The Wunderkind John Singer, 18, swept Paris in 1874 on a powerful talented burst. The boy presented himself at the CAROLIS-DURAN fashionable teacher studio and unpalled a wallet that warned a number of brilliant artistic careers. “I can see the thin youth … His arms intertwined around a formidable roast of studies which, when revealed in the eyes of the master, led him to exclaim:” You studied a lot, “said a student later. “He could have been said about him …” He had a magnificent past behind him. “”
Guided by Carolus -Duran and excited by his own copies and experiences, Sargent has promised to become one of the greatest landscapers of age – or academic virtuosos or impressionists or researchers of exoticism or painters of psychologically heavy domestic scenes. He looked back towards the old masters without getting lost in nostalgia, and to young modernists, while staying away from radical programs. Whatever he aspires, he did it, beautifully.
Sargent and ParisThe spectacular show of the MET captures this feeling of explosive possibility. He recounts the decade of Sargent in the city, when his horizon has widened and narrowed. He tried everything, then focused on the portraits, which was the place where the money was.
Born in Florence in 1856, Sargent experienced an itinerant existence with his American family, flitting, according to season and Whim, in Nice, Paris, Milan, London, Salzburg and Genoa. It was only 20 years old that he visited his parents' homeland, the United States.
The constant in his peripatetic childhood was sketches. Sargent's mother, a passionate amateur, insisted that each of her three children produces at least one drawing per day. (In July, the Met will present 26 watercolors never seen by John's sister, Emily.)
Polyglot, worldly, sociable and confident, Sargent used Paris as a base more than a house. Although he lived in the city that Walter Benjamin later called “the 19th century capital”, he was little interested in his new teeming boulevards, his smoking stations or the shiny crowds of coffee coffee. He preferred the alleys of Capri or the dark keys of Venice, timeless screens on which to project his contemporary sophistication.
The year after registering at the School of Fine Arts, he painted “wine glasses”, a rural patio not peak and weighted in summer when you can practically hear laughter just outside the frame. Before the end of the decade, he had put the wild energy of a girl dancing on a roof of the island, the ferocity of the waves of the Atlantic, the sensual violence of sunlight in Morocco and the mood of a gray day on the large canal. In “The Spanish Dance”, the pale bare arms of a flamenco interpreter shoot in the dark night.
And yet, despite its frequent escapes, Paris – its social life and its splendor of gas, its pure concentration of artistic inventiveness – nourished its creativity until it abandoned it for London in 1886. It exceeded Degas in its “repetition of the Pasderoup orchestra on the winter circus” (1879) where the agitumed pastra -brushs vibrate like a Kettledrum. “In Luxembourg Garden” captures a more moderate but always intense mood, an enlightened cigarette from a man echoing the moon that shines on the flat gravel.
The conservative of the show, Stephanie Herdrich, traces in an expert way how Sargent made a swerved, then made a swerve again, perfecting his profession and his sensitivity. He equaled the technique to content, even in a single canvas. In “Dr Pozzi at Home”, a full length portrait of 1881 of a young surgeon, he slipped from the brilliant enamelled face of the face to the mass status under a scarlet bathrobe, with a brushed foam of white linen on the neck and covers. He goes more towards abstraction in “Subcaseaux ramon in a gondola”, representing his friend in a patchwork of marbled blacks, nuances of orange and dazzling strands on the water.
Carolus pushed his protégé to revisit the past, especially Velázquez and Hals. The lesson has settled. You can see the influence of Hals in the double portrait of Sargent by François Flameng and Paul Helleu, where he freezes the animation with just a trace of blur around the mustache. His 1882 masterpiece “The daughters of Edward Darley Boit” reflects the psychological and spatial complexities of “Las Meninas” by Velasquez, as well as his undulating implasto. Sargent strategically deploys the sketch, making certain faces in detail while leaving unfinished sections swirling around a void.
The two youngest girls open their eyes to the painter; A third sister hides with suspicion on the edge of gloom which almost swallowed the fourth. Sargent respects their reluctance as he exhibited them. The result juxtaposes Victorian innocence with dark Freudian currents. There is nothing to encourage these children.
Sargent understood the children and refused to romantic them. In a double portrait of 1881, a Parisian boy and his little sister (offeniness of the essayist and playwright Edouard Pailleron) perch on a couch against a sunset. The girl looks at the spectator with hostility; The criticisms pointed out his “childish distrust”. His brother leans forward with bored belligerent and barely concealed contempt. It is difficult to detect all traces of feeling between the two.
Just as he rode tradition and modernity, Sargent mixed sensual brilliance and psychological depth. “Madame Paul Escudier” fades in the dark next to an open window, while sunlight falls through a whipped curtain and on the velvety blue of her dress. The subject itself almost melts in the butter brush, so that it becomes both attractive and wise, implorating but private.
A herd of different sargents – the connoisseur of fashion, the clever anthropologist, the student of ancient sculpture and the Italian Renaissance technique, the daring adventurer – converge in “Madame X”. He saw in the form of a mermaid by Virginie Gautreau and a purplish pallor an emblem of decadence of gilded age. It was created through makeup and costume, and a demonstration of studies shows how Sargent worked hard to intensify the artifice. His neck was slim, but not that Miners, his profile is not as a knife as having done it.
The viewers of the 1884 show looked at this attractive and sinister figure, whose theatricality – not to mention its bar turning – caused a scandal. He left Paris in part to escape a suddenly double -edged reputation and rebuilding a less risky business in London. But “Madame X” continued to fascinate. Years later, after the death of Sargent, his friend Vernon Lee (alias Violet Paget) wrote with admiration of his predilection for “The Bizarre and Ordlandish”, a taste he shared with Baudelaire. Sargent, “she wrote:” takes care of the love of all kinds of decaying art, openly approving the pheasantthat is to say putrid ”. It is the miracle of his genius and the show, that this puff of rot is so easily mixed with the lasting freshness of her eye.
As of August 3, Metmuseum.org
