The Daily Telegraph - Features
Scintillating surfaces with little of substance beneath them
Exhibition Sargent and Fashion
Tate Britain, London SW1 ★★★★★
Like a far-off celebrity glimpsed at a party, the star of Tate Britain’s new exhibition, John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883-84), appears at a distance, perfectly framed by a doorway, sending hearts aflutter. With marmoreal, lavender-tinged skin, and that sumptuous black bodice held up only by a pair of chains, her features and attire are unmistakable.
A silver sliver representing a crescent moon adorns her hair, as if she were a latter-day Diana, lunar goddess of the hunt. Yet Diana was associated with chastity, and this French banker’s American wife is hardly demure. In an earlier version of the painting, one of those straps slipped suggestively from a shoulder.
Chastened by the outcry when his portrait of Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau became the succèss de scandale of the 1884 Paris Salon, Sargent adjusted her eveningwear; in 1916, he sold the painting, which he considered “the best thing I have done”, to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
If this makes him sound more couturier than painter, so be it:
Sargent and Fashion explicitly examines his suave images of the elite of the turn of the 20th century “through the lens of dress”. This is a show about “the sensuous sheen” of silks and satins as much as brushwork. Labels wax lyrical about cherry silk velvet and pearl-embroidered bengaline, while elaborate fans and spectacular dresses appear alongside his society portraits. Sargent’s mesmerising, eldritch
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) is accompanied by her extraordinary costume, fashioned from blue tinsel and metallicgreen beetle wings.
In the Tate’s telling, Sargent – a cosmopolitan yet shy, ambiguous figure, who relished painting the surgeon Samuel Pozzi wearing a crimson gown with Turkish slippers, but himself dressed conventionally, in a banker’s suits – was a stylist and “artistic director of public performances”, versed in haute couture’s coded nuances, and capable of suggesting, with liquid brushstrokes, the properties of expensive fabrics. Appearance was everything. Hence, the curators’ belief in his appeal for our “image-making” social-media age.
It’s a seductive vision, in which everyone looks exquisite – and, for a while, it feels fun to be swept up in the razzmatazz of the Belle Époque, the Gilded Age’s opulence. There’s scant hectoring about bygone attitudes, little engagement with identity politics; just escapism, in the manner of a period drama.
Yet, a one-dimensional argument – that Sargent artfully manipulated his sitters’ “sartorial choices” for pictorial ends – cannot vanquish old concerns about his superficiality.
Is there anything to his art other than sheen and sparkle? Of course, his business was flattery. But, as the high-society parade passes before our eyes, the collective vanity appals. Compare Sargent’s portrait of a rich mother and daughter with a photograph of them sitting for him in Boston: in the painting, they might pass for sisters. Sargent could be a toady.
Eventually, the surfeit of sweetness sickens. It’s hard to refute DH Lawrence’s assessment of Sargent’s portraits as “nothing but yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops, having some pretty head propped up on the top”. Strip away the trimmings – the frills and flounces, silk bows and puffed sleeves
– and what’s left?
From tomorrow; tate.org.uk
As the high-society parade passes before our eyes, the collective vanity appals