Preoccupation with the rich can be such an obstacle to greatness.
Perhaps not in nations and cultures still clinging to vestiges of their Medieval past, but for Americans this fixation can be as limiting as ball and chain.
Consider Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Writers of rare genius, they might have been classed with the immortals. Instead, they’re classed mostly with class — the fault all theirs, being obsessed with the dull pomposity and stultifying triviality of social caste — and mere wealth.
The same is true of lesser but still greatly talented writers on the order of Louis Auchincloss, John Cheever, A.R. Gurney and J.P. Marquand. If they had turned their considerable powers more to real people and real life — and gotten beyond the pretense and tribal rituals of the country-club set — they might now enjoy reputations in proportion to their abilities.
And so it is with art. If American Impressionists William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam had more frequently gone beyond the pallid prettiness of leisure-class ladies in white dresses sunning themselves in formal gardens or on elitist seashores, we might have ranked them nearer the likes of Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer. The same goes for the imaginative and deft painter Cecilia Beaux.
But this syndrome obtains most painfully and awesomely with regard to a painter who could have been, and should have been, the greatest American artist of his age, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).
Washington’s National Gallery of Art has just opened an exhibition of 115 of Sargent’s oil and watercolor paintings, for which long lines form at all hours. A companion exhibit of Sargent drawings at the nearby Corcoran Gallery of Art has elicited, if not quite the same attendance, the same enthusiasm.
And for very good reason. These are some of the most gorgeously beautiful and emotionally enjoyable works of art any American painter has ever produced.
They sing with loveliness. They intrigue with veiled hints of untold tales and dark mysteries, and blushing, sighing, barely restrained passions. They make their human figures and subjects invariably interesting.
The two elegantly reclining ladies in his “Two Girls in White Dresses” (1911), for all their seemly garments and repose, are in sexual heat. Sargent’s top-hatted “Lord Ribblesdale” (1902), however flattering, is Dickensian in its display of arrogance. The artist’s portrait of John D. Rockefeller (1917) makes him seem almost poetic — indeed, beatific.
And the skill! Sargent can give us a complex, moody face, suggest a dangerous, flirtatious glance, or brighten a dark, moody interior with a flash of sunlight. One very accomplished and finished portrait in this show, “Vernon Lee” (1881), he did in three hours. As one Eastern critic asserted, no mere Matisse, clumsy Cezanne or restless Picasso possessed such skill with a brush.
This is, astonishingly, the first major career retrospective exhibition of Sargent’s life work since the memorial show in 1926 following his death.
He was held in ill repute, don’t you know, because so much of his output was portraits, portraits of the rich — the faux American aristocrats of the Gilded Age who seized upon Sargent’s portraits of themselves as badges proclaiming their status.
Sargent, a lifelong expatriate, was born into that class, lived and traveled in it, and counted most of his friends in it — including supremely insufferable snob Henry James, whose portrait is enshrined in this show.
Such portraits, “The Misses Vickers,” “Mrs. Wilton Phipps,” “Lord Dalhousie,” etc. — some 800 of them — constitute the better (if worser) part of his life’s work.
But it need not have been so. From the brush of the young Singer Sargent we find real people walking a beachy muck in “Fishing for Oysters at Cancale” (1878), a sultry country beauty in “A Capriote” (1878), gypsy dancers on a wall in “Capri” (1878) and in a steamy nocturne in “Carmela Bertagna” (1879).
We find a smitten, worldly tavern couple in “The Suphur Match” (1882), all manner of shadowy, mysterious, romantic figures in all manner of Venetian back streets, and of course we find the proud, exotic, randy and scandalous Madame Gautreau in “Drinking a Toast” (1883) and “Madame X” (1884).
Finally, in middle age, even the well-bred Sargent couldn’t take it any more. He thrust portraits aside and went after Bedouin tribesmen, stonecutters, dock workers and Florida swamps and jungles. He did those sensuous, reclining girls in white dresses and even a ghastly World War I mural.
But it was far too late.
Just think of the advantages Sargent might have had.
Had he been born poor.
