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."

Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition?

The appeal of the British drama/high-class soap opera Downton Abbey for American audiences has long been a subject of great speculation. Simon Schama called the show “cultural necrophilia” for bringing to life a time he saw as long dead and rightfully so for all its elitism and iron-clad class consciousness from the bottom up. A new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art taps into American Downton-mania, but critiques as it celebrates. Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, which runs through June 2, 2013, collects the high fashion, flashy jewelry, and dazzling portraiture of a too-short age squeezed between two eras that make us today ask both too little and too much of the Edwardians. Is this “Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition,” or is it much more? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Downton Abbey, the Art Exhibition?"

[Image: William Orpen, A Bloomsbury Family, 1907, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Presented by the Scottish Modern Arts Association 1964.] 
[Many thanks to the Yale Center for British Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, which runs through June 2, 2013.]

Why the Newtown Shooting Made Me Think of This Painting

Like most Americans, upon hearing of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, last week, my first reaction was disbelief. How could this happen? Why did this happen? How and why did this happen yet again? Like President Obama, I reacted as a parent as my thoughts raced to the possibility of my own children caught in such an attack. As I slowly digested the news (and as the news itself clarified earlier errors in reports), I kept coming back in my mind to Shannon Hicks’ photograph of Connecticut State Police leading children away from the scene as the children kept their eyes tightly closed and clung to one another in a long human chain. Then my mind linked that image to a painting that has long stuck in my mind—John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (shown above, from 1918-1919), his depiction of World War I soldiers blinded by mustard gas being led in procession to medical care. There are so many things to say about this incident, but these two images put together, at least for me, cut to the heart of what meaning we can draw from it. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why the Newtown Shooting Made Me Think of ThisPainting."

[Image: John Singer Sargent. Gassed, 1918-1919. Image source here.]

Why We Need War Photography Now More Than Ever

A decade ago, Chris Hedges titled his analysis of the addictive power of war War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. If war truly is a force that gives us meaning, photography is a force that gives us a means by which to envision that meaning. In War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, which runs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through February 3, 2013, photography’s ability to capture every aspect of war—from beginning to end—becomes almost troublingly clear. Dedicated not just to the thick of the fight, but also to the events leading up to as well as the consequences thereafter, War/Photography demonstrates how deep our need is to picture war as a means to understand it and, perhaps, avoid it. Unfortunately, in an age of dehumanized battle where automated drones strike from above, we may be losing the genre of war photography itself, just when we need it more than ever. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why We Need War Photography Now More Than Ever."

[Image: Joe Rosenthal, American (1911–2006), Over the Top—American Troops Move onto the Beach at Iwo Jima, February 19, 1945, gelatin silver print with applied ink (printed February 23, 1945), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Richard S. and Dodie Otey Jackson in honor of Ira J. Jackson, M.D., and his service in the Pacific Theater during World War II. © Associated Press.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for providing me with the image above from and other press materials related to War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, which runs through February 3, 2013.]