"A Street in Venice," John
Singer Sargent, circa 1880-82. Oil on canvas from the
collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Mass.
LOS ANGELES, CALIF. - The West Coast's first comprehensive
exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent opens at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on February 2.
"" explores the unique relationship between one of the best known
American artists and Italy, the country of his birth. The
extraordinary exhibition, which complements important works by
Sargent in LACMA's permanent collection, consists of more than 75
paintings that gives audiences an understanding of the enduring
significance of Italy to Sargent. The works will remain on view
through May 11.
Sargent is most famous for his grand manner portraits that
epitomize the elegance and glamour of international high society
at the end of the Nineteenth Century. But he began his career in
the late 1870s and early 1880s painting the island of Capri and
the hidden byways of Venice. Between 1897 and 1914, Sargent
traveled to Italy every year to paint his favorite subjects.
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate
American parents. The Sargents traveled through Europe
incessantly in pursuit of culture, returning most frequently to
Italy - an older country charged with classical culture, but also
warm and sensual. Land of the Renaissance, of the Medici, of
Leonardo and Michelangelo, Italy was also a land of color, or
uninhibited emotion and extravagance; shards of sensation that
feed the imagination of a visual artist. By the age of 12,
Sargent was sketching the artistic and scenic wonders of Italy.
He received his first systematic art instruction in Florence but
left in 1874 for training that one could obtain then only in
Paris. In 1878 he made his first visit to the United States,
where he claimed his American citizenship, and then embarked on
his first professional painting trip to Italy.
Sargent sought new subject matter in the peasant life of Naples
and Capri. "Head of a Capri Girl," 1878, is one of Sargent's
first major Italian works and one of the most significant of his
early views of Venice. The painting exemplifies Sargent's
attraction to the lesser-known parts and people of Venice and his
interest in realistically depicting the gritty physical details
of the Venetian environment. But in Paris, portraits were driving
Sargent's career. With the exception on one subsequent visit,
Sargent did not return to Italy until he had established himself
as the leading portrait painting in the English-speaking world.
In 1897, he came back to Italy. By now he had received a
prestigious commission for a mural at the Boston Public Library,
and his career had ascended in a perfect trajectory from genre
painter to society portrait painter to history painter and
muralist. The following year, Sargent was again in Venice, where
he painted Mrs Ralph Curtis. "Mrs Ralph Curtis," 1898, not only
represents the enticing glamour of some of Sargent's most
privileged clients and friends - Mrs Curtis was the wife of his
wealthy cousin whose family lived in the elaborate Palazzo
Barbaro on the Grand Canal - but also is the only full-length
formal portrait Sargent painted in Italy.
Of all the places in Italy Sargent traveled, Venice had perhaps
the largest share of his attention. The city fascinated Sargent
and was well suited to the watercolor medium in which he worked
most often in Italy. His use of vivid colors, brushwork that
varied from soft and fluid, to bold and dashing, and an
overwhelming sense of light and air characterize his Italian
scenes like "Scuola di San Rocco," 1903, and rank Sargent as one
of the finest watercolorists of all time.
Sargent always cast a fresh eye on the regular tourist subject.
In Venice, where the city's quintessential sight is of domes and
towers melting into the light, Sargent looked at doors and
foundations. He generally leaves enough detail for viewers to
identify the building - but only for someone truly knowledgeable
of Venice. His are never tourist views, a remarkable achievement
in a city processed by artists for the tourist market for 200
years.
Each summer Sargent returned to Italy where he painted
landscapes, genre scenes and portraits. In Italy, Sargent was at
home. His landscapes are populated mainly by family and friends.
He makes visible the vital hold that Italy had on all American
visitors - not simply the abstract ideal of history, but rather
the realm of the sensual, the special qualities of light, the
attention to uncomplicated pleasures of the table, the balmy air.
The Italian locales Sargent found himself drawn to were never
exactly those in the guidebooks. At Lake Garda, he found a small
fishing village, San Vigilio, on the unfashionable side of the
lake; in Florence he avoided the Pitti Palace and instead painted
the Boboli Gardens behind it; in the Alps, he stepped well off
the beaten track.
At the very edge of Italy, high in the Alps, Sargent posed the
young men and women among his family and friends in exotic
costumes, toying with the conventions of both portraiture and
exoticism. These are perhaps his most extraordinary and daring
works, short of his virtually abstract landscape paintings.
"Dolce Far Niente," circa 1907, is one of the greatest examples
of Sargent's interest in exotic themes. The cashmere shawl seen
in "Women Reclining," 1911, was the luxurious Eastern garment
Sargent most frequently used to costume his female relatives so
that he might study the shawl's remarkable drape, folds and
patterns and especially the female figure in repose.
Sargent's Italian landscapes generally evoke the world of people,
a social and sensual matrix. Even when the scene is devoid of
figures and almost abstract, he captures a world of sensation as
it is registered not just by the eyes, but by the body as a
whole: light as warmth, color as taste and texture. This is one
reason why Italy is such a responsive subject, enhancing all of
Sargent's best qualities - and the reason why Italy remained a
part of Sargent from the moment of his birth.
"" will begin with Sargent's works from Capri and Venice and then
present works from the Alps, including his well-known cashmere
series. Visitors will then view works created in Carrara and San
Vigilio, watercolors and oils depicting gardens in Tuscany and
Rome, as well as paintings of art and architecture. There is then
a return to works created in Venice and the exhibition closes
with portraits created while the artist was vacationing in Italy.
"" is accompanied by an edited color catalog and with an
introduction by LACMA curator Bruce Robertson, with essays by
Jane Dini, Ilene Susan Fort, Stephanie L. Herdrich, R.W.B. Lewis
and Richard Ormond.
This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art and Ferrara Art. The tour schedule following LACMA includes
the Denver Art Museum, June 28 through September 21.
"" is a specially ticketed exhibition. Price of admission
includes entrance to the exhibition "Ansel Adams at 100." Adult
ticket prices range from $10 to $15 and go on sale in January.
For information 323-857-6000, or visit www.lacma.org.
