Following fast on the heels of Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition, Exhibition on Screen again focuses on one of the year’s most talked-about art shows. Their film, John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger, explores the Tate Britain and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Sargent and Fashion. The show has already created headlines, with some art critics accusing the John Singer Sargent portraits, and some of the clothing featured in them, as being nothing more than a superficial glance at 19th century society and culture. Visually engaging, but lacking depth. Too much chiffon and taffeta – where’s the gravitas in that?
Fashion and Swagger blends observation and analysis to unpick this question. We are taken on a journey, crossing back and forth over the Atlantic, as Sargent followed the trends – and the cash. The director, David Bickerstaff, quite rightly uses the camera to lean into the detail of the exhibition. Textures, colours and shapes. The portraits are a gift to the film-maker. Typically thought of as beautiful women in gorgeous gowns, painted (quite literally) in their best light, Fashion and Swagger adds editorial balance with an impressive selection of contributors, including fashion photographer Tim Walker. Exhibition on Screen looks at what lies behind the glamour, delving into the history of Sargent’s attitude-filled portraits.
Born in Florence, 1856, John Singer Sargent’s childhood, with his well-travelled family, gave him the best possible grounding in preparing for an artistic life. His mother, Mary Newbold Sargent, started John with sketching. Heading to Paris to study art as a young man, his bold and progressive teacher, artist Carolus Duran, got Sargent to study the work of Frans Hals and Diego Velazquez, the influence of their styles can be seen across Sargent’s work. Hals’ informality captures the essence of his sitter, and Velazquez’s series of paintings of King Philip IV of Spain might seem courtly and stiff, but in the ageing King, Velazquez shows us the man, not the crown. Sargent even followed Velazquez’s trail, travelling to Spain in 1879. The Old Master’s technique of dotting dabs of light to build a suggestion of detailed costume is something Sargent picked up and ran with.
Although Sargent’s fame is located in his portraits, Fashion and Swagger makes the point that he was more concerned with interior drama and the unconventional. His technical skills are legendary: the lightest touch to convey shape, colour and silhouette. The artist not only understands the language of clothes, he captures the fantasy, the aspiration. He borrows from British painters such as Thomas Gainsborough and William Larkin. High-society sitters wearing their finest garb, striking a strong if artificial pose – this style of portrait is given the name “swagger”. There is no room for modesty: these paintings communicate an audacity and an ambition. It this idea that ties the whole exhibition together. Clothes signify status, but their links to identity, performance, self-promotion – how we want the world to see us – is what interests Sargent the most.
In Sargent’s society pictures, we have a formula going back to Gainsborough: achingly beautiful clothes, hung on grand, aristocratic features. Not exactly pushing the boundaries of modern art. But Fashion and Swagger argues that Sargent is no mindless flatterer. He knows that some of his subjects are not classic beauties, but Sargent digs deeper, resulting in paintings that have more to say than striking an attitude in lilac taffeta or white silk. Lady Agnew of Lochnaw and Miss Elsie Palmer (A Lady in White) may initially read as ultra-feminine, but there is an unspoken intensity. Lady Agnew’s eyes burn through the canvas, challenging us not to bore her. Elsie Palmer coolly considers us with amusement. There is, in what they are wearing, how they are placed within the frame, an element of performance. But the person, the individual, still emerges.
To reinforce this point, Fashion and Swagger also discusses Sargent’s impact on reframing late-Victorian masculinity. Sargent’s own sexuality was never stated, but he was quite comfortable around men whose sexual preferences were more clearly defined. His show-stopping portrait of Dr Pozzi at Home displays an ambiguity and tension in Pozzi’s body language that is years ahead of its time. Pozzi’s floor-length red coat exudes both strength and theatricality. Through subtle visual coding, Sargent also applies queer motifs to W. Graham Robertson, a well-known associate of Oscar Wilde. These paintings may fall under the banner of ‘society portraits’, but they veer sharply from its genteel, closeted world. There is a fluidity in Sargent’s work that moves beyond the social, sexual and political boundaries of his own era.
Fashion and Swagger delivers not only an overview of Sargent’s life and career, but an interpretation of how he combined fashion with identity. What is revealed is an artist whose practice may be rooted in tradition, but his reaction to who and what he painted speaks more to our age. How we edit our own photos, present the best version of ourselves, would be recognised by Sargent. It wasn’t just the surfaces that Sargent was painting, but the dimensions of ourselves that clothes reveal: the psychology behind what we choose to show and conceal. Far from being superficial, the exhibition encourages us to appreciate the artist on a deeper level. In allowing us to get up close to Sargent, Exhibition on Screen identifies the reason for Sargent’s continuing popularity. He doesn’t just fulfil our expectations, he gives us more than we were expecting.
Exhibition on Screen: John Singer Sargent – Fashion and Swagger is screening at Plymouth Arts Cinema on Wed 24th and Sat 27th April.
Reviewed By Helen Tope
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