Sargent and ‘Madame X' Return, Notorious as Ever

New York Times

01-05-2025

The preternaturally astute portrait painter John Singer Sargent is often identified as an American, but he belonged to no one country. Born in Florence, Italy, to expat parents who moved the family around Europe with the seasons, Sargent (1856-1925) spent a formative decade in Paris before making London his base for a nomadic life (including long stints in Boston and New York). He went to Spain and Italy often enough to have inspired museum exhibitions on his time there. He was cosmopolitan until the end; when he died, in his sleep in London at age 69, obituaries noted that he had been reading Voltaire.
France was where Sargent chose to start his career, however, and in the Metropolitan Museum's transporting spring exhibition 'Sargent and Paris' we see just how he did it: with a lot of savoir-faire and a touch of the enfant terrible. A collaboration between the Met and the Musée d'Orsay, where the exhibition will appear in the fall, the show follows Sargent from his arrival in the French capital as an 18-year-old in 1874 through his Salon triumphs of the early 1880s to the controversy around his arresting portrait 'Madame X' of 1883-4.
Organized by the Met curator Stephanie L. Herdrich (with help from the museum's research assistant Caroline Elenowitz-Hess and the Musée D'Orsay curators Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Paul Perrin), the show builds to a climax around 'Madame X,' with long sight lines that tunnel through galleries to stoke anticipation for this famous painting of the precariously dressed Parisian socialite and American expatriate Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. The work has been a highlight of the Met's collection since Sargent sold it to the museum in 1916, telling the director 'I suppose it's the best thing I've done.'
Perhaps because it leans so heavily on a well-known painting and milieu, 'Sargent and Paris' does not break a lot of new ground (unlike, say, the recent 'Fashioned by Sargent' exhibition at MFA Boston and Tate Britain, which shed light on the artist's performative, collaborative process). 'Madame X' and her circle have been covered extensively, including in Deborah Davis's book 'Strapless' and Gioia Diliberto's work of historical fiction 'I Am Madame X.'
It's nonetheless an evocative look at the Belle Époque city where a young Sargent hit his stride. And the way he did it — assiduous networking, close study of the greats, an instinctive sense of what was contemporary, and a carefully dispensed soupçon of notoriety — feels instructive for artists today. Emerging artists might also admire the fluidity with which the polyglot Sargent moved between countries (which, at this moment, seems more difficult to emulate).
Not that it was so easy then. American-European relations were strained, as today, by trade wars and tariffs and assertions of nationalism. Protectionist impulses extended to art. (One French gossip columnist wrote that Americans 'have painters, like Mr. Sargent, who take away our medals, and pretty women, like Madame Gauthereau [sic], who eclipse ours…') But in a Third Republic Paris in which the newly wealthy mingled with aristocrats and wanted their own status-affirming portraits, Sargent found material and intellectual support.
Travel facilitated Sargent's quick rise. Training under the commercially successful portraitist Carolus-Duran, he was sent to Spain and the Netherlands to study works by his idols Velazquez and Frans Hals. His copy of a figure from Hals's 'The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard,' made on an 1880 trip to Haarlem, shows off the vigorous white-on-white brushwork that would become his signature.
He also visited Morocco and Italy, in part to satisfy the Parisian Salons' appetite for exotic scenes. Although he dutifully supplied a few of these, as in the overtly sensuous painting of a Tangier woman perfuming herself in 'Fumée d'Ambre Gris,' he thwarted expectations elsewhere with shadowy Venetian palazzo interiors that eschew the city's light-dappled canals. A family friend described Sargent as seeking 'what no one else has sought here — unpicturesque subjects, absence of color, absence of sunlight.'
It was a portrait, however, that solidified his reputation in Paris. Appropriately enough, the subject was Amalia Subercaseaux, the wife of a Chilean diplomat. When the painting of Madame Subercaseaux seated at the piano in a bold dress with cascading black-and-white ruffles was shown at the Paris Salon of 1880, it earned Sargent an award that allowed him to bypass the jury for future Salons. At the Met, the picture introduces a gallery of daring portraits that centers on 'Dr. Pozzi at Home' — Sargent's roguish yet regal image of the gynecologist and man-about-town Samuel Jean Pozzi, the reputed lover of Gautreau among others, in a searing scarlet dressing gown.
Sargent's travels to Spain influenced the work he made in Paris. His next big Salon moment came in 1882, with 'El Jaleo' — a monumental, intensely atmospheric scene of an Andalusian dancer in mid-gyration. A group portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit is opposite a copy of Velázquez's 'Las Meninas' from his student pilgrimage to the Prado.
Outside the Salons, Sargent cultivated a strong network of supporters — many of them formidable, creative women, like the writers Vernon Lee and Judith Gautier, represented at the Met in a palate-cleansing display of informal, sketchlike portraits. (Lee described Sargent's image of her, approvingly, as 'rather fierce and cantankerous.')
Sargent was also surrounded in Paris by the feminine archetype of the 'Parisienne' in her modish black dress. Examples in the show by Whistler, Renoir and Manet (who died in 1883 and would have been on Sargent's mind around the time he painted Gautreau) attest to the hold of this image of female beauty and modernity on the imaginations of very different artists.
By the time 'Madame X' makes her entrance, we are primed to see its subject as both an individual and a type — and to recognize her and Sargent as creators of this enduringly audacious work. As we know from the abundant literature on the painting, both Sargent and Gautreau were looking for a sensational moment and they got it at the Salon of 1884 (though not in the way either one had expected).
Critics objected to the fallen shoulder strap of Gautreau's dress (which Sargent later adjusted to an upright position, as it appears today), as well as her heavy makeup and her avoidance of eye contact with the viewer. They ignored the work's Classical lines and symbols, such as the crescent hair ornament associated with the virgin huntress Diana. And they castigated both artist and subject as American interlopers. (Some of the commentary centered on Gautreau's Creole roots.)
The naysayers were right about one thing, which is that the work was very much a joint effort. At the Met, 'Madame X' is surrounded by preparatory sketches of Gautreau that celebrate her as an artwork in her own right. Most show her in profile, nodding to the tradition of the cameo or of Quattrocento portraits of women.
And the heavy makeup that so offended salongoers can be seen as a painting of a painting — something Sargent's fellow Salon artist Marie Bashkirtseff seemed to grasp when she wrote, 'The beautiful lady is horrible in daylight because she uses too much makeup … This chalky paint looks like plaster and gives her shoulders the hue of a corpse. Further, she paints her ears pink and her hair the color of mahogany …. But at night she is truly beautiful.'
Sargent's reputation in Paris largely recovered from the disastrous reception of 'Madame X.' (Gautreau's didn't.) But by this time he had his eye on London, where he took up residence in 1886.
He continued to see his own artistic identity through a French filter — 'American by birth, French by the brush,' as an 1884 article from a Belgian newspaper had it.
In small portraits he paid tribute to his artist friends Rodin and Monet, even adopting the Impressionist's own style for a lovely little plein-air scene of him at work in the woods at Giverny. Also here is a more formal treatment of the sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer; as the label tells us, both Sargent and Singer made large contributions to the fund to acquire Manet's 'Olympia' for the French state.
The French state returned the favor when, in 1892, it purchased Sargent's 1890 painting of the Spanish flamenco star known as 'La Carmencita.' This daring work, which shows the dancer assuming a confident hand-on-hip stance in a voluminous yellow costume, makes for a fitting conclusion to 'Sargent and Paris' — a vision of Spain in France, seen by an artist who held an American passport but knew no borders.
Sargent and Paris
Through Aug. 3, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, metmuseum.org.