Man of mystery

The enigmatic masterpieces of John Singer Sargent

by Jeffrey Gantz

Where to See Sargent "JOHN SINGER SARGENT" At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from June 27 through September 26. Tickets are on sale at the MFA box office, or call 542-4MFA. For information on Sargent programs, call 369-3306. "SARGENT: THE LATE LANDSCAPES" At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, through September 26. "SARGENT IN CONTEXT AT THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY" At the Boston Public Library, through July 30. "SARGENT IN THE STUDIO: DRAWINGS, SKETCHBOOKS, AND OIL SKETCHES" At the Fogg Art Museum, through September 5. For information on Sargent programs, call 495-4544.

He shocked Paris with his portrait of a woman. He fought with the apostles of modernism. One of his Boston murals produced charges of anti-Semitism and demands that it be removed. His personal life was and is a closed book -- yet his male nudes have prompted at least one writer to suggest that he was homosexual.

He was as prodigiously gifted as Picasso: from oil portraits of the rich and famous to landscape watercolors to bas-relief sculpture to murals that hark back to Giotto and Michelangelo, there's nothing he couldn't do. Yet with the exception of a handful of paintings, none of his work is instantly recognizable. Some hundred years after the height of his career, he's still an enigma.

Welcome to "Sargent Summer." It's not any particular anniversary of John Singer Sargent's birth (1856) or his death (1925) or even his first visit to Boston (1880); all the same, Greater Boston's august art institutions have joined forces to give us a Sargent summer package. The centerpiece is the Museum of Fine Arts' blockbuster (direct from London and Washington), with 140 works, that will open this Sunday, plus the newly cleaned murals in the upper rotunda and over the great staircase. The Gardner Museum has a jewel-like show of Sargent's late landscapes (and El Jaleo will be spending the summer in its usual place of honor there). The Boston Public Library has its own set of Sargent murals, along with a small group of sketches; and there's another show of sketches and drawings at Harvard University's Fogg Museum, plus the World War I murals in Widener Library.

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Who was John Singer Sargent? From the beginning he's a riddle, the American painter who spent hardly any time in America. Born in Florence of expatriate American parents, he lived there and in Rome and Paris before settling, for the most part, in London. He didn't even come to the US till he was 20; his mother brought him to see the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He was as rootless as he was restless; he visited America just 10 times, and only once did he stay longer than a year. The rising arc of his Paris career was bent, in 1884, by the furor over Madame X; in 1886 he moved to London. Around 1907 he "retired" from commissioned-portrait painting to concentrate on figures and landscapes and on the Boston murals, which by the end of his career he considered his major works.

Talking of Michelangelo . . . Michelangelo's greatest achievement was the Sistine Chapel, so perhaps it's no surprise that Sargent saw the culmination of his career as the murals he executed for the rotunda and the grand staircase of the Museum of Fine Arts and an upper room of the Boston Public Library, rather than the society portraits that had made him famous. But unlike the Sistine Ceiling, Sargent's murals have languished in anonymity: the BPL doesn't exactly rival St. Peter's as a tourist attraction, and most visitors to the MFA are too busy looking at the walls to notice the ceiling. Besides, until recently, Sargent's MFA murals were so covered with dirt and grime and cigarette smoke and automobile exhaust that you could hardly see them even if you tried. Now the MFA has completed a year-long conservation of these works; there are no before-and-after photos, but a small uncleaned patch that's been left in The Winds says it all: dark brown instead of the original white. Over at the BPL, meanwhile, "dust to dust" remains the eulogy for Sargent's Triumph of Religion, which is quite literally unviewable. Conservancy efforts are under way (in what's a much more complex and expensive process than the MFA faced), but it's unfortunate, to say the least, that visitors to this city's "Sargent Summer" will find the triumph of Sargent entombed. Granted, Sargent's critics have tended to see his murals (which also include the patriotic World War I pair in Harvard's Widener Library) as an embarrassment rather than a triumph. Even today, we can read that they "reflect a kind of blindness on the part of an artist . . . who, at least in the later years of his career, seemed to lose touch with the modernist sensibility." Yet Sargent was more interested in posterity than modernity, and his murals, like his portraits, challenge the mind rather than the eye. His classical program at the MFA tells no story; at first glance Classical and Romantic Art and Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture Protected by Athena from the Ravages of Time look like mere decoration. But like Sargent's portraits, they ask nagging questions. Why is Romantic art male and Classical art female? What's the relationship between Athena and Death? Why do the images in the colonnades on either side of the great staircase -- Orestes hounded by the Furies against a crimson backdrop, Herakles fighting the Hydra, Phaethon falling from his chariot, Atlas holding up the world -- bespeak violence and suffering? From the top of the stair you can see the Danaides, the 50 sisters who killed their 50 bridegrooms on their wedding night, endlessly pouring water -- this is mere decoration? Back in the rotunda, a round panel shows the Chimaera confronting the Sphinx. There's no source for this meeting, as far as we know -- or is Sargent himself the Sphinx, a riddle to all comers? The MFA hopes to have a publication out by the end of the summer; meanwhile, don't miss the interactive kiosk, which gives you invaluable close-ups as well as music by the late and much-missed Caleb Sampson. You can't see much at the BPL, but Sargent Hall has the hallowed feel of art whose time hasn't quite come, so go anyway and pick up the detailed explanatory sheet. From the beginning, Sargent's program was controversial: do these murals depict the triumph of Christianity over Judaism or the triumph of natural religion over the organized variety? As soon as the two panels over the staircase went up, in 1919 (the middle panel was to show a version of the Sermon on the Mount, but Sargent never completed it), they were attacked as being anti-Semitic. The Synagogue is hoodwinked, fallen; The Church, a kind of pietà, with the dead Christ at her feet, is all-seeing, triumphant -- or does she see all and understand nothing? The Church is supremely Sargent, Sargent as Sphinx, art that requires the interaction of the viewer. You can get some idea of what Triumph of Religion actually looks like -- from the disturbingly cloaked Hebrew prophets to the equally disturbing Our Lady of Sorrows -- through the sketches on view at the MFA and at Harvard's Fogg Museum. And you can get some idea of the mystery and magnitude of this work from Sally M. Promey's scintillating, hot-off-the-press Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, 366 pages, $45). Promey will turn up at the BPL this Friday (June 25) to lecture on Triumph of Religion.

There's no question that Boston -- which boasts oil masterpieces like El Jaleo, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel to go with the murals -- is the place to appreciate Sargent. But this immense, difficult artist is no quick study: the 140 works that overflow the MFA's Gund Gallery hardly scratch the surface. (Indeed, you could make a pretty fair Sargent show out of what's not here: Lady with the Rose, Carmencita, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, Miss Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (Mrs. John Jay Chapman), Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son Livingston Davis, The Wyndham Sisters, etc.) Of course, surface is what Sargent is all about. His ability to depict surface tension epitomizes Keats's notion of "negative capability"; interpretation and judgment he leaves to others. And for a man whose sexual life is a total mystery, he's especially sensitive to sexual surfaces. A look at six of the major "Sargent Summer" works on view will make this clear.

El Jaleo: Danse des Gitanes (1882). Sargent's first big painting -- it's nearly 12 feet across -- was a big success at the Paris Salon but occasioned some equally big critical reservations: R.A.M. Stevenson (Robert Louis's cousin) called it a "large sketch," Henry James described it as an "enormous memorandum," and London's Magazine of Art was flummoxed by the hubbub (which is what "jaleo" means), the uproar, the seductive, intoxicating swirl.

What's going on here? The title notwithstanding, everyone sits passively, furtively, in the shadows; for all the expression you can see on their faces, they might as well be blindfolded. Our attention is focused on the dancer, who is nearing the right edge of the canvas, her left arm extended in invitation, her head drawn back, her lower body angled forward, her right hand clutching her skirt, threatening to expose her legs. The painting converges on that white (for Sargent always the most sexually charged color) skirt, both angelically pure and tantalizingly rumpled.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). You have to wonder what the Boit parents (not to mention Paris Salon viewers) thought of the informality of this portrait. Four-year-old Julia flops down on the carpet, her skirt trailing behind, her toes turned in; though she's looking out at us, her mind, like her hands, is on her doll. It's an honest admission that she considers the portrait process an interruption of her day. Eight-year-old Mary Louisa, with a red dress under her white pinafore (as opposed to her sisters' black and white), stands in front of the brown wall, where she can be seen to best advantage. Her feet are artistically pointed, her hair is carefully arranged, her hands are gathered behind her back -- and then there's that "Move over, Britney Spears" look.

Back in the shadows, 12-year-old Jane peers out, inquisitive but cautious, as if trying to see into her future; her hands hang self-consciously at her side. Fourteen-year-old Florence acts as if she'd already seen too much: she barely shows her face even as she leans back sensuously into the vase. The size of the vases and the height of the ceiling indicate what a big world -- social as well as physical -- awaits these girls, who seem to withdraw from our gaze as they grow older. None of the four ever married.

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). (1883-'84). This portrait undresses more than just Madame Gautreau. It was not a commission: Sargent approached this famous New Orleans-born beauty through a friend. It's been speculated that he was even infatuated with her; in the event he despaired of her "unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness."

Madame Gautreau's décolletage, white-powdered chest, and falling right shoulder strap (Sargent later repainted it in the current upright position) outraged many viewers when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon; the resultant controversy led to a decline in Sargent's portrait commissions and may have contributed to his leaving Paris for London. It's not hard to see why people got upset: Madame Gautreau is depicted as a kind of socially licensed prostitute who sells her beauty, and her body, to a husband in exchange for wealth and social position. It's not what Sargent revealed of the lady that was unpardonable, but what he revealed about society.

Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888). Whereas El Jaleo is staying home, Sargent's portrait of Mrs. Gardner has moved across the Fenway for the summer. It's as unsettling as it is symmetrical: Mrs. Gardner stands ramrod straight, her arms bent as if cradling an orb, the wallpaper behind her head forming a kind of aureole -- the art patron as moon goddess. On the other hand, the tight dress, plunging bodice, and cinched waist give us the art patron as fertility goddess. As with Madame Gautreau, we're invited to look, to admire, but not to touch. Mr. Gardner was not amused.

Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel (1903). This portrait is not part of the official show, but it's in the MFA's permanent collection; you can -- and should -- trip down to the American Paintings Galleries and have a look. Like the Boit portrait, it suggests a study of the same woman at different ages. Mrs. Warren sits up straight, hands folded in her lap. Her dress is ivory with suffusions of mauve and pearl; around her right arm there's a gray fur. Her neckline shows off an alabaster skin; her face is like marble; her hair is fashionably coiffed. She's sure of her wealth, her beauty, her social standing; only in the stiffness of her pose and the slight tightening of her lips is there a hint of what she may have sacrificed to be what she is.

That sacrifice hasn't been lost on Rachel: her arm is entwined around her mother's, and her head snuggles into the hollow of her mother's neck. But there's evidence of a generation gap. Rachel's pink dress looks sensuous and flamboyant next to her mother's. Her hair is loose, her eyes are turned slightly away, her thoughts appear to be elsewhere -- she's altogether freer. Is she everything her mother used to be? Or is her mother everything she's going to become?

Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller (circa 1917). This is not a major Sargent in the ordinary sense -- it's an oil sketch that was found in the artist's studio after his death. Thomas McKeller was a Boston bellhop who posed for some of Sargent's MFA murals (in the Classical and Romantic Art oval, he's the model for both the Romantic male and the Classical female). In this sketch he faces the viewer, kneeling, his legs spread in what's almost a pin-up pose.

Surveying the numerous studies of McKeller and of Nicola d'Inverno (Sargent's devoted manservant of some 25 years), watercolors like 1917's The Bathers (which depicts naked black men), and portraits of seemingly effete young men like W. Graham Robertson (1894) and Lord Dalhousie (1900), former MFA curator of contemporary art Trevor Fairbrother suggested in his 1994 John Singer Sargent (Abrams) that Sargent had repressed homosexual feelings. In his John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes (Universe, 1999), John Esten scolds the "busybodies" who speculate on Sargent's affairs of the heart, quotes Fairbrother, then concludes, "Like beauty, homoeroticism is in the eye of the beholder." (Fairbrother will doubtless have something to say in reply when he lectures on "Sargent and Men" this afternoon, June 24, at 5:30 p.m. at the Fogg Museum.)

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Missing persons If Sargent's oil portraits reveal his Henry James-like gift for conveying psychological nuances, what are we to make of his landscapes, in which people are generally absent? Especially given that over the last 15 years of his life he devoted much of his time to these works? A generous section of the MFA show is allotted to Sargent's landscapes and watercolors. And the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has assembled 14 late landscapes accompanied by a large, handsome catalogue with probing essays by Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Erica E. Hirshler, and T.J. Jackson Lears. The Gardner displays its usual proclivity for creative juxtaposition. Lake O'Hara (1916) looks almost like a painted photo: the bright green of the lake graduates upward to the gray mass of mountain and then the snowy upper slopes. It's not as traditionally realistic as, say, Albert Bierstadt's panoramas, but the tension between paint and perspective is muted. Right next to it, Yoho Falls (1916) seems as chaotic as its huge spray of water: by tilting the picture plane downward, Sargent leaves us uncertain as to where we're standing, and the water looks almost cloudlike. On the wall to the left, the Gardner has placed two oils around two watercolors. Glacier Streams: The Simplon (circa 1911) and Simplon Pass (1911) are forbidding works whose cold blue skies are dominated by the massive mountains, slopes whose geometry is simple and unyielding. The two watercolors, Simplon Pass: The Foreground (1911) and Simplon Pass: Avalanche Track (1911), offer a more inviting, if confusing, view of the universe, the one apocalyptic with its snowy streaks that look like lightning, the other with rocks that suggest the tents of the Israelites beneath a misty, holy mountain. Sargent's watercolors, their soft diffusion hinting at divine light, are a subject in themselves. Like the murals, these works are just beginning to receive the attention they deserve.

With regard to Sargent's sexual orientation, Richard Ormond (the artist's great-nephew) points out in his biographical sketch for the show's catalogue that "we simply do not know, and decoding messages from his work is no substitute for evidence." Yet messages about the work are there to be decoded, and the Sargent they suggest is a voyeuristic artist who's titillated rather than tempted by sex (as represented by both his male nudes and his reclining, odalisque-like women in white), by the forbidden, by what society considers taboo. In El Jaleo, he teases us, and himself, with that skirt that will never be raised. In Madame Pierre Gautreau he cheekily chides society for its voyeurism and sexual hypocrisy, but he miscalculates, oversteps, and gets his hand slapped. Thereafter he moderates his social commentary, and yet the frank sexuality of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Lizzie B. Dewey (1890; at the Worcester Art Museum) left both ladies' husbands a little queasy. We might also wonder what Charles Inches thought of Mrs. Charles E. Inches (Louise Pomeroy) (1887): like Mrs. Dewey, his wife wears a plunging, revealing red dress that looks ready to fall off the shoulder any second. Mrs. Inches gazes at us unaffectedly, but her body, turned slightly, at once invites and withdraws. Miss Elsie Palmer (1889-'90 -- one of Sargent's white madonnas), Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892), Miss Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (Mrs. John Jay Chapman) (1893), and Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1897) all challenge the male viewer -- and the male artist? -- with a discountenancing openness.

Sargent's portraits find him on the threshold of society as well as sexuality, too honest (or scared) to go in, too needy to go away. His portrait of Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881) -- in his crimson dressing gown, the good gynecologist looks like a Velázquez cardinal -- tightropes between paean and parody. Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children (1896) catches Adèle Meyer balancing between woman and mother: she's all dolled up, ready for an evening on the town while her children hide behind the Louis Quinze sofa, as if it could protect them from anti-Semitism; but her right hand reaches back to reassure Frank, and Elsie has one arm protectively encircling her younger brother. Lord Ribblesdale (1902) is a tall, commanding aristocrat with a top hat and hunting crop and riding boots. Does he represent the divine authority of the British Empire? The ugly authority of the British Empire? Or perhaps (he's almost too tall to be powerful, and isn't that whip a sissy substitute for a sword?) the fading authority of the British Empire?

John Singer Sargent isn't the first American enigma of his kind: John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) was another artist whose critics accused him of being nothing more than a society painter. Copley's Paul Revere celebrates an American hero -- or does it critique an American myth? Like Copley, Sargent isn't just a surface, he's a reflecting surface, tilting his canvas to catch our gaze. When his mirror gives us a glimpse of the artist (the way Las meninas shows us Velázquez), we see a Henry James-like observer with 20/10 vision and a sexual curiosity that he can't quite satisfy, a perpetual outsider. But his real genius is to show us ourselves, without apology, without explanation. Those are the Sargent surfaces that plumb the human soul.