Dennis Hollingsworth

Sargent, Bound.

Go to the Met and take a close and long look at this sleeve.

Here are a few stubborn thoughts of mine after seeing the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends last week (on view until October 4th, 2015). Seeing the show, I immediately understood the profound motive of his work, the influence of his first teacher, painter Carolus-Duran. From the wall text adjacent to Sargent's famous portrait of his instructor:

Sargent entered Duran's studio in 1874 and became his star pupil. Duran's approach was radical: he encouraged his students to draw and paint simultaneously, using a loaded brush.

I thought quite bit about this simultaneity of drawing and painting as I looked at the cuff of Carolus-Duran's shirtsleeve as it stuck out of his jacket. Drawing is the making of distinctions, it is a fixation. The delineation of a line separates one (thing) from another (thing). It is a clarity that tends to the diagrammatic, information tends to focus into a signal singularity. Paint pools, it is molten, liquid, it tends to blend, drip and bleed. Information tends to spread, blur and multiply. To do both of these two opposing acts simultaneously... and more: to do it many times in an interconnected manner, a veritable concatenation of multidimensional gestures that gestalt into an image that rivals photography.... now, this is, this was an immense talent.

And still. And still.

Portrait after portrait, gallery after gallery, I began to get a sense of how he was circumscribed by his talent for verisimilitude, and also by the classical model that knew only a limited set of the modes of painting (still life, portrait, landscape, etc), the classical regime. It was the inspiration of the facture of Velasquez that could have led him out of this cul-de-sac, of the court painter's rigid obligation to render portraits and little else. His life started at the same time as the birth of photography, and also the ticking of the doomsday clock for the end of the imperative for verisimilitude in painting. He was exposed to the impressionists and yet seemed not to have absorbed the import and impact of that movement. Impressionism was well named. Their revolution was to paint with fidelity the immediate sensation of visuality, unmediated by mental conditioning and forces of cultural convention. It was as if they painted what had arrived in the chamber of the eye before this information was processed by the brain. This was a literal impossibility of course, but they tried, and what they did was to overturn the conventions of classicism, of the art they inherited. They opened the door for the abstraction to come. The attempted isolation of sight from mind (or better: cultural memory) led to the subsequent isolation of each daub of paint from others on the canvas, which in turn led to the recognition of the constitutive elements of visual perception, which in turn led to abstraction. The Impressionists started down the road to modernism both post and neo, they did what every generation of artists are obliged to do: to make art their own. Sargent was painting within the confines of classicism when at the same time, at the turn of the new century when Picasso was breaking representation with African masks, Delaunay was hyper driving into Orphism and Malevich achieved his Victory over the Sun.

Sargent ultimately did not make art his own. From Wikipedia:

Of Sargent's early work, Henry James wrote that the artist offered "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn."

Sargent was 23 at the time.

Gallery after gallery, deeper into the exhibition I roamed and a shadow oft sadness crept over me. I not only sensed that Sargent tired of portraiture, but the exhibition took pains to show that he thought his escape was landscape painting. But landscape is but another mode, another horizon already explored, mapped and purchased by epochs of previous generations. His real salvation was hiding in plain sight. Sargent was handcuffed to verisimilitude but his teacher had already handed him the key. To draw and paint simultaneously, using a loaded brush, this was the way out of the corner that he had painted himself into. All he had to do was to release the task of the talent of his loaded brush and direct it toward... away from verisimilitude... and towards what painting would become, towards painting unbound, towards the beginning of abstraction.

Posted by Dennis at September 8, 2015 10:10 PM