John Singer Sargent is, perhaps, my favorite artist of all--and certainly when I am in the midst of his art, the others take a back seat. What do you get from him? Technique? Unassailable! It doesn't matter the medium. Pencil/charcoals? Check, Oils? Check. Watercolor? Check! Once he set to preserve an image to paper/canvas, the result was so imbued with life--that you cannot but stand in awe of it. I have never seen the smallest of sketches that did not speak volumes of Sargent's craft, insight, and love. I am convinced, that as easily as you or I breath the air, John Singer Sargent loved everything that he immortalized with his art.
The exhibition "Sargent in Spain" covers a handful of trips that he took there, a small representation of the images that he created there, and the influence of those trips and works on his final opus: The Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Sargent toured Spain three times in the late 1800's and again in 1903, 1908/09, and finally in 1912.
Sargent painted "The Infanta Margarita" after Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo in 1879.
The next room featured a range of works around his fascination with Flamenco dancing and the 19th-century master, Carmencita. She is the inspiration for a handful of large scale paintings, including the iconic "El Jaleo"--a centerpiece of the collections of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston. The original was not part of the exhibition; yet several sketches and "studies" for the work were. And perhaps most interesting of all was the inclusion of a short film of Carmencita dancing from the Thomas Alva Edison early film collection in the Library of Congress. She is actually performing in the same yellow dress that Sargent painted her in.
Study for "El Jaleo"; Seated Musicians' Heads and Hands, 1881
"La Carmencita Dancing", 1890
Video Clip: "Carmencita" 1895
William K. L. Dickson (1860 - 1935)
& William Heise (1847-1910)
Thomas Alva Edison Collection, Library of Congress
"La Carmencita", 1890
Albert de Belleroche, circa 1882
Portrait of a Welsh-born painter wearing costume items John Singer Sargent bought in Spain.
The next couple of Galleries take up the subject of Sargent's fascination with and acumen in depicting architectural subjects. These morph into images of people and animals in common unguarded moments. Most of the works are executed with watercolor, but a good number are also painted with oils. The watercolors open up for me the heart of my love of Sargent. His intuition and ability to use a medium infamous for it's difficulty demonstrates more than anything else his genius. Many watercolorist, my humble self included, incorporate the independence of the pigment pretending to have meant it to be that way all along! Sargent does play this game. He understands what every brush strokes implies and offers them up with a confidence and abandon that becomes perfection. I study his paintings and I think: he saw it there, and then used the brush and paint to reveal it to the rest of us!
"Escutcheon of Charles V of Spain," 1912
"Spanish Fountain," 1912
Another aspect of Sargent's genius: Light. He brings truth to light in a way that exceeds the two-dimensional limits of his subjects. It effects me to the point of tears.
"Turkey in a Courtyard," circa 1879-1880
"Sierra Nevada," 1912
Up close this oil painting was little more than a sloshing about of colors as thick as icing, but just a few feet away and a moment in time, one hundred and ten years past, is as fresh and alive as it must have been on this sunny day in Spain.
"Spanish Soldiers," 1903
One of three works on this theme in the exhibition, depicting soldiers convalescing at the Royal Hospital in Santiago de Campestela. Three paintings representing dozens that Sargent made as a result of this visit. The watercolor highlights two aspects of Sargent's work. 1) his prolific output. Sargent made paintings of his experiences like I take photographs!--well, at least, GOOD photographs. And 2), his sensual side. I mean, who are we kidding her, his recovering soldier is sexy! As was La Carmencita, the flamenco dancer. Sargent was in his heart as bi-sexual as any person could be without the label having been created. He is famous, in his lifetime infamous, for two portraits. Madame X--so scandalous that she wasn't named, and Dr. Pozzi--a man dressed a red robe looking like he's ready to remove it. And I full-well love him for both.
"Women at Work," 1912
3) his understanding of light. Sargent knew the power of contract like few artists then or since. He's a major inspiration to me.
"Driving in Spain," 1903
I would have taken a photograph. Sargent paints a picture!
The next set of paintings focuses on his visit to the Spanish Island of Majorca. Today, home to uber rich jet-setters, but in 1908, a backwater with orchards and fishermen.
"Majorcan Fisherman," 1908
"Pomegranates, Majorca," 1908
In the final gallery, we treated to images form Sargent's final and perhaps most intense, ouvre: the Public Library of Boston. A shrine to humanism, the images connect the dots between what Sargent created for this iconic public space and his experiences in Spain. It's an ambitious drawing, but also fascinating and well researched.
"Tarragone," 1908
"St. Teresa of Avila," circa 1909
Created from a post visit sketch, a watercolor sketch of its own right. Would that I could have watched him conjure up this image from his notes and memory!
No comments:
Post a Comment