Omnivore’s Dilemma: Rethinking John Singer Sargent

The standard line against painter John Singer Sargent goes like this: a very good painter of incredible technique, but little substance who flattered the rich and famous with decadently beautiful portraiture — a Victorian Andrea del Sarto of sorts whose reach rarely exceeded his considerable artistic grasp. A new exhibition of Sargent’s work and the accompanying catalogues argue that he was much more than a painter of pretty faces. Instead, the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends and catalogues challenge us to see Sargent’s omnivorous mind, which swallowed up nascent modernist movements not just in painting, but also in literature, music, and theater. Sargent the omnivore’s dilemma thus lies in being too many things at once and tasking us to multitask with him. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Omnivore’s Dilemma: Rethinking John Singer Sargent."

Take Me to the Water: Sargent and the Sea at MFA, Houston

Like the first life forms on Earth, the career of John Singer Sargent rose up from the sea. Between 1874 and 1879, when Sargent first emerged from his teens and began his career as an artist, he painted scenes of the sea and shore he witnessed during trips to Brittany, Normandy, Capri, and other Mediterranean spots. The exhibition Sargent and the Sea currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston brings together Sargent’s seascapes together for the first time to allow us to understand how the greatest portraitist of his time literally got his feet wet as a painter. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Take Me to the Water."

[Image: John Singer Sargent, American, born Italy, 1856-1925, En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878. Oil on canvas. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 17.2.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Sargent and the Sea. Many thanks to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for providing me with the image above from the exhibition Sargent and the Sea, which runs through May 23, 2010.]

Karma Chameleon

Zelig will always rank up there among my favorite Woody Allen films. Allen’s depiction of a human chameleon mingling with the famous faces of the 1920s beautifully captures the spirit of the time while humorously analyzing the human need for acceptance—the drive to blend in and belong. Like Zelig, John Singer Sargent often adapted the characteristics of artists around him and incorporated their style into his portraits of them. Born January 12, 1856, Sargent lived a nation-less life with his travel-mad parents until moving to Paris in 1874 to study with Carolus-Duran. Carolus-Duran taught Sargent to paint portraits in the style of Diego Velázquez. Upon finishing his studies with Carolus-Duran, Sargent painted his Portrait of Carolus-Duran (above, from 1879), which perfectly illustrates the teacher’s Velazquez-inspired technique. Carolus-Duran not only taught Sargent his style of painting but also how to be a painter. Sargent’s teacher counted Fantin-Latour, Courbet, Manet, and Monet among his many friends, setting an example for Sargent, who would develop a large, international circle of artist comrades that nourished his art. The good karma such associations brought helped make Sargent a diverse, well-rounded visionary who could seemingly paint in any style with true depth and insight.

Sargent first met Claude Monet in 1876, when Sargent was an unknown but promising student. By 1885, Sargent’s rising prominence in the art world helped him get closer to Monet. Although Sargent made his fortune and fame through realistic, if slightly romanticized portraiture, he admired the Impressionists and painted Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (above, from 1885) in an Impressionist style. The freedom and color of Monet’s Impressionism must have seemed like a great release for Sargent after all the dark backgrounds and fine clothing of his lucrative portrait practice. Monet didn’t care much for Sargent’s portraits in terms of subject matter, although he recognized the genius of Sargent’s technique, but Sargent saw the greatness of Monet and paid great tribute to him by emulating Monet’s style. Lesser, less confident artists might have resented the one-sidedness of their relationship, but Sargent kept true to his pattern and took the best elements of Impressionism and made them his own.

Sargent’s Impressionist journey reminds me of Mozart’s late symphonies written during his travels and named after their place of origin: No. 31 "Paris," No. 32 "Overture in the Italian style," No. 35 "Haffner," No. 36 "Linz," and No. 38 "Prague." At each destination, Mozart took the local folk tunes and styles and did them better than the locals. One of Sargent’s final artistic “destinations” came in the person of Antonio Mancini, whom Sargent humbly called the greatest painter alive. Sargent painted his Portrait of Antonio Mancini (above, from 1898) while trying to find portrait commissions for Mancini in England. Sargent took the gifted, yet mentally ill artist under his wing and, simultaneously, studied Mancini’s thick impasto style closely, employing it marvelously in the portrait of Mancini. Mancini later scratched into his portrait the words, “Mancini thanks/ devotedly Mr. Sargent/ whom is so good/ to this bad painter Mancini/ London.” In that act of profound kindness, Sargent garnered a score of good karma that perhaps contributed to his own charmed life. Sargent returned to his customary lyrical portrait style, but he allowed himself the occasional side trips into Impressionism and impasto, always keeping the people in his life in his heart through his art.

Signs of the Times

When Ary Stillman snuck out of Russia in 1907 and fled to the freedom of the United States, he listed his profession as “painter” when passing through Ellis Island. One of the great theorists and technicians of the 1950s New York School of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Newman, and others, Stillman’s name disappeared from those ranks thanks to a combination of being a generation older than those artists and his relocation to Mexico after an eye hemorrhage in 1955, just as the Abstract Expressionists began to capture mainstream attention. Ary Stillman: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, edited by James Wechsler, presents the first full-length study of the artist that critic Clement Greenberg recalled as one of the most lucid theorists of that era. Beginning with early, Impressionistic works such as Coney Island Fireworks (above, from 1940), the essays in this catalogue follow Stillman’s evolution into Abstract Expressionism and beyond, into his own personal style. “It is true that we have no tradition in America,” Stillman said in 1952, “But we have something else. We have a conglomeration of individuals who come from all parts of the world… [E]ven if we don’t have one tradition we have an accumulation of dozens.” Stillman accumulates traditions within himself of all kinds and melds them with his Jewish faith after World War II and the Holocaust into a deeply spiritual and profound body of work.

After living with cousins in Sioux City, Iowa, upon first reaching America, Stillman moved to New York City in 1919, studying for a time with John Sloan of the Ashcan School. In 1921, Stillman traveled to Europe, landing in Paris to learn the ways of Impressionism. In 1925, Stillman traveled to Palestine. In Palestine, Donald Kuspit asserts in his essay, “Ary Stillman’s Art: Making an Emotional Difference,” Stillman changes. “He needed a Jewish stimulus to liberate himself.” Works from this post-Palestine period, such as Nude (Nude with Tea Cup) (above, from 1928) show how Stillman sought to paint in an Impressionist style yet maintain some independence of vision. Looking at these almost vibrating figures reminded me of the late work of Antonio Mancini, another loose cannon in the Western art canon. In “Drawing from Life: Ary Stillman and the School of Paris,” Susan Power sees Stillman embracing and thriving from his otherness. “Cultivating his in-between status, which spanned two continents and cultures—the Old World experience of his Russian-Jewish heritage and the New World promise of another life in America,” Power writes, “Stillman approached his art similarly, interweaving subjectivity and acute observation, layering his canvases with the rich variety of experience encountered during his travels.” The pressure of all those built-up experiences explodes at the end of World War II.

“The apocalyptic personal pathology of Stillman’s paintings,” Kuspit writes, “is informed by the destructiveness of the Second World War and, however unconsciously, the Holocaust.” After such horror, abstraction seems the only escape for Stillman from harsh reality. Also, Kuspit continues, “[a]bstract art appeared to be the best way to convey the Jewish conception of God as a purely spiritual and thus unrepresentative being.” Thus, God and painting aspire to the condition of music. “Look at them the way you listen to music,” Stillman later said of his paintings, especially works such as Jazz (above, from 1949). Clearly influenced by Kandinsky, Stillman “used ‘visual music’ (synaesthetic abstraction) as his point of departure for a development that made the implicit spirituality of early abstraction into the explicit content of his work,” writes Michael Betancourt in “Ary Stillman and Synaesthetic Abstraction.” In the 1940s, Stillman still searched for a visual “language” in which to express his spirituality in his paintings. Oddly enough, it was a temporary loss of vision that led to him finally seeing the way to his ultimate goal.

In 1955, after an eye hemorrhage left him unable to paint, Stillman and his wife left New York for Mexico. For years, Stillman had read the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell dealing with the collective unconscious and its connection to mythology. In Mexico, Stillman immersed himself in the local mythology and voraciously read of the Mayans and Aztecs and the Spanish invasion led by Cortes. “It would not be surprising for a post-Holocaust Jewish artist living in Mexico to empathize with those who had suffered crimes against humanity on that very soil five centuries earlier,” James Wechsler writes in “Alchemy of Light: The Art and Life of Ary Stillman.” When Stillman regained his sight and began painting again, he briefly works solely in black and white before working in color again. “The he reintroduced color,” Wechsler writes, “there was a new, rejuvenated clarity and brightness to his palette and less of the light-infused haze of his earlier abstraction.” In From an Aztec Temple (above, from 1961-1963), Stillman copied the shape of a statue of Coatlicue, the Aztec “Mother of the Gods,” and incorporated his new flashy color with a new sense of line. As Helen A. Harrison writes in “’Beyond the Border Are Possibilities’: Ary Stillman’s White-Line Drawings,” “When the ‘world of surface realities’ was not longer artistically viable for him, [Stillman] fond new meaning in an underlying realm of essential forms and symbols, whether they arose from the collective unconscious or sprang from his own reservoir of memory, emotion, and imagination—his personal creative unconscious.” From an Aztec Temple is both Coatlicue and not Coatlicue in the sense that Stillman represents the abstract essence of that mythological power by suggesting its most basic form. Both Stillman and Pollock use an expressive line, but, unlike Pollock, Stillman’s paintings “never collapse into chaos,” writes Kuspit, because they “are stabilized by his Jewish unconscious—his Jewish mysticism.” Pollock, on the other hand, is simply “an art mystic,” whereas Stillman’s abstract mysticism, rooted in the Judaism’s idea of an unrepresentable God, ventures beyond the borders of art.

Stillman’s calligraphic abstract art opened up another dimension of meaning to him and abstract art itself—time, specifically timelessness. In “Ary Stillman’s Cuernavaca Paintings: ‘Doubling Back’ to Advance Forward,” David Craven sees Stillman’s late work as “a type of gestural proto-writing,” featuring “a distinctive back-and-forth interplay between the indexical (a trace of human action resulting in a sign) and the iconic (a rudimentary effort at a pictogram, with a mimetic dimension that led to the invention of writing).” Although most of the Abstract Expressionists flirted with the idea of primitivism and getting back to nature, Stillman approaches primitivism in a different, more philosophically sophisticated manner. “I am nature!” Pollock roared when asked to show the presence of nature in his work. Stillman instead returns to nature by returning to the very beginning of human expression, when concepts of nature first bloomed. In Calligraphic Arabesque (above, from 1958-1960), Stillman “features well-defined calligraphic lines deployed in an energetic way that makes them seem almost like pictograms for dancers,” Craven writes. Like early man writing on the walls of caves, Stillman strives at pure expression of the highest concepts for the widest audience possible, even across millenia.

Ary Stillman: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism presents a thought-provoking, coherent, yet multifaceted view of an underappreciated artist of one of the major schools of American modern art. Bringing Stillman back into the fold of the pantheon of great Abstract Expressionists sheds new light on the period and the other artists. Yet, like a great movie, the final essay provides a shocking, twist ending. Rachel Garfield’s “Questioning Receptions of Jewish Identity in the Work of Ary Stillman” turns all the narratives linking Stillman’s art and faith on their head. She calls “looking for signs of Jewishness in Ary Stillman’s abstractions… a matter of conjecture.” “By painting non-Western forms as exotic and Other,” Garfield writes, “and by conflating the ancient and the non-Western, Jewish artists” such as Stillman “identified themselves as sophisticated and Western, thus assimilating Jewishness into whiteness.” In other words, Stillman’s development reduces rather than amplifies his Jewishness. By the end of the book, you’re left going back to the beginning and to the paintings themselves, the mark of a truly great examination of any artist. In the final analysis, we see Ary Stillman’s work through a kaleidoscope (much like his Keleidoscopic, above, from the 1950s and 1965) of interpretations and rediscover an artist both of his time and for all time.

[Many thanks to Merrell Publishing for providing me with a review copy of Ary Stillman: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism.]

Great Expectations

Every year I purchase two calendars for Annie’s office featuring work by the same two artists—Alphonse Mucha and John Singer Sargent. Annie fell in love with Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (above, from 1885-1886) years ago and now shares my great affection for his work. Born January 12, 1856, Sargent is considered American, but was born in Europe to American parents who continually moved from country, providing their children with an amazing, eclectic education in different languages and cultures. Sargent drank all that in, ending up with a mental catalogue of the great works of Western world art. From that catalogue, Sargent took a little bit from every age, from the portraiture of Velazquez to the Impressionism in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, yet always made it uniquely his own.

Now that we have Alex, we appreciate even more Sargent’s depictions of children. In fact, a 2005 exhibition titled Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children concentrated solely on Sargent and children. In The Daughters of Edward D. Boit (above, from 1882) Sargent created an unusual group portrait of the four daughters of his wealthy patron. Some look directly at the viewer, while others lurk almost entirely in the shadows. Each child is given a distinct interior life. Aside from this psychological astuteness, Sargent’s handling of the paint is incredible. When I saw this painting in person, I first couldn’t believe how large it was. After I got over that shock, I was then amazed at how loosely the figures are painted when seen up close. The “details” become apparent only at a distance. Reproductions truly don’t do this painting justice. To be able to create such realistic effects with such free gestures truly requires a magic touch.

One of my other favorite paintings by Sargent is his Spanish-flavored El Jaleo (above, from 1882), one of his depictions of a distinct culture similar to his masterful watercolors of Venice. This painting also has a personal association for Annie and me. We ate at a great tapas restaurant in Washington, DC, called Jaleo that featured an enlarged reproduction of Sargent’s painting on the back wall. I recognized it immediately after we sat down. It was like unexpectedly seeing an old friend across the room in a strange city.

No discussion of Sargent would be complete without mentioning the infamous Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (above, from 1884). Deborah Davis’ Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X entertainingly tells the whole sordid story of the socialite who grew to regret posing for Sargent. It’s always fun to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look closely to try and see where Sargent repainted Madame X’s shoulder to raise the once daringly dangling strap of her dress back onto her shoulder and to respectability.
Sargent always seems to me to be the one painter you’d want to spend an agreeable day with. Portraits of his teacher Carolus-Duran and of his friend Claude Monet attest both to his talent and to his affection for those artists. Sargent’s admiration for and promotion of his friend, the troubled Italian painter Antonio Mancini, appear in his remarkable portrait of Mancini, painted in the style of Mancini (in about an hour, too) and given to him as a gift. The vibrant community surrounding The John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery attests to the continuing audience Sargent’s works have and the power of his warm personality to continue to radiate even today.

Sad Times

Art critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times takes notice of the PMA’s Antonio Mancini exhibition in today’s edition. On one hand, it’s nice to see this sleeper of an exhibition get greater press, especially someplace as visible as the Times. However, the one thing that I loved the most about the catalogue to the exhibition (which I reviewed here) was that it totally resisted making the "Van Gogh angle" of the "crazy painter" the main focus. Smith makes some interesting comments, drawing parallels between Mancini and Balthus, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly, but falls right into the same, tired storyline of the mad painter. “Yes, I am a little bit nuts,” she imagines one of his paintings saying. Perhaps Smith takes that tack to pander to popular taste, which thinks that all artists are a bit daft, but you’d hope for something a little better from the alleged paper of record. Yes, Mancini had severe emotional and mental problems. Yes, he lived a strange, tragic existence. But to insinuate, as the mad painter storyline always does, that the art is a pure, unconscious manifestation of that madness rather than a talent developed by effort expressing a particular inner life does injustice to the artist and perpetuates prejudice against the mentally ill. (Smith also veers off into a critique of some of Mancini's paintings of children, likening them to Calvin Klein ads and thus skirting the periphery of a pedophilia accusation, maybe as another component of his "madness." Personally, I believe that Mancini's depictions of children are his most striking works in their honesty and intensity. They are truly cases of an "inner child" being let out, in this case on canvas.) When Annie, Alex, and I toured the Mancini exhibition after visiting the Renoir Landscapes recently, I was simply blown away, even after being somewhat prepared by seeing the works in reproduction first. Annie couldn’t believe how someone that good could remain unknown. The PMA’s exhibition hopes to create an atmosphere in which Mancini the artist can be rediscovered by a modern audience. Roberta Smith’s piece on Mancini the madman simply covers him up again.

A Man of Sorrows

Boy with Toy Soldiers, c. 1876, Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930). Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 24 3/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

“Vulgarity is often the daughter of poverty, and poverty has always been my closest relative,” Antonio Mancini once wrote. “Since I was a boy she took me by the hand and accompanied me from garret to garret to suffer all the sorrows of the world.” Despite crushing poverty and mental illness, Mancini rose to the heights of the late nineteenth-century art world, compelling fellow artist John Singer Sargent to call him the greatest living painter of the age. Sadly, after his death in 1930, Mancini again faded back into the shadows of art history, a name known only to specialists and loyal fans. Thanks to a recent gift of fifteen works by Mancini from the late Vance N. Jordan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Mancini’s name is again in the spotlight in the exhibition Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master, curated by Ulrich W. Hiesinger, who also authored the catalogue. In his masterfully scholarly text, Hiesinger illustrates how Mancini never stopped being that poor boy surrounded by vulgarity and poverty, painting with sensitivity and insight images of other poor boys such as Boy with Toy Soldiers (above). The yearning in the eyes of Luigiello, one of Mancini’s favorite models and a true orphan from the streets of Mancini’s native Naples, represents the yearning found in all of Mancini’s works.

The Saltimbanco, 1877-78, Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930). Oil on canvas, 80 1/4 x 43 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

Luigiello appears again as the model for The Saltimbanco (above), in which the young boy poses as a performer in the circus, a common theme for Mancini. “A contrast is drawn between any illustion of glamour and the sober vision of a boy alone with his thoughts,” Hiesinger writes, “a hapless mannequin in a brightly patterned, ill-fitting, and tattered costume that bespeaks his general place in the world.” As Hiesinger also points out, The Saltimbanco stands in the pose of Christ as “the man of sorrows,” borrowing Christological typology for the suffering youth of Naples, which at this time is “an inescapable nexus of poverty, disease, unemployment, crime, corruption, and superstition.” And, yet, Mancini’s amazing artistic gift allows him to rise above this trap and travel to Paris, where he meets Degas and Sargent. Mancini’s shyness and social awkwardness hinder him in making contacts and sales. Later, disappointment over lack of success at exhibitions drives him back to the safety of Naples. Finally, in 1881, Mancini is committed to a mental hospital, where he remains for four months.

Self-Portrait (recto), c. 1880, Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930). Pastel on paper, 27 3/8 x 19 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

While in the hospital, Mancini paints a series of self-portraits in which he portrays himself with both ridicule and pity, posing with a basket on his head in one case. In the Self-Portrait above, painted the year before his stint in the hospital, Mancini places a straw hat on his head, tipping it back far enough to transform it into a halo and transforming himself from the starving artist into the suffering servant, martyred by others’ misunderstanding of his art. Through such transformations, Mancini adds “an imaginative dimension that underscores the visionary rather than realistic qualities of his work," Hiesinger believes. Every time that Mancini gains some small success, as when Sargent helps him obtain portrait commissions from American and British patrons, parasitic family members, including his father, take away all his money and possessions, forcing Mancini at one point to sell paintings just to purchase the paint and canvas to paint more.

Elizabeth and Charles Hedworth Williamson with Dog, 1901-02, Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930), Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 19 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

Despite all his sorrows, Mancini never loses his ability to see with the wondering eyes of a child, especially when painting children. His portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Hedworth Williamson with Dog (above) lacks the desperation of his paintings of street urchins, yet still captures the essence of youth wary of a world run by adults. Hiesinger explains the eccentric painting techniques Mancini develops at this stage as well, which only added to his reputation as “il pittore pazzo”—the crazy painter. Photographs capture Mancini painting using the graticola, a framed grid of his own devising that he’d place before both the subject and the canvas simultaneously, the marks of which can still be seen in some of the impasto, including that of the double portrait above. Looking to enhance the glittering effects of his painting, Mancini begins to insert shards of glass or mirrors, scraps of metal or foil, and even paint tube bits and wallpaper into the paint itself, which catch light in unusual ways and reinforce the physicality of the painting itself upon the viewer. Eyewitnesses describe Mancini’s brushwork as “intense—even harrowing,” as he lunged and pulled away from the canvas like a fencer.

Old Woman Drinking Tea, c. 1907, Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930). Oil on canvas, 29 x 23 ½ inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

In the 1920s, Mancini’s nephew Alfredo assumed guardianship of his uncle, bringing stability to his life, which led to accolades and fame in his native Italy. Just as he had come to terms with aging and death in Old Woman Drinking Tea (above), Mancini came to terms with death shortly before his own end in 1929 with the words, “The sun sets, man dies. It is right. But what a pity not to be able to paint any more.” The only place in the world Mancini felt at home was before an easel. The man who couldn’t carry on a basic conversation could expound endlessly and eloquently on his heroes Velazquez, Titian, and Rembrandt. Hiesinger explores Mancini’s madness (which he theorizes may have resulted from mercury poisoning in an attempt to treat Mancini’s venereal diseases) without making it the defining aspect of his art. It would have been easy to create a caricature of Mancini as an Italian Van Gogh, raging against the cruel world yet still magically creating works of art. In Hiesinger’s hands, Mancini emerges as a thoughtful, albeit tortured, yet endlessly creative painter who fought long odds and won, not only against poverty and illness while alive, but posthumously against the threat of erasure in art history. The “crazy painter” knew what he was doing even in the most turbulent times of his life when he stood before a canvas. As we stand before those same canvases today, we’d be crazy ourselves to deny it.

[Many thanks to the PMA for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibit Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master and the images from the show.]