Sargent and Spain — Spirituality, Sun, and Ripe Pomegranates

The National Gallery of Art triumphs with this stunner of a show on the great John Singer Sargent.

O n Thursday, I wrote the first of a two-part story on Sargent and Spain, the wonderful new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Sargent did about 220 paintings, watercolors, and drawings depicting Spanish subjects, and visited the country on seven long trips as an adult. He first went as a 23-year-old in 1879. His principal art professor in Paris, Carolus-Duran, pressed his students to study Velázquez, so it’s no surprise that Sargent spent lots of his time in Madrid at the Prado copying work by Velázquez but also El Greco and Goya. The artist’s exploration of their palette, use of tone, and handling of paint was a lifelong lodestar.

Sargent was always passionate about music and dance. He didn’t spend all his time on his 1879 trip as a Velázquez fanboy. He fell in love with flamenco. Sargent and Spain delivers two crackling galleries on his flamenco paintings.

These alone are a treat. After 1879, though, Sargent waited until 1892 to go back to Spain. The ’80s were busy, even frantic times for Sargent. After delivering hit after hit in the Paris art world in the early ’80s, Madame X, at the same time slinky and ghastly, upset the art establishment. Sargent has never been so pelted with garbage. He wasn’t forced to flee, but flee he did, to London, in 1884, setting up shop there as a high-society portraitist.

We learn that after La Carmencita, in 1890, a large, full-length portrait of a famous Spanish dancer, Sargent never painted Spanish dance again. During his later trips to Spain, he focused on scenes of everyday life, architecture, and religious themes. Sargent and Spain delivers a needed interlude in the next gallery, and that’s fine. After two galleries of flamenco art, a reflective pause was good. In one of the many lovely touches in the show, an 1894 film of a dancing Carmencita shows that she was a whirling, twirling, sizzling sensation.

Sargent always had art-making on his mind, even when he was on vacation. A gallery on Sargent, architecture, and gardens reveals Sargent the dabbler, painting architectural details and arrangements of flowers that aren’t compelling but attracted him. Spanish light was entirely different from the light in his London studio or the light in the Cotswolds. It’s far more intense. It illuminates but also delivers deeper shadows.

The gallery treats Sargent’s architecture studies from a few of his trips. Well Head with Kufic Inscription is a small watercolor from a private collection. Sargent saw it in Toledo’s archaeological museum during his 1879 trip. It’s a 14th-century object — a cover for a well to keep water clean — made from teal-colored glazed ceramic and elaborately embellished with braids, knots, and Arabic script.

Sargent didn’t paint it for the marketplace. He painted it for himself, to be filed away as an intriguing motif, maybe to reappear in a finished studio oil painting, maybe not. Sargent loved the Alhambra, the Moorish caliphs’ palace for women in Granada. Pointed arches, elaborate, flat geometric patterns, and tile together created a look he couldn’t find in London or Paris, certainly, and not in Venice, either.

One of the high points for me was an inspired gallery depicting everyday peasant and working-class life in southern Spain. Women at Work, Spanish Roma Dwelling, and Hospital at Granada, all from 1912, are in a row on one wall. Hospital at Granada comes to the show from a museum in Melbourne, Australia, while Women at Work is in a private collection and Spanish Roma Dwelling is from the Addison Gallery in out-of-the-way Andover, Mass. There’s so much to say about this gallery. These three, for instance, are on a wall opposite Sierra Nevada, also from 1912. It’s, for Sargent, a rare, grand panoramic landscape. It shows mountains near Granada. So we see scenes of everyday life as well as the vast landscape they occupy.

The National Gallery, a creature of Washington, is naturally on our Oppression Olympics Team. The Roma in Spain, we learn in this gallery, are the newest poster children. The Roma “have been oppressed, marginalized, and subjected to painful stereotypes,” we’re told, and I’m sure that’s true. “While Sargent’s portrayals are generally more sympathetic . . . he would not have fully understood the experiences of the Roma community.” The museum convened a Roma advisory group to help here with the wall texts.

Responding to Spanish Roma Dwelling, one member of the group composed a label that’s an “imaginary letter” to his family back in Sacromonte in southern Spain. “I become angry,” he writes, “when non-Roma people romanticize poverty,” referring, I think, to Sargent’s presentation of innocent rustics happy with their dog, caves, baskets, and donkeys. He resents “the versions of our history made by others.”

I think it’s not the end of the world to convene community groups, though I wonder how much they know about Roma life in pre-1900 Spain or about Sargent. Of course, Sargent would not have understood the experiences of the Roma community. He was a tourist. Sargent also wasn’t empathetic. He saw his subjects — animal, mineral, or vegetable — as motifs. He’s an art-for-art’s-sake guy. He’s not Ben Shahn. He’s not a sociologist, and he’s hardly a realist.

If the “imaginary letter” writer, a man who’s a theater director, art historian, and human-rights and Roma activist, drops a grievance stink bomb, the exhibition has to explore it. Otherwise, it’s tiresome and trite.

I know something about Spanish Roma Dwelling, since it hung in my office off and on when I was the Addison director. It’s a scene of peasant life, about which Sargent knew nothing and about which he cared not a whit. The label the curators wrote, not the “imaginary letter,” correctly notes his interest in patterns: the rock-strewn ground, the rough façade of the dwelling, and polka dots and striped textiles.

In 1909, Sargent made his famous “no mo’ pawtrates” declaration. He painted a few after this and did lists of charcoal portraits, but lots of his work depicted everyday life. Unbound as he was by the conventions of aristocratic portraits, he painted people lying on the ground, doing physical labor, legs and arms akimbo, children acting goofy, and a man showing off his donkey’s teeth. Mosquito Nets, from 1908, in the next gallery, is another example. It’s a scene of his sister and one of her friends reading, their heads encased in black mosquito nets. I don’t think many millionaires, dukes, or even random countesses would have wanted Sargent depicting them so adorned.

Sargent’s interest in patterns is a new, more modern Sargent. Though Velázquez and Goya painted patterns, mostly in the costumes their subjects wore, Sargent paints patterns of natural, intense sunlight and patterns of random surfaces. Women at Work is a great example. The tour de force in Spanish Roma Dwelling is the basket weaving. When Sargent copied Velázquez’s Fable of Arachne in 1879, he didn’t paint Arachne’s spinning wheel in furious motion. Painting motion that blurs is hard. Velázquez did it. More than 30 years later, Sargent tackled it, too, in painting a basket weaver working at warp speed. Hospital at Granada shows everyday life in a distinguished Renaissance-era hospital so it’s people and architecture.

Mosquito Nets is one of a dozen delightful treats in a gallery of art Sargent made in Majorca in 1908. Just as Sargent and Spain jolted us in moving from the Prado, where Sargent copied Old Masters, to the flamenco dance hall, the show goes from arid Andalusia and peasant life to water, the tropics, lush flowers and fruit, and bourgeois leisure. It’s brilliant. Good curators know how to keep us from getting bored or stuck.

Majorcan Fisherman and Group of Convalescent Soldiers look at us directly and with poise, confidence, and curiosity. Yes, Sargent painted lots of good-looking young women, but invariably he was paid to do it. The good-looking young men tend to get their portraits painted for free. Dense pictures of blossoms, gourds, and pomegranates still on their trees merge still life and landscape. Many of these things are in private collections.

The last gallery in the exhibition considers what has to be Sargent’s magnum opus: the murals at the Boston Public Library. Even Sargent aficionados don’t think about them much since they’re so, well, not the Sargent we think we know. Since they’re murals, they don’t travel. Called “The Triumph of Religion,” the mural project makes Sargent an eminent though overlooked religious painter. And he spent nearly 30 years working on them, having won the commission in 1890 and finishing it in 1919. Sargent’s known for portraits, and even the full-length swagger portraits of aristocrats were meant for private consumption. The murals are huge works of public art.

The gallery is smashingly beautiful, with a high ceiling, a dark color, and double hangings so we feel we’re in the vaulted space in Boston where the murals still live. I commend the curators for integrating the BPL murals into the show. They’re essential ingredients to studies of Sargent of any depth. Sargent certainly drew from motifs from his Spanish travels but only here and there. He collected Spanish architectural photographs in depth. I think, in terms of style, the murals are indebted to Spanish painted sculpture, especially wood sculpture. The Spanish retablo, for instance, was the default feature of medieval Spanish altarpieces, and here the figures are in heavy relief and painted.

Chloe Sharpe’s catalogue essay, “Sensuality and Spirituality,” makes a good case for Sargent’s attraction to the aesthetics of Spanish Catholicism, which develop a mournful, rigid feel. Sargent was irreligious but, culturally, saw Spanish Catholicism as overly indebted to superstition. None of Sharpe’s good observations make it to the show that the public sees. I think the NGA didn’t relish yet another community-sensitivity group.

The catalogue is gorgeous, and the essays are good. The topic of Spanish influence on the art of Britain, France, and America has been well covered but only in the past 25 years or so. The topic’s never exhausted, though. The NGA, as always, looks fantastic. The main floor fountain is decorated for Christmas in an orchestra of poinsettia. The exhibition schedule shows not much sign of PC pollution, sensitivity groups and grasps at victim studies aside. There’s a Carpaccio show on view now and an exhibition on Canova on the docket. The Philip Guston retrospective, which I reviewed at the MFA, is slated for next year, but I’m told it’s going to be very different at each venue. I looked at the NGA’s recent acquisitions. They’re very strong. The place got a Leonardo drawing as a gift a couple of weeks ago. It’s a balanced acquisitions program, as it should be.

It’s too bad Sargent and Spain didn’t get José Gutiérrez Solana’s Carnival in a Village, from between 1917 and 1920, which Sargent owned and displayed in his London home. It’s a fantastic scene of the village procession in which locals, from children to old people, wear masks, some of skulls, some of goats, all just creepy. It’s a medley of browns, cream, and greens, painted in thick impasto with the figures outlined in black. Solana lived in Madrid and was part of a circle of artists that included Zuloaga. It’s a mystical scene, both heavy and sad, and suggests a Spain stuck in the past.

Solana seems to be a Spanish Symbolist immersed also in Goya. I was surprised to see Sargent owning something so weird and modern but had never really thought about how he decorated his home. Sargent also was instrumental in introducing El Greco to American museum audiences. He pushed the MFA in Boston to buy El Greco’s Portrait of Fray Hortencio Félix Paravacino in 1904. It was the first El Greco to enter an American public collection.

El Greco, who died in 1614, was seen as a regional artist, a very good one but not esteemed beyond Toledo. It was Sargent as well as a few art historians and German Expressionist artists who found in him a painter of Spanish soulfulness whose long, twisted figures and acid colors seemed modern. It seems logical to include the Paravicino portrait, but it might have been seen as a tangent too far. Sargent and Spain is, after all, focused on what the artist experienced and recorded in his travels.

Sargent and Spain is a great show. There are so many rarely seen, beautiful, and provocative objects from private or far-off collections. What a triumph!