Arts and crafts

The Art Institute lived up to its promise on Monday, unsurprisingly.  I entered through the fast track door, my ticket on my phone, then grabbed a museum map and figured out where the Sargent exhibition was being shown.  I entered through the main entrance on Michigan Avenue, not the modern wing entrance on East Monroe, so I would have to navigate quite a bit of other art before getting to the main event – oh, the horror!  I walked up the grand staircase and entered the Impressionist galleries.

There is enough Impressionism available to the curators of the Art Institute that the exhibitions change pretty regularly, but some paintings do have pride of place.  There’s Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jette, of course, and they fortunately haven’t moved a haunting picture of a group of Breton nuns walking in candlelight in the rain which I now can’t find online.  The museum had gotten rid of some other things, some bad self-portraits mostly, that I didn’t miss, especially on my way to look at one of the masters of the genre.  Alas, they still had a sort of creepy nude crucifixtion piece by a Finnish painter – one can always hope that goes back into storage.  Given my recent musings on the topic, I stopped for a bit in the Gauguin room, forcing myself to think about the art without regard to what I know of the painter, and I think it was a good exercise.  I’m not sure I could wholly disassociate the two – you can’t unlearn knowledge, really; even if you forget about the facts themselves there lingers in your memory the impressions made by those facts – but by being conscious of the emotional reaction to Gauguin’s wretchedness as a human being, I tried my best to separate those emotions inspired by data from any aesthetic reaction I might have to his paintings.  I spent about five minutes in that room – not too much, but enough to focus myself a bit.

In light of my rants about Gauguin and others, I should say up front that I know very little about Sargent as a person, nor really have I found all that much insightful about him.  I did the usual Wikipedia searches and found a bit more while puttering around on search engines, but the internet is unreliable enough that I’m not sure I got anything of value.  It would seem that he was well-loved as a child, more so than that odd mid 19th century way that wealthy families “loved” one another which involved a lot of nannies and boarding schools.  His parents let him learn from nature and the churches and museums of Europe, nurturing him as an artist while giving him a wealth of languages and cultural knowledge that would serve him well in later life as painter to the global business elite.  His expat parents traipsed about Italy and Switzerland, living off a dwindling inheritance by chasing from one town to the next, and Sargent learned enough painting from them (both parents were accomplished amateurs) to pass the admittance exam to the Ecole des Beaux Arts when he was seventeen years old.  When he was nineteen, he was accepted into an atelier with a number of other painters, including some Americans – notably James Beckwith – who, while not achieving the same prominence as Sargent, knew more of his fellow countrymen and introduced Sargent to a wide range of future patrons and subjects.

The internet indicates that Sargent was probably gay and reasonably comfortable with that fact, and his social circle seems to have accepted that as well even though it seems to largely have consisted of rich married couples.  A number of anecdotes hint that he wasn’t shy about being gay, one friend noting that he was a “frenzied bugger” through his time in Paris and another friend making allusions to how much he enjoyed hiring the Venetian gondoliers as models and painting them from the back of their boats on the canals.  No stories came across of him being particularly good or bad as a person, though, or for that matter, as being particularly amiable or arrogant or a fun guy or an annoying twat – on a personal level, what struck me about the writings I came across was just how blank he seemed to be.  He painted, and painted very, very well; he seems to have liked owning nice things; he was a good travel companion as a painter but he also seems to have cadged his invitations to travel – in fact in the exhibition, one patron noted how he had effectively overstayed his welcome at the patron’s holiday villa but couldn’t seem to take the hint that he should be moving on.  Everyone – including his fellow students at the atelier in Paris – thought he was gifted, both in technique and in his style, a style which was unique from a young age, not truly impressionist but definitely completely outside the boundaries of the classic Parisian academy style.  He functioned at a high level in the each of the media in which he worked, but beyond that, he wasn’t much of anything.  Of course, he was everything to himself – by definition – but his ability to leave his life hidden indicates either a high degree of shame (I think that’s unlikely), a really boring internal life (again unlikely – how can you live that life as a bore?), or an intense insecurity.  That last feels right – especially in an artist.

But this is just background that I had vaguely in my head as I moved towards the American wing at the Art Institute.  Leaving the Gauguin gallery, you immediately come out at the stairway above which hangs Georgia O’Keefe’s monumentally scaled work Sky above Clouds IV, which took her years to paint and is so enormous that it can’t fit in the gallery that it was donated to (the San Francisco Museum of Art) so it stayed on loan to Chicago until the museum raised the funds to buy it outright.  It’s beautiful and serene and completely other to anything Sargent would do, and coming out of the room with Gauguin and the ghosts of his abuse, it sort of prepared me for Sargent.  I forgot about background information on the artist; I just looked at the painting, breathed deeply, and walked downstairs, turned the corner to the right, and approached the exhibition.

The space in front of the special exhibits hall was itself being cleared for new exhibits, which I appreciated – it helped clear my mind of the art I’d already seen, only being aware of the exposed stone Beaux Arts columns and balustrades of the courtyard in front of the gallery.  My ticket scanned, I walked in.

The theme of the show was the Gilded Age in Chicago, and the first room was a simple but brief introduction to early works by Sargent – some childhood sketches from walks in the Alps, student work, oils from his early years in Venice after he left the atelier.  What was interesting was the inclusion in the first gallery of what were contemporary works – by his painting master in Paris, for example, and a few works by the emerging Parisian impressionists and John Whistler, that other paripatetic American of the day.  Sargents paintings – even the early ones – always stood out, though; his style was unique from his earliest days.  Not to say it was better than Monet or Whistler, just different.

Then I came around a corner and was at once embraced, punched in the eyes, and shocked all at once.  It was a lifesize Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis, of all of her ample middle aged American open-hearted beauty and her sort of dorky looking son in a sailor’s suit (yes, Alan, rich little boys did actually wear sailor’s suits – it’s not just a conceit of Looney Tunes).  Her face was open and her smile was alive, genuine, along with the smile-grimace of the embarassed boy whose pride at being painted still came through behind it all.  It was a punch, though – the opening room of traditionally sized wall portraiture and experiments with small-scale genre paintings in no way prepared you for an eight foot high canvas with all six feet – or certainly at least five feet nine inches – of Mrs. Davis.  In the same room was the painting used as the cover of the gallery book, La Carmencita, of a painter of the age that Sargent was (visually) taken by, and a full length Mrs. Hugh Hammersley which – like Madame X but with a more Bloombsbury attitude – showed a woman d’une age certaine with a plain face but a radiating sensuality.  I’d notice her pose, arm draped over a couch, legs akimbo in front of her, echoed in a Bodhisattva Simhanada Lokeshvara carving in the South Asian gallery later in the afternoon.

That kicked off the first of three rooms focused on his portraits.  After being introduced so forcefully to Mrs. Davis, the viewer could then wander at leisure through a combination of early Parisian works and some of the more monumental portraits Sargent crafted when he was in full form in London, along with portraits he would make later after he had largely settled in the United States in his older years.  It was not strictly chronological in presentation, which I appreciated.  It was more groupings around the sitters themselves – here wives and children, there friends and members of Sargent’s circle, then more portraits but now mostly of just raw wealth, robber barons and their wives and mistresses.  The groupings were occasionally visually confusing, especially where you’d span thirty years of Sargent’s career in a space of three or four pictures, but because his style became so set – at least for the oil works – so early, it wasn’t that bad.  And focusing on the sitters let you get a sense of who these people were and how Sargent did – or didn’t – shift his style when doing one “type” versus another.  His female portraits are much more successful than his males, for example – although apparently his male portraits were popular, they seemed much flatter, and the male monochrome fashions of the time simply didn’t allow for the range of color that he could employ with women’s dresses, the blues and pinks and chartreuses.

I do have a theory that Sargent put exactly as much effort as he felt was needed for a given subject, but I’d like to amend it.  Sometimes he would paint for a patron whom he felt had a good eye – he painted quite a lot for Charles Deering, who made his fortune with International Harvester but began his artistic relationship with Sargent in his early 20s while he was in the US Navy and met Sargent in Venice.  The Deering portraits – of his two wives (the first dead in childbirth – even the rich were vulnerable before antibiotics), of himself – are works of imagination, works that clearly Sargent was doing to prove his own abilities to what may have felt like his keenest critic.  Another portrait, that of Mrs. Charles Gifford Dyer, is not much more than a fast-dash color study in the style of Sargent, given to a friend as a momento, said the little card by the painting, but clearly not to a friend whose taste he valued.  A small canvas of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard focused far more on the lace and silkwork of her naval-style tunic than on the somewhat vapid face (I noted that the Shepard work is usually on display in Fort Worth, Texas – there are good museums down there, maybe all is not lost with the new relocation…).

Very helpfully, the curators drew upon the insanely deep broader collection of the Art Institute and hung portraits done by other artists – in particular Anders Zorn and Leon Bonnat, the latter seen as a direct competitor of Sargent’s in the London market, while Zorn being a Swedish portraitist of the same era who realized that the money and the subject matter in Chicago was worth making a brand of himself there.  Quite a few of these rival Sargent’s work – for example, in a small corner of the third portrait room, there were three Zorn portraits, two studies of middle class people, the third a portrait of Mrs Potter Palmer, the feminist wife of another robber baron who raised money for a women’s pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Exhibition, that were stunning, and outshone the couple of Sargents hanging next to them.  That had me moving back and forth, though.  What did Zorn get right that Sargent missed?  Sargent’s colors are better, to my warped eyes, and definitely used a much wider palette; his brush work is better, knowing when the brush should be invisible and when the viewer should feel its bulk in a way that Zorn’s controlled but one-dimensional strokes can’t match.

What Zorn did get right, much more so than most of Sargent’s work, was his sympathy.  He clearly liked the people whose portraits he was painting.  The two studies of middle class people had a lovely kind of spark in their eyes that – except for the redoubtable Mrs. Davis, and maybe Mrs. Hammersley’s plain-faced but flirtatious gaze – Sargent seems to gloss over or to just not bother with.  Or maybe it wasn’t there; maybe the Sargent treatment had a way of slowly wearing down the sitter into a kind of dull torpor, while Zorn was somehow keeping them either happier (telling jokes? keeping up a constant stream of light-hearted foolishness?) or having a much keener memory for the life that lives behind one’s eyes than Sargent had.  Sargent also dealt exclusively with the rich – well, except for some of his genre pieces from Venice, and most of what was on display was anonymous, the faces obscured by shadow or big hats or just by the choice of Sargent to present those non-wealthy figures from the back, or the side, or from a position where their identity as individuals was, really, irrelevant.

I did see a different side of his subject matter, though – his interest in actresses and dancers and what would have been called the demi-monde back in his time.  He had a real flair for capturing them – the above-noted La Carmencita being the most flamboyant, so much so it got the nod as the signature painting of the show, but there were several such paintings and, really, isn’t Madame X all about creating the kind of decadent scene that today we’d call celebrity, and which crosses the boundaries of class, wealth, and taste?  He’s such a gorgeous craftsman – he’s so clearly inspired by a kind of joy that he can make paintbrushes and paint sing – but there is a fawning over that culture of celebrity which, taken in over maybe 60 paintings, both portraits and his later plein air work, got to be too much.

Before the final, grand room of his outdoor work, there was an odd small gallery with three “exotic” paintings – a famous Egyptian Girl life study and then two small oil sketches of, in one case, Egyptian women gathering water from a well, and in the other, two Bedouin tribesman.  On the other wall was a set of male nude studies, supposedly done as preparatory work for Sargent’s murals at the Boston Public Library but looking more like Maplethorpe, especially when paired against the sickeningly colonialist, condescending Egyptian Girl, her nudity only exploitative.  It was an odd room; it looked like it was poised to ask questions about the artist and what he thought of his subjects, about his own humanity, but instead it talked about how much Sargent valued the life study as a finished portrait even though others thought it was more of an experiment; how he often painted nude male forms but always to incorporate them in either spirit or in pose to his more allegorical or monumental works.  Yeah, right.  Egyptian Girl is a masterwork of painting, don’t get me wrong; but I understand also that a certain artistic eye – comfortable with the engagement of sexual predation in the service of beauty – would be disappointed not to see that particular Art Institute work in the show.

And again, the curators – maybe intentionally, maybe out of a sense of their own unease of Sargent’s eye and attitude, with a creeping sense that they were creating an homage to at the best, the world’s best painter, but perhaps also a narcissistic sociopath who viewed his subjects as objects and viewed objects with an abstract disdain – kept sneaking in alternatives to Sargent’s perfection, the Zorns especially.  Towards the end of the exhibit, there was just such a counterpoint, with a Sargent watercolor-goache-pastel piece of Charles Deering –  you remember, of International Harvester fame – in his 70s at that point, facing off against a Zorn portrait of the same man in very different relief (alas, I can’t find a link to an image of it).  In Sargent’s work, Deering looks small in his suit but really the painting is about the light of Florida, the shadows of the palms and his wicker chair and how Sargent can just play with white and dark and light even in that most washed out sunlight of late season Biscayne Bay.  Zorn’s portrait is a more traditional, face on, standing three quarter portrait, with a slimming tuxedo, black tie, the gleam of a gold chain, and eyes that are at once possessive, lively, and perhaps a little drunk.  Is it a better painting?  Well, the painter’s outcome for Sargent is not clearly better (although as Sargent got older, he wasn’t as concerned about final works), although the technique is undeniably exquisite.  And it’s difficult to compare evening tie and cumberbund to a linen suit and an obscuring Panama hat.  But Deering is more human – even if the formalwear and the light is used to subtlely jab at his wealth – in Zorn’s portrait than the object draped with light and shadow, who may or may not be alive or a dummy or even just an abstraction, in Sargent’s treatment.

I left the last room and felt a kind of vacuum absence, like I needed to be filled again, so I went back to the beginning and started over.  The early work, the moody Venetian glass workers and the Parisian beggar girl and the ambiguously dressed woman walking by two shady men, now felt quite different.  At some point, Sargent stopped painting the non-elite – the non-customer – as real, fully formed people.  But as he continued on in his portraiture business, his work shows a slow but steady dimming of his success in making anyone human.  Even his beloved (or lusted after) Venetian boatmen become draped in colorful fabric, pieces of motion as they row the canals, but their faces eventually vanish.    Meanwhile his outdoor scenes get richer, the painting more virtuousic.

I walked out again, turned left, and was hit with Georgia O’Keefe and Marsden Hartley, with a rejection of all the craftsmanship of Sargent and even that of Zorn, an embrace of humanity in people, of warmth in color, and of a search for personal meaning that, I realized, I had abandoned for two hours while closeting myself with Sargent.  I had an odd sensation: I think Sargent is the best painter I know, he’s the master of the craft – but he is by no means my favorite artist.  I lingered in the pre-1900 galleries in the floor below and was reminded of Winslow Homer, of Thomas Eakins, or even lesser artists like William Sidney Mount, who did Bar-room Scene and somehow evokes the humanity of the poor, the rising, insecure middle class, and the outcast blacks of pre-Civil War Connecticut with grace, if with little painterly skill.  I felt like I was always comparing the technique to what I saw from Sargent – in fact, I was doing the same with the Manets and the Degas that also were sprinkled through the exhibition, and kept finding them wanting versus my expatriate American hero – but the finished work isn’t just the craft, it’s not just a framing of a scene (and Sargent’s framing is spectacular).  There’s also the transmission of an impression of time and space and emotion.  There is painfully little emotion in Sargent, but seeing so much of him, with such a sweep of the man’s life contained in seven rooms and several score of paintings, you really sensed how much of a vacuum there was.  Clearly that can lead to wonderful, transcendent experiences of craft, but is it art?  Well, it’s not the best art, no matter how good it is.

Art – to me – is a completion, it’s alive on its own, and as such there needs to have breathed into it at creation a spirit of life from its creator, the creator being both the craftsman who puts pen or brush or chisel to surface, and the subject who agrees to the act of creation in their image.  Art can be beautiful – in the same way that a leaf is beautiful – but beauty alone is just that, beauty, alone.  Art is a harmony, a unity of beauty, life, and also a harmony of creator to depicted to viewer.  There isn’t a morality to this, but the consent of the depicted is crucial, so I suppose there is a moral element.  But like our lives, art is a unity – and any support missing leads to a sense of emptiness, it emphasizes what isn’t there.

I loved the exhibit, even if it didn’t have the effect on me that I expected and even if I left with a far different view of Sargent – and artists like him – than I had when I came in.  But that’s why the Art Institute is such a great museum.  With a deep collection, with curators who are allowed to use the collection to borrow and assemble but really to challenge and yet still offer up to us, the unschooled viewers, senses of wonder and beauty alongside that which we don’t yet understand, it achieves year after year something magical.  The bellman at the hotel I stayed at chatted with me while I was waiting for my car; I told him I was in town for the Sargent exhibit.  He knew what I was talking about and said how much he and his wife enjoyed it, and how it got them back into the museum for the first time in a year, and that was special too.  I told him about what I thought.  He said his wife liked the big portrait of the woman in the black dress with her kid in the sailor suit too, and that she sort of zoned out when they got to the part with Sargent’s watercolors and landscapes.

When my car came around, he put my luggage in the back and said he was glad I had a good stay.  I told him thanks, and that I’d be back.  Not for the Sargents next time, but I’ll definitely be back.  Great art demands a return journey.  Heck, even great craftsmanship deserves a second look.