A friend from grad school recently posted about his visit to the “Fashioned by Sargent” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. It led me to look up a few volumes on my bookshelves. It’s been years since I read or reread these books, all bought before grad school. It was enough of a delight to reopen these books that I have thanked him for the post.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was a curious case of modern art, epitomizing the label “society painter” during his life and long after. His most-reproduced portraits are about the upper and/or aristocratic classes. The fiercest attacks on his reputation came from the critic Roger Fry who, during Sargent’s lifetime and after his death, decried the painter’s lack of relevance to modernism. There were other negative assessments. True, there were a couple of large retrospectives not long after his death: at the Royal Academy and the Met. But the negativity was enough that, as Maev Kennedy wrote in The Guardian in 2014, his posthumous reputation “went into freefall,” to the point that when a grandnephew put on an exhibition of his works in England during the 1960s, “people in the arts were puzzled that he was bothering.”

As Sarah Burns puts it in her monograph Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (1996), Sargent’s “dazzling success at the turn of the century interfered in both subtle and obvious ways with his attainment of unequivocal ‘great artist’ status, regardless of the skill, taste, and facility that made him such a superb painter.” Most damningly, although “there was extensive disagreement regarding Sargent’s abilities to do more than capture mere appearances… there was [also] near-universal consensus that he was an artist of little or no imagination or poetic sense, a limitation that confined him to the fascinatingly lively observation and depiction of facts.” Ouch!

Indeed, I reopened my copy of Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting (1959, 1968) and saw that Sargent’s name was nowhere to be found. The book includes some portraits and self-portraits, but they come from Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Modigliani, Andre Derain, etc. Plus, they are decidedly not portraits of the upper classes.

I next opened Meyer Schapiro’s Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (1979), a collection of selected essays. It mentions Sargent twice in an essay first published in 1952 and entitled “The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show.” It’s about an event in 1911. “For the symbolic mural decorations of the Boston Public Library, one called from Europe the fashionable portrait painter, Sargent, and the pallid Hellenist, Puvis de Chavannes.” Not exactly affirming. A more positive point appears a dozen pages later: “The most advanced taste in the US about 1900 had been self-consciously aristocratic, hostile to American customs, and deeply attached to the aesthetic as a superior way of life. Its representatives, Whistler and Sargent, preferred to live abroad. These two painters were not in the vanguard of world art at their time; but in their concern with a refined style and technique they were closer to the new European art than the American.” Yet Schapiro immediately adds a qualification: “They lacked however the originality and robustness of the European innovators, their great appetite for life.” Another ouch, if less stinging.

Next was a collection of essays and articles by Hilton Kramer, the NYT chief art critic from 1965 to 1982 and later a co-founder of the conservative journal The New Criterion. Called The Age of the Avant-Garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972 (1973), this book also mentions Sargent twice, albeit completely in passing while discussing an exhibition of Fairfield Porter (in 1966) and another of Whistler (in 1971). They aren’t damning but neither are they uplifting.

The three books above were published before the 1980s. I then turned to John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 (1989). (The poet reviewed exhibitions on occasions.) Sargent’s name pops up in a 1979 review of the American expat artist R.B. Kitaj: “It would be hard to imagine the difference for our culture if Whistler, Sargent, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Pound and Eliot had elected to live in the US.” More notable is Ashbery’s 1980 review of the American Wing at the Met. Or, more precisely, review of the then-ongoing and multi-year additions to the wing over three phases. It’s a positive review: “The nine galleries of American paintings and sculpture, with the paintings beautifully restored and enhanced by the fall of natural light from the skylit ceiling, are, again, something more than the sum of their parts. That is, not just a great collection of American art but an illustration of our changing attitudes towards our own past.” Sargent also comes up in passing as a part of a group that is positively assessed: “it comes as no surprise that Whistler, Homer, Eakins, and Sargent (all strongly represented here) are masters.”

The positivity continues in Jed Perl, Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World (1991). Perl was the art critic of The New Republic for some years. His review of a 1987 retrospective of Klee at MOMA notes the event’s popularity: “a hit with the crowd that goes to perhaps half a dozen exhibitions a year.” In addition (and to the purpose of this post), Perl makes a comparative point about Sargent: “unlike some shows that have pulled in the museum-going public–unlike, for instance, the Modern’s own those-were-the-days Vienna extravaganza and the Whitney’s swashbuckling Sargent retrospective–Klee was an exhibit to which artists were also going, and going many times.” Ok, Sargent wasn’t entirely embraced by latter-day members of the trade. But “the Whitney’s swashbuckling retrospective” in the mid-1980s was a very different situation than the reception of his grandnephew’s effort in the 1960s.

Last but not least is John Updike, Just Looking: Essays on Art (1989). Besides publishing a lot of fiction, Updike was a prolific book critic–I remember reading his collection Hugging the Shore (1983) with pleasure–and an occasional writer about art. I can’t say whether his fiction about the mid-century American WASP world will last. (It’s certainly ignored by academics these days.) But this collection, which is much much shorter than the massive collection of book reviews, is a delight to reopen because it carries the same Updikean clarity, descriptiveness, and judgment. I reread the pair of essays on Sargent. At merely four paragraphs, the first is like an overlong caption about two paintings, one each by Homer and Sargent, of children in the US. Updike likes them: e.g., “The dashing impressionism of Sargent’s technique carries a generation farther Homer’s flickering grasses and dabs of sunny red.” Then later: “Sargent’s painting could have been a mere commission, an expert piece of toadying within the upper classes, but the jaunty eccentricity of its composition, and a daring within its deference, save it for art.” The fellow’s “society painter” reputation does not–cannot–go away. But this remark exemplifies a renewed interest in evaluating his works.

Similarly, the next and much longer essay, a review of Updike’s visit to the aforementioned Whitney exhibit, begins with an unfavorable comparison for Sargent. That is, “he was too facile, too successful, too professional, too European” in comparison to the crankiness or asceticism of Homer, Hopper, Eakins, and Pollock. Updike further reminds readers that “a frequent criticism of Sargent [was] that his portraits lacked psychological depth” (adding with a touch of dry humor that it was “not a quality, perhaps, that the sitters were paying for”). Yet the novelist warns that the “sumptuous wealth of stuff–long dresses, velvet hangings, flowered furniture… detracts from the intelligent intensity with which the faces are rendered.” After describing three portraits of aristocratic women, especially their faces, Updike argues that “these women, if not psychoanalyzed as Rembrandt and Velazquez and even Copley psychoanalyzed some of their sitters, are not cheaply beautified either, and are presented enigmatically and undeniably as real people in a room.” Most of the second half of this essay discusses his outdoor subject paintings. Fry once sneered that Sargent’s European watercolors were “exactly what the average upper-class tourist sees.” Updike’s review gives a more even-headed take. Some aspects are lousy: e.g., “his works along the lines of Monet and Renoir are, by and large, not only weak but ugly.” Others are lovely: e.g., “Where Courbet rather than Monet haunts the canvas, Sargent could paint a fine open-air picture.”

The Whitney exhibit was the first major of Sargent’s revivals. During 2014-2015, the National Portrait Gallery mounted another in London and NYC. In between was a massive retrospective jointly organized by the Tate in London, the National Gallery in DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston during 1998-1999. Less than two years later, the Seattle Art Museum curated another comprehensive exhibition. (The current exhibit is co-organized by MFA Boston and Tate Britain.)

Why this interest in Sargent’s works after more than a half-century of neglect? One reason was the growing interest in his sketches, charcoal drawings, and paintings of the male nude, most of which were never shown in his lifetime. These works, plus the fact that most of his personal papers were lost or destroyed, prompted a reassessment of his works, including portraits of the European and American elite. Updike had alluded to this side of Sargent, who was a lifelong bachelor and thought to be asexual: “The artist’s sexual activities and proclivities have not excited any very lively interest among his biographers, but the men of his portraits, generally, seem more in danger of idealization than the women.” By the time of the Seattle retrospective in 2001, sexuality had begun to be a part of the scholarship of his works. Last year, Paul Fisher (Wellesley) published a biography called The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent and His World. I haven’t read it but I’ve seen descriptions indicating that the book explores this line of thinking. While waiting to hear about its merits and debits, I can say for sure that its publication (and others I’m not aware of) and, especially, the Boston exhibit are the latest manifestations of academic and public interests in Sargent since the 1980s.