The exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s late charcoal portraits of fabulously beautiful women, at the Morgan Library and Museum, is quite profound. These pictures were drawn when Sargent was sick of doing the elaborately colored portraits of society women, those dressed up in fancy gowns, the costumes distracting from the fact that Sargent is primarily interested in faces and that he has the ability to render each face as distinctive and deep. Sargent’s facility as a portraitist, whether in color or charcoal, prompts a viewer to ask the most difficult questions about the nature of portraiture, and that fact alone casts considerable credit on Sargent for having raised them, even if neither he nor anyone else is able to fully answer them.
Here are the questions. Is the power and insight of the pictures the result of something in the way the faces are drawn and so in the art itself? Or is it the result of something Sargent has added, some additional value that he, and other great artists, are able to contribute to a representation that makes a representation so gripping? Or is it that the fascination of the painting comes from what the audience brings to the picture? In that last case, specifically, are portraits of women powerful simply because most men are attracted to women and so infuse any picture of a woman with a special aura or force? Let us consider how the three questions play into one another.
Sargent did a charcoal drawing of Sybil Sassoon in 1912. She has thick eyebrows (as does his famous portrait of “Lady Agnew”). She has narrow and penetrating eyes. Her hair is notably unmajestic. What makes her attractive aside from her overall look are her notably displayed shoulders (as risque as the shoulders displayed by Madame Gateau), which are both revealed and covered with a draped cape which is tied together with a stream of pearls. Quite an accomplishment for one working without color or thick paint.
But spelling out the features of her face is not very illuminating, as both these and her form of dress are doubtlessly repeated not only by Sargent but any number of other artists. The point here is that Sassoon’s face cannot be reduced to its features, as prominent as those may be. Now, facial recognition software may go about identifying faces by finding any number of similarities between a picture of a person and the person who is supposed to be identified, but that is not the way it works when the person is recognized by a human mind. In that case, a mind identifies the gestalt of the person’s face rather than particular features, and that is what it means to say we know who a person is. And that occurs even with people with whom we are very familiar. Not just strangers are subject to a stereotypical portrait of who they are, but a person knows a son or a wife by the image they have in their mind’s eye of what that person looks like, as that has grown and changed over time as the person got older or shifted expression or dress or as the person’s face has altered, adding on spots or heavier jowls. So specifying a feature change is not what makes a person distinctive even if it is a point worth making when you want to suggest how a husband or wife has or has not changed over the years. Sargent is very good at rendering that entire gestalt even if it is just a matter of a charcoal drawing style whereby he pencils in more and more lines to form an eyebrow or uses a few thin lines to create a mouth. Somehow, the picture glows with the full blown Sassoon and so she is more than her features.
Moreover, a clue to her character is perhaps offered by her bare shoulder, even if it is not a definitive clue, because it is merely how she allows herself to appear on this particular outing. What the bare shoulder does is make her attractive, appealing, as a female, and any male looking at the drawing will notice that, and so sexual attraction is part of what draws a viewer to the picture, which is also the case with most art since the Renaissance, the male nude not much present after Michalangelo, except in Eakins, as something of a lark or a violation, and then fully as a violation in Mapplethorpe, who was perhaps out to recover the male nude as a figure for admiration. So all three questions operate at once.
Consider a more complicated connection between the three questions as that is revealed by considering another one of Sargent’s charcoal drawings, the one of Lady Diana Manners, created in 1914, and so also a late Sargent production. This drawing has a very different mood than does the Sassoon one. It uses fewer lines. Lady Diana has short, light hair and petit features. She has a small nose, small eyes and small brows, and so comes across as being quite pale. Like Sassoon, however, she has pearls that accentuate the deep cleavage of her dress. So without color, Sargent has made a contrast in color: pale against dark. Both women, in their very different ways, are vibrant, and so it is possible to say that they are attractive, which is to redefine sexual attraction as a fullness of personality that is accentuated rather than created by sexual characteristics, and so owes a lot to the art of the artist and also to the artifice of the model. Our three questions are interconnected in that way: the artist makes the women attractive by enhancing the sense of them as being particular and self-possessed beings, that meaning that they know who they are in the sense that they know what kind of impression their presences creates for an audience, which is also true of so many of Sargent’s full blown portraits.
A different Sargent drawing tests that hypothesis. Look at his drawing of Olimpio Fusco (1900-1910). He has a strong jaw, prominant hair, and an arrogance that can be taken to betoken a person proud of being an artist-- or perhaps of being a homosexual. (Online references these days to this drawing regard its subject as “hot”.) So the idea of being self-possessed is independant of particular features or of sex. What makes the subject of a painting attractive is the vibrancy of being self-possessed, and that is a contribution that Sargent offers to us to help us understand the world better, whatever are also his successes as a render of faces through both charcoal lines and fully colored dress up portraits.
Compare what Sargent accomplished in his drawings with what another genius with an overlapping career did in a similar genre. Pablo Picasso, in 1923, did a drawing using a grease pen on paper, entitled “Tete de Jeune Homme”. He takes a simple and perfect sphere and decorates that with hair and ears and a nose, as if he is making a Mr. Potato Head, and what he comes out with is a portrait of a person, however unusual may be a person who has so round a head. What makes it into a person? The arrangement of the hair? The shape of the nose? I don’t know, but somehow Picasso manages the transformation of a bowling ball into a person. He is playing with geometry, with how much can be done with a few lines, all of this at about the same time he is doing a highly Romantic portrait in the same year of Sarah Murphy. So Picasso is a revolutionary for seeing how geometry informs painting, as well as a genius in a number of other ways, while Sargent is a genius for a point of view, a principle, that emerges from his richly realized and realistic portraits: the central point about beauty is that it is a matter of attitude, of one’s presence in the world, rather than a matter of features, even if Sargent is also to be seen as the one who promotes the opposite idea, which is that beauty is a gift of well matched features that are mostly in the genes but which can be brought out with self-discipline and a lot of primping. The idea that beauty is available to all those who present themselves with audacity has become the cliche view of the matter since Sargent, and so he should be given credit for having both exemplified the earlier view and furthered the latter view.