Olympia” from Manet for the French State.
The French State returned the favor when in 1892 it bought Sargent’s 1890 painting by the Spanish Flamenco star as known as known as “La Carmencita.” This daring work, which shows that the dancer takes a confident hand-on-hip attitude in a voluminous yellow costume, ensures a suitable conclusion for “Sargent and Paris”-a vision of Spain in France, seen by an artist holding an American passport but knew no limits.
Sargent and Paris
Until 3 August, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, Metmuseum.org.
