Word: sargent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the last great society portraitist--the Van Dyck of his time, as Auguste Rodin was the first to say. Twenty years ago, to confess an admiration (however sneaking) for his work was to invite incredulity. Sargent? That flatterer of the Edwardian rich? That fat-cat holdover, that facile topographer of the social Alps, that living irrelevance to the concerns of modernism? But what goes around comes around. Sargent's reputation is back as though it had never gone away. Once again, if one can judge from the attendance at the Sargent show...
...show bills itself as the first "complete" Sargent retrospective, which in a way it is--the Whitney Museum of American Art's attempt at one in 1986 was smaller and less intelligently planned, and this one does full justice to Sargent's watercolors, an essential side of his work. In fact there probably can never be a complete Sargent show, because his enormous early masterpiece, El Jaleo, 1882, cannot leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. But this is the best look at him in living memory...
...Sargent was an American artist. With his older contemporary James Whistler, he was the first American painter since Benjamin West to become famous in England--and in France too. But he never set foot in the U.S. until his 21st year, and only rarely thereafter. The skeptic might say he hardly even qualified as an expatriate. As a boy he had no patria beyond the rented flat and the hotel room, and thus was unencumbered by the tension of nostalgia for early belonging that affects the real expat...
Paintings by Degas, Botticelli, Matisse, Giotto, Velasquez, Sargent and Holbein adorn medieval tapestries, which in turn cover the walls of the Northern European Hall, the Spanish Chapel the Chinese Loggia and the Dutch Drawing Room. Watercolors by Turner and masterpieces by Rembrandt peek out from behind neoclassical chaises lounges. Writings by Napoleon, T.S. Eliot and Sarah Bernhardt fill all nooks and crannies...
...Sargent Richard Gardner of the Cambridge Police Department estimated more than 3,000 fans passed through the store...