John Singer Sargent & Chicago’s Gilded Age

Although recent scholarship has uncovered new and interesting dimensions to John Singer Sargent’s art, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that, for all his prodigious talent, Sargent was never much more than a gun for hire. [1] He courted wealth and his services were, in return, widely courted. Although he painted some publicly minded murals and genuinely experimental street scenes, his reputation continues to rest on his portraits of aristocrats, tycoons, and the nouveau riche from Europe to the United States. This ill-timed show at the Art Institute, built around the faltering conceit that Sargent and Chicago mattered to each other, does nothing to shake the idea of the painter as Gilded Age apologist. Despite some intriguing pairings and a lucid, well-researched catalogue, it lurches from misstep to misstep.

Born into a wealthy American expatriate family, Sargent trained under the French specialist in high-society portraiture Charles Auguste Émile Durand (known familiarly as Carolus-Duran). He came to notice for his artful presentation of beauty, a French critic declaring in the early 1880s that “all pretty women dream…of being painted by him.” [2] This period is represented in the Art Institute’s exhibition by a full-length portrait of Louise Lefevre from 1882 which exemplifies some of Sargent’s unconventional strategies, not yet developed into a signature style. Loose brushwork suggests the walls and furnishings of a dark interior, contrasting powerfully with the delicate modeling of the subject’s hands and features; a virtuosic set of slashes and shadows highlight the sumptuous folds and fabric of Lefevre’s blue dress; the strong white light complemented by the gathered curtains curiously overshadows the subject’s face; the composition is radically asymmetric; and the reflective glass in the upper left hints at the influence of artists like Diego Velázquez who, more than anyone before Manet, made the painted canvas a machine for examining the philosophical dimensions of looking.

Nineteenth-century portraiture generally functioned as a conservative genre, not only in the sense that it flourished as a form of conspicuous consumption by bourgeois and aristocratic elites, but also in the way it relied on well-established visual codes of class and gender to portray sitters. But where his teacher followed the customary formulas of the day, the young Sargent didn’t. His full-length portrait of Virginie Avegno Gautreau, known provocatively as Madame X, caused a real stir for its transgression of social mores. (The shock didn’t last; when the Friends of American Art tried to buy the painting for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913, its erotic frankness would have lost its frisson in a world of newly ordered gender relations, and its commitment to figuration would have looked passé in light of the gauntlet recently thrown down by the Cubists.) Four Venetian genre scenes on display, small studies that ably showcase the artist’s eye for color, underscore the fact that Sargent’s work from the early 1880s had started to rearrange a whole host of received conventions.

But the bulk of paintings and charcoals in the exhibition were made after this period, and they demonstrate how his ambitions shrank. A dour portrait of Philadelphia millionaire Peter Widener from 1902 shows none of Sargent’s earlier painterly verve or gender-bending iconography. The few loose, black brushmarks overlaying the coat of his seated portrait of John D. Rockefeller from 1917 look like the forlorn vestiges of a forgotten heterodoxy. While Gilded Age millionaires did often patronize experimental art—the president of the American Sugar Refinery was lending the latest Impressionist pieces from his collection to the National Academy even as he brutally crushed strikes at his company’s factories—the show makes it clear that Sargent’s work began to reflect a certain kind of conservative taste as well as the financial arrangements that made his career possible. [3] A lifelong friend of industrialists such as machinery tycoon Charles Deering, whose 1876 portrait is on view, Sargent painted in sympathy with capital.

This sympathy is displayed even more garishly in Sargent’s paintings that aren’t straightforward, commissioned portraits. A Chicago millionaire bought The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, and it became the first of Sargent’s works to enter the collection of the Art Institute in 1914. A sterling example of the painter’s wet-in-wet technique, it shows the English artist Wilfrid de Glehn and his American wife Jane, also an accomplished painter. Jane daubs at her canvas while her mustachioed husband reclines, eyes closed. This is the very picture of indolence, of two Anglo-American expatriates living on unearned wealth (de Glehn was the son of the Prussian aristocrat Robert von Glehn), of art as a pleasant pastime ennobled by the social status of its practitioners and patrons. Charles Deering himself took time off from his business concerns to paint seriously, and the show’s climax comes with Sargent’s deceptively casual depiction of Deering at the lavish Florida estate where he wintered. The elderly industrialist reclines in a cane chair, surrounded by palms and bathed in sun. In her catalogue essay, the show’s curator Annelise Madsen notes that the portrait was “undertaken informally as a result of the enduring bonds of friendship” shared by painter and sitter, with Sargent stopping off at the estate for a time after filling a commission from Rockefeller. [4] In spite of its dearth of critical framing, this exhibition shows, damningly, how the artist’s cozy relationship with the Gilded Age elite determined not just what he painted but also how he painted.

Madsen should at least be commended for not trying to shuffle Sargent’s sympathies out of view. If Chicago and Sargent really were connected during the Gilded Age, as the exhibition’s advertising copy proclaims, it could only be through the wants and wallets of the city’s superrich. (Much of the wall text quietly omits any mention of Chicago rather than risk straining the viewer’s credulity; Sargent only made two brief visits.) His collectors included Martin A. Ryerson, son of a lumber baron and famously the richest man in Chicago, and Charles Hutchinson, who notoriously cornered the market in wheat in 1888 while serving as the Art Institute’s president. These patrons wanted Sargent’s paintings both as pawns in their game of civic humanism, buying up art to display to Midwestern audiences in dire need of aesthetic education, and as testaments to their elevated status. The catalogue, which I suspect will prove indispensable to future analyses of fin-de-siècle art’s complicity with capital, carefully chronicles the ways these elite figures supported Sargent and put his paintings to use.

Of course, few issues are more timely than the relationship between art and capital, except perhaps the relationship between money and power. As the American political scene witnesses a retrenchment of anti-labor laws, soaring inequality, and the stunning convergence of business interests with elected office, it’s vital to revisit the legacy of the last Gilded Age when, as Alan Trachtenberg describes in a classic study, “an emergent form of ownership,” defined by power “distributed inwardly along hierarchical lines and outwardly in new social configurations and cultural perspectives,” spun society on its axis. [5] Chicago, roiled by police violence and corporate corruption, perfectly illustrated these new distributions of power and Sargent’s patrons like Deering, Hutchinson, and Ryerson perfectly illustrated these new kinds of owners. None of this social context appears in the exhibition, leaving attentive viewers to conclude that Sargent’s artworks probably functioned as prostheses of Chicago’s business elite but equipping them with no tools to make sense of what this might have meant. You’d be forgiven for leaving with a decidedly rosy image of the Gilded Age, a time of ruffles and ironic sailor hats.

A close reading of the Art Institute’s advertising campaign and ticketing policies for the show demonstrates that the museum means to celebrate this reading of art as luxury good, construing Sargent’s paintings as desirable commodities first and transparent visions of aristocratic life second. The show’s advertising apparatus is shockingly amenable to the forms of the ideology critique advanced by postwar theorists like Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, and Raymond Williams, so much so that baffled friends texted me photographs of promotional posters for weeks, together with snippets from Mythologies. [6] Store windows on Michigan Avenue currently feature Sargent-inspired displays, from Bloomingdale’s to the Marriott to AT&T, with Macy’s perhaps the most outstanding offender. A pop-up bar at the Chicago Athletic Association featured a special event for pet owners: “Commissioned paintings during the Gilded Age weren’t always of moguls and divas, but also of beagles and dachshunds,” crowed the Facebook description, inviting the public to register by providing a pet photo that could be turned into a greyscale printed canvas. Dogs, owners, canvases, and “custom palettes” were invited to gather for cocktails.

And finally, Sargent’s distinctive portraits are covered with quotes culled from pop culture and plastered all over. Each iteration merits careful attention for the way it puts the elite art of the past in dialogue with the pseudo-democratic Öffentlichkeit of the internet. An Instagram ad overlays a woman’s stately head with the slogan “Yaaaaas Queen” and captions it with the words “OUTFIT OF THE DAY” and three fire emojis. The phrase, originating in queer communities of color, has now devolved to a form of digital blackface, part of a lexicon freely used by straight white consumers of popular culture. [7] “Gold Is the New Black” accompanies a detail from La Carmencita, an unsubtle allusion to the Netflix drama that chronicles life in a woman’s prison. “Damn Daniel” overlays the head of Sargent’s portrait of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ ten-year-old son, referencing the popular meme in which one Californian teen compliments another. The marketing campaign trades on the fact that conspicuous consumption is a major form of public entertainment these days (think of Rich Kids of Instagram, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the obsession with royal weddings), and that such entertainment depends on fantasies about participation; when the media reported that Kylie Jenner was close to becoming a billionaire, her fans tried to crowdfund an extra $100 million to push her over the edge. While the popular literature of Sargent’s Gilded Age saw an explosion of rags-to-riches tales, trading on the fantasy of becoming rich, these documents of our new Gilded Age ironize the impossibility of social transformation. I’ll never be a millionaire, but I can gorge myself on Kim Kardashian’s most intimate moments and debate the merits of her extravagant purse purchases. By analogizing the luxurious lives of Chicago’s bygone elites to the contemporary spectacle of inequality, and by analogizing the format of painting to the eminently accessible world of social media, these promotional images naturalize exploitation in the past and present alike.

“Promotion,” as the critic Harold Rosenberg presciently observed in 1968, “has become the vital center of aesthetic discourse.” [8] The advertising campaign supplies a dominant interpretive context for the show, filling the vacuum opened by the bland wall text and turning Sargent’s paintings into nostalgic icons—to borrow John Vlach’s felicitous description of plantation imagery—of wealth. [9] Nonmembers pay a hefty additional charge to enter the show, on top of the museum’s standard entrance fee which runs to twenty-five dollars for an out-of-state adult, despite the healthy array of corporate sponsors and the distinct lack of blockbuster loans that usually drive up special exhibition prices. (I set aside La Carmencita, lent by the Musée d’Orsay, which could only be called “blockbuster” if you squint hard.) There’s something deeply unsettling, in the era of President Trump, about asking Chicagoans to pony up extra cash to inspect a set of luxury commodities that aggrandized, and were owned by, the opulent figures who profited so handsomely off the working poor a century ago. But this demand squares neatly with the ideology underlying the marketing campaign; the middle class should fund and enjoy the spectacle of their own subjection.

Let me be clear. I’m not criticizing the Art Institute for capitulating to the pressures that all institutions face in the neoliberal age. As Matti Bunzl notes in his ethnography of the contemporary art museum, instead of seeing a “failure of nerve” in these nakedly anti-intellectual, ostensibly democratizing moves, we should probably see “a set of strategies devised to persist through a particular economic and cultural moment.” [10] Museums have to survive. But the Art Institute has made a damning set of choices about how to display and market Sargent’s work, which, the admirably historicist catalogue aside, rehearse a set of neoliberal commitments to the primacy of capital and exalt the old order of wealth.

August, 2018