SARGENT AND ITALY

I saw the Sargent And Italy exhibition soon after it opened at the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art in February 2003. Four years earlier, the Tate Gallery’s massive John Singer Sargent retrospective had infuriated London's critics, who railed against a painter of profligate skill seemingly content to utilise his talents in the service of profitable commissions rather than pursue the artistic grail of self-expression. In the TLS Richard Thomson called him ‘all surface (with) nothing underneath,’ while Elizabeth Pettejohn pointed out ‘nowadays we expect artists to be hustlers in the schmatta of the art world…(Sargent’s) misfortune was to do it (while) the art world was in revolution.’

Yet that exhibition contained a few paintings which suggested a different Sargent lurking behind the enigma of success. Sargent And Italy, which opened in 2002 at the Palazzo dei Diamani in Ferrara before heading to LACMA (and thence to Denver) brought much of this well-hidden shadow into the light.

Italy was Sargent’s spiritual home. He was born in Florence in 1856, to parents who quit America after the death of their first child, and remained expatriate, restlessly pursuing European culture. After studying in Florence and Rome, he moved to Paris at 18 for more formal training. He visited America, to establish his citizenship, in the Centennial year of 1876, but the following year was back in Paris, exhibiting at the Salon. He was only 21.

Flush with Parisian success, he returned to Italy, working in Venice, but travelling extensively. In Holland he immersed himself in Frans Hals and Vermeer, and in Spain absorbed Velazquez’s massive influence. But in Naples and Capri, in Spain and Morocco, Sargent also sought out the exotic subject matter of Mediterranean peasantry and Orientalism. The way Sargent puts those influences to work within what amount to genre painting is tantalising; his synthesis of classic and contemporary plays with light and shadow to create a shimmering sensuality.

A fine essay by Richard Ormond in the sumptuous catalogue accompanying the exhibition compares Sargent’s languid ‘Venetian Bead Stringers’ (c. 1880-82) with more energetic portraits by accomplished genre painters. His ‘Venetian Interior’ (c. 1880-82) mixes shadows and figures, as if fleeing from the bright light outside a door at the far end of the room. But his sensuality is most evident in two paintings from the same time, ‘A Street In Venice’ and ‘The Sulphur Match’. In the first, an insouciant man addresses a woman in a doorway; she is momentarily distracted, as if by the viewer. In the second, the same man lights a cigar, as a women leans back in a chair, casually satisfied, feet in the air, an empty flask of chianti on the ground. Ormond compares Sargent’s with Whistler’s contemporaneous Venetian works; he says they undoubtedly knew each other, which is interesting because the louche figure in those paintings could easily be mistaken for Whistler himself.

This brooding sensuality boiled over in Paris, when Sargent’s portrait ‘Madame X’ created a scandal at the 1884 Salon. The stunning Virginie Gautreau stands in profile, pale arms and shoulders bare, contrasting with the decolletage of her black dress. While the critics fumed, they also missed the point. Sargent’s friend Violet Paget, who, as Vernon Lee, was publishing her first work on the Renaissance, called it an ‘unpleasant’ but ‘very grand work’, ‘tending entirely toward fifteenth century ideas’.

Sargent’s reaction to critical opprobrium was not just to move to London, but to establish himself remarkably quickly as English society’s most-sought after portrait painter. A century later, his success was still infuriating the critics. Although no one paints women more beautifully, he would shock no one else, and seemed to save his deepest sensuality for representing fabrics and shadows. In 1890 the Boston Public Library offered him his first mural commission, elevating him to the top paying ranges of the art market. He was hailed as ‘The American Michelangelo’, and he was still only 34.

At the same time, in the mid 1890s he began to return to Italy, researching his commissions and vacationing virtually every summer until the Great War made travel impossible. His studies of monuments and figures have a life of their own; Arthur Symons, amazed by his painting of Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture of Perseus, described a ‘terrorless Medusa head from which the blood drops like clotted pearls’. But the studies pale beside a stunning group of oils and watercolours, almost impressionist in their striking light effects; they shimmer and glisten with life. His Venetian paintings are all corners, edges: buildings glimpsed in part, from a gondola perhaps, whose prow nudges into the bottom of the view. Although Sargent once referred to working in watercolour as ‘making the best of an emergency’, he seems to revel in the freedom watercolours provide.

It is not the thesis of the exhibition, but it is nevertheless tempting to see these later Italian works as Sargent’s vacation of sorts from the prestigious murals and high-toned portraits that marked his successful life in Boston. Walking through the Italianate layout of the Los Angeles show, there is a palpable sense of release, of freedom, in these paintings of gardens, quarries, cypresses, and of his family and friends on holiday. It is as if his career turned on the fulcrum of ‘Madame X’, and now, unimpeachably successful, he could return to his earlier pursuits.

Sargent never married; his sexuality has always intrigued art historians. He never travelled alone, and he brought with him exotic costumes in which he posed relatives, servants, and friends. If, as Ilene Susan Fort suggests, his emotions were reserved for art, the sensuality of his early works manifests itself again in the way he positions figures lounging by rivers, in the shadows of mountains, or simply on grass. Their limbs are entwined, their shawls take on a serpentine life. In ‘Group With Parasols’ (c. 1905) the ‘Whistler’ figure from Venetian streets seems to reappear. Perhaps it is a fantasy self Sargent is painting into those scenes.

His beautiful views of the Palazzo Barbaro, where he was a guest along with Henry James, remind us of the affinity between Sargent and writers, the subject of a thorough essay by the late R. W. B. Lewis. When Lewis refers to The Wings Of The Dove as being James’ statement about ‘the dark interior workings of the human spirit’, one senses a vivid contrast with Sargent. Perhaps, as the critics insisted, he withdrew from digging deeper into those dark interiors, to concentrate on exteriors. But the effect of this exhibition, the essays in this catalogue, is to restore our sense of artistic spark to Sargent, to look behind the portraits and see the evidence of the man in a wider, more intriguing, body of work.

Sargent And Italy, Bruce Robertson, editor Princeton University Press/Los Angeles County Museum of Art 208pp, $35.00, ISBN 0691113289

A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement

FLEEING DIRE ENCUMBANCIES: EXILES AND EMIGRES

FLEEING DIRE ENCUMBANCIES "Exiles & Emigres” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1997-98 and the catalogue: Exiles and Emigres by Stephanie Baron (LACMA 1997 ISBN 9780875871783) 

 Hitler’s 1937 exhibition of “degenerate” art declared war on artists threatening the Aryan purity of the Master Race. They got the message; Max Beckman left for London the day after it opened. Yet artists proved remarkably lucky in avoiding the worst fates of Hitler’s other targets. “Exiles and Emigres”, follows the paths of artists exiled from Nazi Europe, first to Amsterdam, Paris, and London, and then to the United States. In detailing their fates in contrast to the displacement of most refugees, it raises some unsettling questions about the west’s response to the Nazis, and in gathering the work of these exiled artists it questions to the core our basic belief in art’s power in the face of unspeakable horror. Stephanie Baron, who curated this show for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it opened, had already organised the ”Degenerate Art” exhibition at LACMA in 1991. That served as a springboard to the wider themes now on display. “Although few artists made it as far as California, there were many German exiles in the film industry who faced similar problems of assimilation, and the same questions of how political their work could be,” says Baron. Given a climate where, in 1939, 83% of Americans supported curtailing immigration, assimilation and politicisation did not go hand in hand. Unusually for art galleries, but perhaps not for Los Angeles, “Exiles and Emigres” makes its most vivid impression on video. The centrepiece of the show, and the harshest evidence of the world’s indifference to the fate of Hitler’s victims, is a moving 15 minute documentary, “America and the Refugees”, produced by Chana Gazit. Unlike the audio-visual portion of many exhibitions, this is essential, unsettling viewing, as it sets out the refusal of shelter to those threatened by Nazism. The villain is not so much Hitler as Breckinridge Long, Roosevelt’s State Department official who used bureaucratic stalls to ensure nearly half the US’s available quota places for refugees went unused. Sympathy for mere Jews was still dangerous politically. Long is counter-balanced by the exhibition’s hero, Varian Fry, who was sent by a group of American art collectors, the Emergency Rescue Committee, to aid some 200 intellectuals and artists, including Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst, in escaping through Marseilles. Fry proved a remarkable secret agent, and managed to save more than 2,000 other people, “ordinary” refugees, before being forced to return to America. Ernst’s wife, Peggy Guggenheim, also fled to America, and when she was back she staged “The Art of This Century” exhibition in New York. A model of the surrealist gallery from that show leaves one wondering if she had any idea a war actually was in progress. Ernst at least attempted to parody Hitler in “Napoleon in the Wilderness”. “Compared to ordinary refugees, artists had it easy,” admits deputy curator Teri Bernstein. Easy, of course, is a relative concept. Britain interned John Heartsfield and Kurt Schwitters on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. Strangely enough, Heartsfield is the only artist in this show who produced explicitly anti-Nazi work. Shows of “free” German art were staged in Paris and London in 1938. Stephan Lackner’s essay written for Max Beckman’s exhibition at the Burlington Gallery describes a Germany where “genies of the dark execute unperturbed their dire encumbancies“. Beckman’s own work, like “Self-Portrait with Horn” seems strangely inward looking in its struggles, as if he found himself powerless to make any meaningful action against the horror Isolationist America was far different from London and Paris; modern art had still not been totally accepted by the mainstream of the collecting world. Despite an atmosphere where, in Baron’s words, “the impulse toward political art was deadened”, the modernists give a sense of trying desperately to “fit in” to the New World. Only Andre Kertesz, barred as a potential spy from taking photographs outdoors, challenges the American mainstream. The shadows on his wartime photographs speak eloquently of personal, as well as political, isolation. The work of Georg Grosz is particularly poignant. Grosz left Germany just before Hitler came to power, and wanted to become a “genuine” American. Contrasting his “Lower Manhattan” with the architectural images of the German-raised but American-born Lionel Feninger, reveals his lack of a innate sense of naïve optimism. His “Manhattan II, Manhattan Night” echoes Sheeler or Demuth, but turns the thrusting modern city they celebrated into an expressionist film noir set, an almost abstract recoiling from the sheer dangerousness of unfettered power. The freedom America offered liberated many artists. The reconstruction of Mondrian’s New York studio shows the impact that jazz music made on him, literally setting free his painting. But there is no sign of the chaos from which he’d been rescued. Reflecting British anger at Auden and Isherwood’s moves to America, or French suspicion of Picasso, this show questions the idea that an artist’s first responsibility is to his art. Does that responsibility carry with it a freedom from any further action? We may think differently about Menhuin playing with Furtwaengler, or Pound in Italy, after we’ve glimpsed how irrelevant many artists considered the horror they’d escaped to be. Perhaps the reality is art, “Guernica” notwithstanding, realised that, in such circumstances, it could have little impact. Or perhaps, dependent on patronage from those who wish not to rock the boat, most of the exiled artists simply refused to make waves. Jazz playing in the background, Mondrian assimilated himself all the way into American isolation. Assimilation inevitably produced self-censorships. Chagall, for example, bizarrely used the figure of Christ on the cross to symbolize the martyrdom of the Jews. “He felt that explicit Jewishness would alienate a Christian audience that had refused to allow Jews escape from Hitler,” says Bernstein. Tellingly, only three of artists included in this show are Jewish. And one of them, Mies Van Der Rohe, supported Hitler, at least until der Fuhrer soured on the Bauhaus. Still, Van Der Rohe and his Bauhaus colleagues were acceptable enough to America's upper-crust to encounter little trouble dodging the quota system and grabbing plum jobs at top US universities. Yves Tanguy, born in Paris, died in Connecticut. His moving “The Prodigal Son Never Returns” serves as a metaphor for the real story of the exile of modern artists from Germany. They were soon absorbed into the American mainstream, as was their art. They thrived in the boom economy of America’s postwar golden age. Within a decade of the end of Nazism, New York was the art capital of the world, and they were world-renowned. But there is a different coda to this tale of moral indifference, obliviousness, or compromise. Varian Fry would also die in Connecticut, an unknown high school teacher, ignored and forgotten by those whose lives he saved.