Sargent’s “Madame X” was originally appreciated as the object of scandal, and so it was and remains, but also reveals the complex relationship between husbands and wives in the Gilded Age and also the opening of what would become glamor photography.
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Commentators regard the scandal that was associated with the first appearance of John Singer Sargent’s painting “Madame X” as a sign of Gilded Age prudery. After all, the straps on her dress were rather narrow and Sargent had tried to repair the image by painting in a second strap. All that had been shown was her bare shoulders. It is a clue that Sargent is hopelessly middle brow, entertaining only conventional images to satisfy a bourgeois taste and so is like Norman Rockwell, who could also be appreciated as humor for the uneducated viewer rather than deep in meaning as was the case with Sargent’s contemporary Kliest who made dresses part of the background and so reconceived clothing as an existential experience as well as a fresh vision.
But think again. “Madame X” is indeed and remains scandalous and not just because it portrays a respectable and recognizable figure for her slightly risque dress but because it was and remains titillating. That is because the viewer has a sense of the subject as being in her body and presenting her body to the viewer. What Sargent is presenting is pornography with people with their clothes on, forcing you to consider the union and contradiction of personhood and body, which is as existential a matter as it gets and so an object of art rather than just a distraction.
Look at the painting closely. Looking at it recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I was struck by its whitish skin, revealed best in the actual canvas, and so noted by a placard placed next to it. Also to be noticed is the ripple of flesh at the neck which suggests that Madame X is turning away from the plane of the viewer and has the suggestion of a come hither look that combines but contradicts her hauteur, and is a very attractive way in which a woman can pose herself. So there is more to her presence tham bare shoulders and upper chest. She is meant to be alluring. I noticed some more things when looking at leisure at a photograph of the painting, Look at her hands. They are clutched as if in tension and holding tight to objects as if it were a strain to maintain her pose. So her posture indicates that it is hard work to seem graceful. One of her hands clutches part pof her carefully draped dress where the light allows for different aspects of the very black dress. The dress and not just the contrasting shoulders is important.
The same is true of other of Sargent’s elegant ladies. These portraits make them aware of their bodies under their clothes, that they are all naked under their clothes, a continuing presence ever since Adam and Eve became modest when they ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, which is about moral enlightenment rather than scientific knowledge. The compilers of “Genesis” were only concerned with moral knowledge and Sargent is specifying this long lasting moral tension between what is animal, which means, among other things, given to lust, and what is social and human, which is the display of personality and the coexistence of the two. Isn’t that metaphysical enough?
The catalog at the Met said that later on in his long life, Sargent thought that Madame X was his best painting. I would demure. Lady Agnew and Mrs. Swinton are more elegantly dressed and have more colors and more interesting faces than Madame X. What the artist in Sargent was saying was how much he could achieve with minimum resources: just a black dress and a conventional female stance and an intricate pose. He got a big bang with little resources, and so that might have leased his artistic frugality. “Madame X” certainly made an impression.
Dr. Pozzi at Home, John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925), 1881.
Oil on canvas. The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Moreover, by the time of “Madame X, Sargent had already done some remarkable portraits that could have certified his reputation. One is “Dr. Pozzi at Home” which was painted in 1882, two years before “Madame X”, and it is intriguing. Dr. Pozzi was a gynecologist and art collector, and so critics think his slender hands and red as blood eobe showed his occupation, but that I think is overreaching, Sargent’s not an age of iconography. Sargent is a realist who paints people accurately. Dr. Pozzi had slender hands and all his red robe tells is that he was a bit flamboyant. Nor should it be read into him that he is satanic because of his carefully groomed short beard. All it shows is that he is well turned out and meticulous and perhaps maybe a dandy. He is particular rather than symbolic.
Rather than looking back at iconography to get Sargent right, look forward. Sargent is accused of being slick rather than depthful. He does not get into the hearts of people as in Rembrandt or Velasquez, Instead he is glossy, his women, like Madame X, overly posed and glamorous as well as haughty and so the presentation is of its own kind of stylization that goes beyond realism. And that is true because Sargent is inventing a style that would come to dominate glossy photography that adorned the covers of fashion magazines like Vogue. His women are the celebrities of the age before there were movie stars to play that role. Think of Sargent as precursor of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who also made striking and elaborate and carefully posed women, even sometimes highlighting the blackness of the tone to establish striking images, as is the case with “Madame X”. Think of Penn’s 1950 cover of Vogue with the model of Jean Patchett. That photo, like “Madame X”, dressed the model in black and was very striking. The goal is not to make the woman all too human, cries to humanity, however distinctive Sargent’s portraits may well be, but elevated out of the dross, elevated into admiration and a higher way of life and so an escape from realism while remaining exact. This is a fresh combination.
Black & White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), New York, Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009), 1950 (printed 1968).
Platinum-palladium print. The Art Institute of Chicago.
It is not easy to describe accurately the relation of the women to the men who pay for the portraits of their wives, It would be a simplification to think women were chattel, meat on the hoof, prized like a horse or a great gem, shown off for their beauty and objects of conspicuous consumption, like trophy wives, Even looking at the relationship is economic, wives and daughters as property, then they are wealtheather than income in that they are not easily converted into cash, but husbands a stabile part of their way of life, like an estate, and in that case, a qualitative indicator of money rather than a quantitative one wherein there is a numerical evaluation of exactly how many dollars are owned, Rather, the measure is crude; you are rich or filthy rich or stratospherically rich and listed on the Forbes list of billionaires or lesser down making significant contributions to the “PBS Newshour’’
More accurately, wives are wives, which means married, which is a social role whereby wives can do what wives can do. They can nag their husbands, and can develop and deliver cutting remarks to men in ways the women know the men to be vulnerable. They can be cold or even withheld sexual favors and risk being thought of as a cad if the husband persists. Women can spend money to adorn their homes and apartments and make their establishments and people well turned out. They can provide solace aside from whatever other people are around. The wife of the President redecorates the White House, accompanies him to Paris for formal meetings, and is present when he leaves his hair down. The same is true of the women portrayed by Sargent. The kind of person the wife is the subject of attention, not the person who paid for the painting.
That view of portraits of loved ones is therefore, for Sargent, is deeply conservative because he is thinking of wives as parts of family, that understood as a stable and long lived part of social structure even though, obviously enough, the nature of families do evolve very slowly over time and are recognizable in the “Odyssey” and “Genesis”. The family is bedrock even if women are unreliable, also known in “Genesis” and the “Odyssey” because of how they can alter their passions, as every one of those Sargent paintings attest, always available to burst out of their seams.Yes, the women have both breeding and genes. But they also have independence, seen in their faces and posture. You don’t know what they will do next.
Critics rather than viewers may be able to articulate such matters while a viewer may only have a sense of why a painting, for that matter, a play o a political argument can be emotionally gripping and troublesome. That is the way it is with the arts: people are moved for reasons not unclear. The artwork operates more directly and asks for consideration as to why it evokes what it does even if it eludes the answer or presents a partial unfolding or explanation as why Hamlet seems a fop worth thinking about, just like Willy Loman who is afterall just a salesman. A personality is in there and personalities are embedded in women just being women and somehow for reasons of instinct and convention somehow different from men.The thing about all of the arts is that they develop a sense of what a pater of words feel like, how they alter people as well as how people lookaside from the explanations, offered in words, of what they are really about.
“Madame X” is an example of notorious art. Some works of art create such consternation that the heated rejection of the work of art is a part of artistic history. It applies to novels such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”,”Ulysses”, and “Lolita”, and to Stravinsky’s “The Rites of Spring”, whose initial performance was the occasion of a riot. “Madame X” was the start of a period of censorious response to art that lasted through “Deep Throat”, which was never treated as a work of art and continues through cleaning out “Heather Has Two Mommies” from school libraries. Significant in these causes celebres is that they are all about transgressive or overt sex, which suggests the ability to unsettle works of art because sex is so elemental and counter morality even if it is part of life, as the story of Adam and Eve suggests when they went modest. Any scintillation is daring, evokes a response, while politically charged novels and plays and paintings, such as Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Vonnegut’s “SlaughterHouse Five” and Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” and Picasso’s “Guernica” or the song does not earn outrage just rejection or earns admiration as just another way of doing art. “Strange Fruit” was just a Communist protest song about lynching and no riots ensued. So notorious art is cheaply earned and also always available and provocative and awaits its next occurrence.
Notorious art is inherently amoral in that it doesn’t violate a particular custom or obligation as is the case when a person becomes a traitor or murderer or an adulterer. It violates the idea of norm by saying in particular lust is beyond norms, not to be subject to norms. The opposite of a notorious work of art is the Hallmark movie where people can comfortably fit into their social settings even if the couple have different social backgrounds. A woman’s car breaks down and the man who rescues her brings her into his family and all of them see her as a fitting spouse and before long she finds herself in love with the unproblematic hunk. No stress; no mess.
But sexuality is always transgressive because it responds to its own imperative rather than the social order however women in particul;ar are placed within the social order. Mrs. Swinton is attractive even if that is enhanced with her clothes and makeup and manner. The sexual person resides within the social world and so is unpredictable and dangerous. She is formidable rather than sweet. She has the power of womanhood. Think of that portrayal of sex as very different from what is available in Hallmark movies of romance. In those oft repeated and attractive stories an eligible man and woman meet not even cute like in in +Sleepless in Seattle” and because of, lets say, her car getting mired in the road and a handsome man comes by and the two are ever curious and they come to his family ranch where she is asked to stay and everyone in the family loves her. Including his own child and there are no strains that might make the couple party and the couple lives happily ever after. Sex is just part of the ensemble, while in Sargent sex is a distinct part of the ensemble.