Word: sargent
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...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...
...born in Florence, the son of intensely Europhile parents (his father was a New England doctor, his mother a clinging neurasthenic who couldn't bear the crude culture of her birthplace). The Sargents were not rich, but they moved from one roost to another--Rome, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, the Austrian Tyrol--for the first 18 years of their son's life. All he retained of America was his passport and some traces of accent; yet he held onto both until his death. Sargent's relation to America was neither resentful nor yearning, as it is with so many expatriates...
...1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds of a black dress or the petals...
...lessons of Velazquez's Las Meninas, which Sargent had copied in the Prado, sank very deep into his style and would produce curious effects tinged with melancholy, like the brilliant early portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit--four slightly alienated-looking moppets, their white pinafores gleaming in a cavern of bourgeois shadow...