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Created: March 23, 2003
Latest Update: March 23, 2003
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Backup of Sargent's Mistake (Or Maybe Not)
By Miles Unger
SOURCE: New York Times
Copyright: Source Copyright.
Included here under Fair Use Doctrine for teaching purposes.

March 23, 2003
Sargent's Mistake (Or Maybe Not)
By MILES UNGER

BOSTON

FEW successful artists have tried to reinvent themselves in midcareer as completely as John Singer Sargent did. In 1890, at the height of his fame as a society portraitist, he accepted an offer by the architect Charles McKim to paint a series of murals for the soon-to-be-completed Boston Public Library. Here was a chance to prove that he was no artistic lightweight, but a deep thinker in the heroic tradition of Michelangelo and Raphael.

Over the next 30 or so years Sargent largely abandoned his lucrative portraiture business to refashion himself as a master of monumental narratives. The resulting work, "The Triumph of Religion," was a sweeping history of faith with all the tawdry grandeur and over-the-top effects of a Cecil B. DeMille film. This epic synthesis drew on sources as diverse as ancient Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, Byzantine mosaics and scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Style clashes with style as supernatural creatures like the bull-headed god Moloch and the serpent-entwined goddess Astarte keep company with more mundane figures that reveal Sargent's gift for realistic portraiture. For all its monumental sweep, there is something of the costume drama in all this, as if these were actors in some theatrical pageant.

Sargent also pushed the limits of his own considerable technical expertise, incorporating sculptural relief elements and daring formal experiments, like the costume jewelry and bits of commercial fabric affixed to some of the panels. This vast multimedia extravaganza bore no resemblance to the elegant easel paintings for which he was known, and that was more or less the point. It was on the basis of these ambitious murals that he hoped future generations would judge him.

The verdict was not long in coming, and it was not favorable. Despite the public's initial enthusiasm, by the time Sargent died in 1925 critics had largely dismissed his magnum opus as a misguided effort. The critic Roger Fry wrote in 1926, "Perhaps no considerable painter was ever less gifted by nature for such an undertaking," while Bernard Berenson concluded, "As `murals' I know of nothing less appropriate to their walls than his in the Boston Public Library." This harsh judgment was followed by the work's physical deterioration and gradual fading from view, lost beneath an obscuring veil of soot and an equally impenetrable veil of critical neglect.

As often happens, history is reversing itself, and Sargent's murals seem poised to command our attention once again. Their dilapidated physical condition will soon be transformed through a major restoration by Harvard University's Straus Center for Conservation, which hopes to return the works to their original state by early next year. Viewers can follow along online at www.sargentmurals.bpl.org/imagesection /index.html, and the conservators will soon install a Webcam that the public can operate inside a kiosk at the site.

The process of reclaiming the canvases from critical obscurity is already well under way. A 1998 Sargent exhibition, organized by the Tate Gallery in London, gave unprecedented prominence to the works, and Sally Promey's 1999 "Painting Religion in Public" was the first book devoted to the murals.

Many explanations can be offered for the neglect of the library canvases, not the least of which is their difficult and obscure theme. Even when the paint was still wet, their religious subject matter was becoming increasingly out of step with the times and contrary to the ideals of a civic institution meant to serve a diverse community. That he should have haplessly stumbled into such a minefield was typical of Sargent who, though by all accounts a mild-mannered man, frequently found himself embroiled in controversy (witness the scandal over the 1884 exhibition in Paris of his provocative "Madame X" portrait).

Sargent conceived his project in terms of a natural evolution from pagan superstition to the moral teachings of the Jews, then from a dogmatic brand of Christianity to a more liberal and personal form of faith. According to Ms. Promey this reflected a conventional late-19th century positivism that identified religious evolution with the triumphant march of civilization itself.

But tying religion to progress was bound to offend those whose beliefs were depicted as mere steppingstones in the upward climb of the human spirit. For a while Sargent managed to navigate dangerous waters, but when in 1919 he installed two panels personifying the institutions of Church and Synagogue, he offended many people by his depiction of the latter as a blindfolded old woman.

Sargent was taken aback by the controversy. "I am in hot water with the Jews," he complained, "who resent my `Synagogue,' and want to have it removed."

Sargent's defensiveness stemmed in part from his conviction that his murals represented an open-minded and tolerant attitude. "He tried to put his story together in a way that he thought was modern, appropriate to a modern pluralistic society," Ms. Promey said. While noting that Sargent was on good personal terms with his many Jewish patrons, she concluded that he "can justifiably be accused of gross cultural blindness and insensitivity."

The furor was such that in 1922 a bill to remove the offending panel was brought before the state legislature, which passed it only to reverse itself two years later. By then Sargent seems to have lost faith in the project. The final panel, which Sargent believed was central to his conception, was to have shown the Sermon on the Mount but was never completed.

Sargent's initial insensitivity, followed by a retreat into dignified silence, reveals a man who was increasingly out of step with his times. It is startling to note that these backward-looking works were emerging from his London studio at the same moment Picasso was painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon"; even Sargent's contemporaries, like his friend Monet, seemed to be living in a different world. While Monet was painting his garden at Giverney, Sargent was finding his images in musty tomes and in ancient basilicas. Sargent still carried with him the values of the academic tradition in which he was trained. It was all very well to dab a watercolor of some passing scene, but in the library murals he was painting for the ages.

In "Triumph of Religion" the weight of that tradition apparently devoured the personality of the artist. Curiously, this may provide the basis for a renewed appreciation of the murals. For as defiantly as they resisted the modernist impulses of the era, they uncannily foreshadow some of the concerns of our postmodern age. In trolling through 5,000 years of art history, Sargent created a pastiche in which incompatible artistic languages collide, much in the manner of a David Salle painting. This "appropriation and reworking of artistic precedent," as Ms. Promey calls it, meshes with the concerns of contemporary artists who are skeptical of the cult of originality that grew up in the heyday of modernism. This lack of an authorial voice is perhaps the most revealing — and most contemporary — aspect of the canvases. There are few works that illustrate that postmodernist conceit, the death of the author, as effectively as Sargent's ambitious but soulless masterpiece.

Miles Unger is writing a book on Lorenzo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance.

Copyright 2003. The New York Times Company