TATE
BRITAIN
EXHIBITION
SARGENT AND FASHION
Fashion, identity, painting: explore the unique work
of John Singer Sargent
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/sargent-and-fashion
Celebrated
for his striking portrait paintings, this exhibition sheds new light on John
Singer Sargent’s acclaimed works. It explores how he worked like a stylist to
craft the image of the sitters he painted, who he often had close relationships
with.
Sargent
used fashion as a powerful tool to express identity and personality. He
regularly chose the outfits of his collaborators or manipulated their clothing.
This innovative use of costume was central to his artwork – for example,
tugging a heavy coat tighter around a man to emphasise his figure or letting a
dress strap sensuously slip from a woman’s shoulder. It was these daring
sartorial choices that allowed him to express his vision as an artist.
Almost 60
of Sargent’s paintings will be on display, including major portraits that
rarely travel. Several period garments will also be showcased alongside the
portraits they were worn in. The show examines how this remarkable painter used
fashion to create portraits of the time, which still captivate today.
Lead
support with a generous donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Additional support from the Sargent and Fashion Exhibition Supporters Circle
and Tate Americas Foundation.
Organised
by Tate Britain and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both MFA Boston and Tate
Britain received generous support for international scholarly convenings and
for the exhibition from the Terra Foundation for American Art
This is a terrible
and unfair review by Jonathan Jones, followed below by a send Letter
by Cally
Blackman, who takes issue with the ‘dismissive’ review by Jones.
TWEEDLAND
Review
Sargent and Fashion review – tragicomic travesty
is a frock horror
Tate
Britain, London
Sargent’s gloriously rich and subtle paintings can’t
be reduced to dreary facts about hats, dresses and opera gowns. Sadly, that’s
just what’s happened
Jonathan
Jones
Tue 20 Feb
2024 10.00 CET
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/feb/20/sargent-and-fashion-review-tate-britain-london
This is a
horrible exhibition. The American painter John Singer Sargent is a great artist
of identity, fascinated with the nature of social being. He paints people not
in isolation but as players in a social world in a way that is startling,
modern and so truthful it hurts. Trained in 19th-century Paris, he brought
brushwork tinted by Manet and Monet to portraying late Victorian and Edwardian
British society, and was especially drawn to those who didn’t fit the old order
– such as the young Jewish women joyously proclaiming their individuality in
Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer. But was he, above all, a
painter of fashion, as this show claims? No way – what on earth are they
talking about?
This daring
artist of modern life is turned into a stuffed shirt by a show that puts the
dress before the face, the hat before the head and the crinoline before the
soul in an obsessive, myopic argument. A painter with much to say to us
becomes, here, a relic with no relevance.
The first
thing you see on walking in is an old opera cloak, magnificently preserved and
beautiful in its day. But this black lacy artefact is leaden next to the first
painting, Sargent’s portrait of Aline de Rothschild, Lady Sassoon, whose keen
face is full of life and wit. That’s the difference between a work of art and
an ancient frock: the painting is as old as the dress but in it, a person
lives.
Throughout
this show, Sargent’s scintillating works are wretchedly displayed. There are
clothes in glass cases everywhere obstructing sightlines, distracting from the
art instead of illuminating it. One hilarious example is his portrait of Lord
Ribblesdale, a positively Sadean image of an aristocrat in top hat, black coat
and boots holding a riding crop he might be about to use on a horse or
housemaid. Instead of letting this fascinating portrait speak for itself, it is
displayed next to a case containing a top hat, made in the late 19th century by
Cooksey and Co of London, as the pedantic label explains.
The
curators have gone to the trouble of borrowing this topper from the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, but I have no idea what its presence adds to our
appreciation of Sargent. Reconstructing the clothing his sitters wore seems as
perverse as digging up their skulls and displaying them complete with forensic
reconstructions of their faces to see how accurately he painted them. The
crinkled silks look as macabre as that to me. They belong in an attic with a
rocking horse that moves of its own accord.
The canvases are not only crowded by old clothes but
shouted down by intrusive labelling and hideously set against ever-changing
wall colours and lighting
The
meticulous sartorial scholarship is misplaced. A painting is a fiction, not a
jumble of facts, and no artist knew that better than Sargent. Born to American
parents living in Europe, he was cosmopolitan, ironic and sophisticated – like
a character in a Henry James novel. James, in fact, became a friend, and there
are subtle connections between their artistry. Both might be mistaken, by an
idiot, for conservatives. But James probes the tremulous complexity of the
human psyche and the nature of morality with a shimmering, yet heartbreaking
power. Sargent, too, is a portraitist of subtlety and mystery, bringing out the
“character” of his people – with inverted commas as James might put it – in
wisps and dashes of impressionistic brushwork. Sargent and James would make a
much better exhibition.
Instead,“Fashion
was central to John Singer Sargent’s achievements as a portraitist”, declares
the opening wall text. No it wasn’t. Painting is. It’s the way he paints that
makes his art breathe. Yet here it’s hard to see that. The canvases are not
only crowded by old clothes but shouted down by intrusive labelling and
hideously set against ever-changing wall colours and lighting. Worst of all
there, is no narrative logic. The display sacrifices any sense of Sargent’s
life as an artist to its essayistic theme.
This is all
the more tragicomic because so many of Sargent’s finest works have been lent.
If I was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I’d have a serious
complaint about the way its treasure, Madame X, is displayed. This portrait of
Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau in a shoulder-baring dress was daring for the
1880s, even in Paris, where its contrast of dark material and pale, slightly
blueish flesh horrified the 1884 Salon exhibition. But far from being given the
grandstand it deserves, it is shown under a forgettable quotation painted in
huge letters.
Worse, it’s
just dropped in without any buildup or history (other than fashion history). We
learn nothing about the Paris in which Sargent started his career: the capital
of the avant garde where Manet and the impressionists were locked in artistic
civil war with the conservative Salon. Sargent knew the modernist rebels, had
met Monet as early as 1876 and his later portrait of the impressionist at his
easel shows how attracted he was to such ideas. Madame X brings that knowledge
into the establishment Salon and plays on the border of respectability and
outrage.
Sargent
slightly miscalculated, and people were more upset than he hoped. Is it the
black dress that shocked the Salon? No, it was sex. Gautreau, not the frock, is
the star, as she exudes sophisticated glamour, knowingly self-possessed as she
turns her sharp profile away. It is a novel compressed into a portrait. Sargent
provokes us to wonder who this magnificent character is, where she’s been and
might go next. Gautreau collaborates with him in creating the fiction, inciting
the fantasies.
This
portrait of a lady shows how Sargent is as elusive and complex a fabulist as
his alter ego, James. Each painting in this exhibition is just as rich, but the
curators keep hammering home their narrow clothes-based interpretation. It’s
extremely hard to see past that in the chaotic non-narrative display. An artist
as good as Sargent needs space, decent light and not much more – certainly not
quotations and props.
If you love
historic millinery, this may be for you. If you love great art, stay at home
and read The Portrait of a Lady.
Sargent and Fashion is at Tate Britain,
London, from 22 February to 7 July
( This is the reaction from Cally Blackman to the
terrible review published above.)
Letters
Throw off the cloak of snobbery and treat fashion
as a serious art form
Cally Blackman takes issue with a ‘dismissive’ review
of the John Singer Sargent exhibition at Tate Britain
Fri 23 Feb
2024 19.24 CET
When I read
or hear the word “frock”, my heart sinks and my hackles rise: when will fashion
be taken seriously? As the most powerful form of non-verbal communication,
clothes tell us a lot about people – from their occupation, to religion, to
their Indigenous heritage. The now thriving academic discipline of fashion
studies rose from schools of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, philosophy,
curatorial scholarship and art history. The first postgraduate course in the
history of dress was set up in 1965 at the Courtauld Institute – a bastion of
the art establishment – to enable curators and art historians to date paintings
and describe garments in them accurately. Sadly, many of them continue to get
it wrong.
Jonathan
Jones’s review of the Sargent exhibition at Tate Britain (Sargent and Fashion
review – tragicomic travesty is a frock horror, 20 February) was typical of the
snobbish and dismissive attitude often taken towards anything to do with
fashion, including the multitrillion-dollar fashion industry that, for better
or for worse, ranks as one of the biggest in the global economy, a fact that is
seldom recognised. If it was called “garment manufacture” instead of “fashion”,
a complicated word freighted with negative connotations, it might be.
Museums
such as the V&A and the Tate well know the pulling power of fashion
exhibitions and can hardly be blamed, in their currently straitened
circumstances, for wanting to cash in on it: on Thursday this week, the Tate
exhibition was packed, demonstrating the level of public interest. However, the
exhibition is more than just an exercise in ticket sales. Sargent was a great
painter who had an affinity with dress and fabric, like Dürer, Holbein, Van
Dyck, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Gainsborough and Lawrence before him, and traces of
their influence resonate throughout his work.
Whatever
the distress caused to Jones the by lighting, wall colours and glass cases in
wrong places, it is a very rare thing indeed to see garments displayed next to
the paintings in which they are depicted, and a special joy to see these same
garments interpreted on the canvas with Sargent’s consummate skill and
aesthetic judgment. Some of the gowns on display are by Charles Worth, the most
prestigious couturier in Paris (not “designer” – the word had not been invented
then). Compared with these, Ellen Terry’s beetle-wing-embellished Lady Macbeth
stage costume (“costume” is the term for clothing worn for performance, not for
garments worn in everyday life) looked dull and lifeless, yet scintillated in
radiant, glowing colour from Sargent’s portrait, a testament to his quality as
an artist.
Yes, some
of the objects displayed to accompany a painting seemed arbitrarily
helicoptered in, such as the top hat Jones mentions in his review, but this is
not an exhibition about “historic millinery” as he puts it, but one that offers
a new approach to a brilliant and prolific artist, just as the National
Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends in 2015
did. This generous, sumptuous array of Sargent’s work tells us much about
class, society and fashion at the end of the 19th century, an era of great
privilege for some, before the impending rupture of war. As the historian and
philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote in his book Sartor Resartus (1831), one of the
first to address the significance of dress with any degree of seriousness:
“Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant.”
Cally Blackman
London
No comments:
Post a Comment