Sargent Painted Here
John Singer Sargent & Chicago’s Gilded Age at the Art Institute of Chicago
John Singer Sargent & Chicago’s Gilded Age at the Art Institute of Chicago
Washington slept here; Kilroy was here.to these we should add something like Sargent painted here, or Sargent painted people who lived here. Something like that.the mot juste escapes me. these days, when there seem to be two or three new John Singer Sargent exhibitions every year, it’s hard to imagine a time when John Singer Sargent wasn’t wildly popular. But early in his career his works were thought to be, perhaps, a bit edgy, and then, as he aged, the modern aspects in his painting, aspects he had reined in and labored to balance against the tenets of classical realism, overtook him and spilled out in the works of the next generation of artists. Collectors took advantage of these
brief out-of-favor moments and snapped up his paintings.the fruits of Chicago’s foresight form the new exhibition John Singer Sargent & Chicago’s Gilded Age at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sargent was born in Florence,
Italy, in 1856. His parents, both New Englanders, were well off and moved from one European capital to another as the social season moved. Sargent’s mother painted and she encouraged her son when he showed a talent for art. By the age of 12, Sargent was studying watercolor in Rome with an American painter, Carl Welsch. Six years later, he began his studies at an independent Parisian atelier run by Carolus-duran, a painter known for what were then considered avant-garde notions of portraiture—building a composition stroke by stroke or au premier coup—and using light and atmosphere in dramatic ways. In October 1874, expatriate American painter Julian Alden Weir wrote, “i met this last week a young Mr. Sargent about eighteen years old and one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his drawings are like old masters, and his color is equally fine. He was born abroad and has not yet seen his country. He speaks as well in French, German, and Italian, as he does English, has an ear for music, etc. Such men wake one up, and as his principles are equal to his talents, I hope to have his friendship.”
Talented and charming, Sargent quickly came to know everyone— everyone wanted to know him—and to travel everywhere. His transnationalism positioned him perfectly to become the choice of wealthy Americans in search of cultural artifacts to consume conspicuously. where Sargent didn’t regularly travel, he made sure his art did, especially to cities like Chicago, full of new money and hungry to make a mark in an America dominated— culturally—by the East Coast.
In 1871, most of old Chicago burned in what has come to be known as the Great Chicago Fire—of Mrs. O’leary’s cow fame—though enormous fires elsewhere at the same time, notably Peshtigo, wisconsin, tell a tale of a hot, dry year.that was a tough year, not only for Peshtigo, but also for my hometown, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee had set itself up, and enjoyed some success as the selfstyled “Athens of the Midwest” pitting its Germanic sophistication against Chicago’s provincial cowtownery. But after the fire, Chicago rebuilt itself, not merely with a view to commercial and industrial might, but with an eye to rivaling Newyork, Philadelphia and Boston in the arts that would leave other Midwestern cities behind.
When Sargent exhibited his Portrait of Madame X in 1884, its lividity and sensuality—as well as the fact that it depicted the artist’s own cousin— occasioned a scandal in Paris so great that he felt compelled to relocate to London, which he would make his home base for the rest of his life. Knowing that his fame would be made in portraits, Sargent backed away—a bit—from his startling style, becoming part of the juste milieu. Exhibition organizer and catalog author Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Assistant Curator of American Art at the Art Institute, describes the group as: “an international group of painters who straddled the line between old and new by offering an approachable version of modernism that was fresh and virtuosic but likewise built upon principles of space and form.” Madsen goes on to locate Sargent within the group, writing: “he aligned himself with more radical painters, befriending
Monet and deeply admiring Édouard Manet. Further, Sargent practiced a technical modernity, especially in his landscapes, that pushed his style toward abstraction by cropping, flattening or skewing perspective, and emphasizing surface and facture with his brushwork.” Part Old Master, part impressionist; part classicist, part avant-gardist: Sargent was a thoroughly European American, and a thoroughly American European, combining Old World education and artistic sensitivity with New World drive and an entrepreneurial approach to his career. In many ways, despite the fact that he only visited Chicago twice in his life, he was the perfect painter to express the ambitions of the newly risen big shouldered city.
Early on in his career, Sargent submitted paintings to exhibitions in Chicago and found ready patrons there. One of his oldest friends, Charles Deering, was a Chicago native, and he acted as Sargent’s surrogate, principal patron and cheerleader in the Windy City for decades. Deering and others like him led the charge for Chicago to be the host city for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—where Sargent’s work was amply represented.the
World’s Fair also led to a spectacular new Art Institute building, the one that graces Michigan Avenue to this day. Sargent did a number of portraits of his friend. One in particular, done in Florida in 1917, shows the evolution of the artist’s thinking about portraiture. Here, an older Deering is casually posed, sitting in a wicker chair in a loose white suit and straw boater tilted at a rakish angle.around him, fallen palm fronds and coconuts and their shadows crisscross and dot the ground. Over Deering’s shoulder, boats sit under a blue sky. Sargent arranges the wrinkles in the suit, the canes in the chair and the fronds in an overlapping mat suggestive of the myriad events of his friend’s long life. After 1907, Sargent rarely did portraits in oil, preferring charcoal as his medium, as we see in the 1911 portrait of Harriett Pullman Carolan. But as in the Deering portrait, Sargent surrounds the steely-eyed heiress to the Pullman fortune—recall the Pullman Strike from high school history, or just punch it into Wikipedia, and you’ll have an idea of the reach of this Gilded Age/robber baron family—with spikes and swirls. In both portraits, there’s a sense, unspecified though it may be, of subcutaneous turmoil.
At the same time that Sargent moved toward charcoal portraits, he also moved toward watercolor as a major medium. In each, we see a modernist attention to speed and to finding ways to capture the fleetness of time. Contrast the Portrait of Charles
Deering and the portrait of Harriet Pullman Carolan with the first of Sargent’s many major portraits to create a stir in Chicago: La Carmencita. Exhibited there in 1890, in the Third Annual Exhibition of Paintings at the first incarnation of the Art Institute of Chicago, you can see how an ambitious city might have viewed this painting as simultaneously bold and brazen, both in the pose and gaze of the subject, and in the artist’s treatment of the subject. Chicago critics were divided, but the painting still won the Art Institute Prize.a famous Spanish dancer in
New York, Sargent’s painting captures La Carmencita’s proud air. Chin out, arms akimbo, her right foot out and pointed, she gazes unabashedly at the viewer, her knowing smile all but daring us to ask what’s on her mind. Sargent paints her gown with special vividness. Short strokes define the shimmering decorations, imparting motion to the dancer’s moment of stillness. Nothing in the space surrounding her distracts us; she has made everything else disappear. Two paintings in the exhibition, an 1882 work, Street in Venice, and The
Fountain,villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, 1907, when considered together, may reveal something of Sargent’s Old World/new World thinking. Street in Venice forgoes the typical beautiful canal scene, with the dome of St. Marks and the gondolas lined up under a blazing sunset, choosing, instead, a moment in an old street, where one of two mufflered men, leaning against a wall, notices a young woman walking. Is she wrapping herself in her shawl, hurrying against a chill in the wind or against the male glance that might become a male gaze that might take a sinister turn? He might simply turn back to his conversation, or he might not. Chase did similar paintings, but in them, the glance is already the gaze, the gaze is already the leer. Deliberately drab, the canvas almost sags under the patches of shades of gray and clay; the scene is relieved only the red at the woman’s throat and the flower in her hair.
The Fountain, on the other hand, was the first Sargent acquired by the
Art Institute of Chicago. In contrast to Street in Venice, the canvas is full of life, light, water, lushness.the gaze here is female; what’s more, it’s the gaze of a woman painting a male subject. If Street in Venice is Old World Italy, the Italy in The Fountain seems like an American oasis in Italy. Neither painting is a portrait by the numbers; neither is a true genre scene. Sargent is after something new here; something new that combines old and new, tradition and innovation. Something just right for Chicago at the turn from the 19th century to the 20th.