Undressed: Sargent's private album reveals a gallery of male nudes.
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ANDY WARHOL ONCE got a personal tour of John Singer Sargent portraits from Trevor Fairbrother. In the 1980s, the man who would become Seattle Art Museum's curator for modern art and one of the country's leading Sargent scholars led Andy through the Whitney Museum of Art, as if to point out the surprising similarities between two artists so utterly separated by time, place, and aesthetic sensibilities: one, a stiff Victorian portraitist; the other, a hedonist breaking new ground in conceptual art. Both were rather reserved—awkward, even—as they were caught up and embraced by an intense social whirl. Both were drawn to glamour, drama, costume, and rich adornments. By extreme talent, in Sargent's case, and by sheer brilliance and incessant quirkiness in Warhol's, both men gained status among the celebrities of their respective days and came to be emblems themselves of a certain lifestyle and social milieu. Almost two decades after Andy got the goods on Sargent, Fairbrother leads me through the galleries at the Seattle Art Museum for his final exhibition here, "John Singer Sargent."
John Singer Sargent
Seattle Art Museum December 14- March 18
Fairbrother says the Sargent show seeks to "illuminate the paradox of a reserved person who made exuberant art." As if in tribute to this sheer exuberance, Fairbrother holds up several paintings and simply admires them in reverent silence. He's undoubtedly waited for this moment for years—the chance to assemble his favorite Sargents and stroll through the galleries, always making new connections and discoveries. As we poked around, he noticed—perhaps for the first time—Sargent's propensity for a certain raking angle in women's backs, a stark diagonal that manifests itself again and again. Fairbrother explains that his process for hanging the show unfolded rather organically, that certain works fell into place only as they were unpacked. The 130 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in the exhibition cast revealing light on facets of this painter's life, which is still steeped in ambiguity long after his death.
Fairbrother refers to the dozen portraits of the Wertheimer family as the "jewel of the show." Around this touring exhibition, organized by the Jewish Museum of New York City, he has built an exhibition with a much broader, almost retrospective scope, delving into often overlooked aspects of Sargent's career. The Wertheimer pieces represent the type of work for which Sargent is best known—rather ostentatious portraits that are uncanny windows into the sitters' personalities. Fairbrother lingers before the portrait of young sisters, Ena and Betty, rather gleefully pointing out their defiant, self-confident poses and interlocked arms. At the peak of his career, a portrait by Sargent's hand had the power to make someone into "a society celebrity." But these remarkable portraits of a nouveau riche Jewish family were often the objects of anti-Semitism. Fairbrother here places them cleverly within the context of "Sargent as sensualist." This guise of a rather fluffy theme grants access to the underbelly of Sargent's oeuvre: lesser-known works, erotic male nudes, portraits Fairbrother terms "creatures," and travel paintings with a fascination for the dark alleys and dilapidated buildings in otherwise glorified cities.
SARGENT THE SENSUALIST would have certainly understood Warhol's decadent Factory lifestyle. He reveled in luxurious textiles and women's finery; he collected exotic costumes on his travels and instigated "dress-up days" on holidays with friends and family, painting scenes of his loved ones lounging in colorful Eastern garb. His very use of paint is sensual—his liberal application of oils in thick, rich strokes gives a luminous quality to the glistening surfaces and fabrics that he gloried in recreating. In this almost obsessive attention to all things luxurious and in the ease with which Sargent captured the complexities of gaze and subtle body language of his sitters, the works exude a sexual energy that was both controversial and delectable in Sargent's Victorian times. It is this energy that makes the works as delectable to us today, though we aren't so prone to the shock that Sargent was capable of inciting then. The obvious example is the famous "Madame X." Fairbrother reminds me that Sargent's instincts were often radical or racy, "continually conflicting with his desire to conform and to be accepted and successful." He first painted this beauty with a strap of her already revealing gown slipped provocatively off her shoulder. After public ridicule of this scandalous display, he repainted the strap in its proper upright position.
But this exhibition particularly comes to life through the unknown works assembled here—especially the informal, private pieces and portraits whose subjects Sargent sought out rather than being commissioned to execute. Most stunning are several paintings and drawings of friends and portraits of people by whom he was fascinated—"creatures" that he ran across in the street or the fabulously irreverent Parisian socialite "Madame X." His portrait of friend Robert Louis Stevenson catches a glint of shared humor in the author's eye. Likewise the portrait of Sargent's longtime friend Vernon Lee (a.k.a. Violet Paget), captures the individualist in this English writer and lesbian. The delicate touch Sargent employed in this portrait—no superfluous stroke, corners left unpainted, impressionistic reflections off glasses, lips, eyes—gives a fleeting feeling to the whole, as if he's caught his friend in movement, a furtive glance in an intimate conversation. Indeed, Sargent painted "snapshots" before such a thing existed. In this way, Fairbrother explains, Sargent was employing the concepts and techniques of the Impressionists. But, though he may have wanted to participate in that movement, he was not invited to join them: "He just didn't fit in."
