fbpx

Category: John Singer Sargent

Posted on

Georgia O’Keeffe has an acne problem—and she’s not the only one

Artists are, for the most part, practical chemists with no education in the subject.
Pedernal, 1941, Georgia O’Keeffe, courtesy Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. All three paintings in this post have been identified as suffering from saponification.
For decades, conservationists, scholars and even Georgia O’Keeffeherself assumed that the tiny bumps along her paintings were grains of sand from the desert of New Mexico. Eventually, those bumps began to grow and flake off.
The bumps are metal soaps, formed by a chemical reaction between lead and zinc pigments and the fatty acids in the linseed oil binder. Medieval alchemists made boiled linseed oil by exploiting this same reaction, tossing lead oxide in to make the oil thicken.
O’Keeffe’s paintings aren’t the only ones suffering from these surface pimples. The problem is found in works by artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh. As many as seven in ten museum masterpieces may be affected.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, Rembrandt courtesy the Mauritshuis 
Anecdotal evidence shows that moving paintings, exposing them to daylight, and changes in humidity contribute to the problem. “There seems to be some correlation between the number of times the paintings have traveled to public exhibitions and the size and maturity of the surface disruption. The more times the paintings have traveled, the more likely it will be that the protrusions are larger and more numerous, saidDale Kronkright, head of conservation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Detail of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), John Singer Sargent, 1884, showing saponation in the black dress.
To test this theory, a team from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering has developed a handheld scanner to document continuing changes in painting.
“If we can easily measure, characterize and document these soap protrusions over and over again with little cost to the museum, then we can watch them as they develop,” saidOliver Cossairt, an associate professor of computer science at McCormick. “That could help conservators diagnose the health and prescribe treatment possibilities for damaged works of art.”
What does this have to do with us working artists? After all, we’re not using lead paint anymore, and if we’re smart, we don’t use zinc white, either. The problem is, most artists are all practicing chemistry with very little education in the subject, self included.
Falling Leaves, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, courtesy Van Gogh Museum
Don’t think you’re getting away from the metals because you’ve moved to a modern palette. Metals are naturally-occurring elements of great usefulness, and that includes making pigments. An incomplete list of the metal pigments we currently use includes cobalt blue and violet, manganese blue and green, ultramarine blue, the cadmiums, Prussian blue, viridian, the iron oxide pigments (sienna, umber, and black), and titanium white. In other words, you can’t get away from them. Nor can you get away from the fatty acids in oil binders. Whatever the binder you’re using—walnut oil, beeswax or linseed oil—it’s an organic fatty acid.
This process of saponification is also what is going to make you and I dissolve into a pile of grave wax someday. Even the ancients knew that nothing lasts forever: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun,” (Eccl 2:11)
Meanwhile, we’ve managed to keep paintings intact for a few thousand yearsand we can continue to do just that. Just continue to paint fat over lean, avoid known fugitive or reactive pigments, and don’t follow untried, crackpot approaches, and your work should last a long time.
Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: the lost-and-found edge

Sometimes it’s about what you don’t say.
Girl with the Red Hat, c. 1665-66, Johannes Vermeer, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Earlier this month, I mentioned I once had a painting teacher who told me that heavy edges were “my style.” Like many younger artists, I just hadn’t learned how to marry edges in my painting. Beginning painters tend to give all edges equal weight—they are borders to be colored in. Part of the learning process is learning when to keep the edge and when to lose it.

Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, above, perfectly illustrates the lost-and-found edge. The smooth transitions between the hair and the hat on the left, within her gown, and the lack of contrast in the shadow side of the model’s face drive our eye to the highlighted passages. Squint and concentrate on just the shape of the highlighted passage for a moment. It’s just one long, beautiful abstract shape in a sea of darkness.
In Church at Old Lyme, 1905, Childe Hassam softened the edges between leaves and sky by making them the same value. Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Losing the edges helps link visual masses into a coherent whole. It deemphasizes things that aren’t important. It’s a way to create rhythm in a painting.
The human mind is adept at filling in blank spots in visual scenes (and seeing things that aren’t there). If you doubt this, squint while looking around your room. In any collection of similar-value objects, you don’t see edges, but you understand what you’re looking at. Your mind sorts it out just fine.
A careful drawing is different from a value study. Both are important, and the wise artist does them both. But a drawing explores the shapes and contours of an object. It’s a fact-finding mission. A value study concentrates on the links between objects and the final composition.
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, John Singer Sargent, courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 
In the oil painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, John Singer Sargentuses the great dark entryway as a framing device, a compositional accent, and a poignant social statement. Only a hint of light in the shape of a window implies what is behind. The girls recede into space in order of age, with the eldest (Florence, age 14) almost enveloped in the darkness of the drawing room. Florence and Jane have no accents in their hair; their dresses and stockings disappear into the murk.
The Bridge of Sighs, c. 1903-04, John Singer Sargent.
Sargent painted at least two versions of this study of the Bridge of Sighs; a mirror-imageis in the Brooklyn Museum. In this version, Sargent placed a hard edge at the top of the arch where sky meets stone. The shadows on the left bleed without any attempt at architectural precision. This creates the same kind of murky dark passage as in The Daughters of Boit. (A note for watercolor purists—the whites of the gondoliers’ clothes were done with white paint.)
In Two Women on a Hillside, 1906, Franz Marc tied the women to the background by repeating greens in their skin and garb. Courtesy Franz Marc Museum.
To lose an edge in painting, start by making both sides of the line the same value, even when they’re different hues. Conversely, the highest contrast will give you the sharpest edge. You can add to either effect by softening or sharpening the paintwork with your brush. Introducing the color of the adjacent object will also soften the contrast between an object and its background, as in the Franz Marc painting above.
Detail from John Singer Sargent’s Lady Eden, 1906, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Remember that the sharpest, most contrasting edges draw our eye. The trick is to find a balance that supports the composition. Sometimes only a small flick of paint is necessary, as with Sargent’s sequins in the detail from Lady Eden, above. These support the dynamics and direction of the composition. If they didn’t, they’d undermine all his careful compositional work.
Posted on

$2 billion in art distributed for free

The Corcoran’s demise is a sad reminder that many cultural institutions in America skitter on the brink of insolvency.

Simplon Pass, 1911, John Singer Sargent, has gone to the National Gallery.

In 2014, the board of trustees for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that they were closing that venerable institution and offering its assets—for free—to other agencies to manage. That meant its school, its Beaux Arts building, and its collection would all be given away. The assets were staggering, somewhere around $2 billion, and somehow the money machine would be kept out of the process.
This week the deal became final, with the Corcoran board announcingthe dispensation of the final 11,000 artworks. (The National Gallery had first dibs and took about 40% of the collection.) The art school, the building, and about 800 works go to George Washington University. Much of the rest of the collection is headed to the American University Museum, with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other institutions rounding out the list. The art will stay in Washington, in the public view.
Niagara, 1857, by Frederic Edwin Church, has gone to the National Gallery.
The Corcoran was one of America’s oldest art museums, founded to house the private collection of a 19th century financier, William Wilson Corcoran. Doing nothing by half-measures, Corcoran hired James Renwick, designer of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and the Smithsonian ‘Castle’ in Washington, to build his museum.
Corcoran made his fortune on war bonds and retired to a life of philanthropy by 1854. His good works were legion. They included the land and chapel for Oak Hill Cemetery, a benevolent fund for the poor of Georgetown, innumerable gifts to universities, and securing Mount Vernonfor the nation. He was also a southern sympathizer who left for Paris at the outbreak of war.
Forty-two Kids, 1907, George Bellows, has gone to the National Gallery.
Corcoran was also an early patron of American art. He counted painters Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Doughty, and George Innessamong his friends. The Corcoran was established in 1869. Its School of Art was founded in 1878.
Fast forward a century and Corcoran’s vision was showing signs of financial strain. “When news broke that Board was considering selling the building, it felt like every conversation I had placed the beginning of the Museum’s decline to an earlier and earlier point,” wrote Blair Murphy. “One D.C. artist I spoke with argued that the Museum had never recovered from declining to purchase the collection of the shuttered Washington Gallery of Modern Art. That was in 1968.”
Ground swell, 1939, Edward Hopper, has gone to the National Gallery.
In 1989, the gallery agreed to host Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment. Worse, it cancelled the show when trustees and supporters voiced opposition. A change in leadership staved off bankruptcy temporarily. But history conspired against the institution. Rerouted traffic after 9/11 made it harder to get to. In 2005, the museum was unable to raise funds for a highly-touted addition by Frank Gehry. The financial crisis of 2008 hit cultural institutions hard. Giving to the Corcoran fell off sharply.
The Last of the Buffalo, 1888, Albert Bierstadt, has gone to the National Gallery.
Washington is a city of free, government-subsidized museums. The Corcoran was neither. By the end, in 2014, the admission fee was $10. Why pay that when there are so many other options that cost nothing?
The Corcoran’s demise is a sad reminder that many cultural institutions in America skitter on the brink of insolvency. What do we do about that?
Posted on

Wondering what tomorrow will bring?

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, 1822, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Shortly after this was painted, the female form would be locked back down in corsets for another century.
Strapless gowns continue to be a popular silhouette for young American women on their wedding days. Their mothers preferred something with lots of fabric, either in the style of Princess Diana’s gown or hippie-like Gunne Sax. That change continues a long pattern. For more than a hundred years, fashion has trended toward less coverage, more stretch and less tailoring. We seem to be at the logical end of this trend, when even celebrity nudity ceases to shock.
A satirical cartoon from the July 11th 1857 issue of Harper’s Weekly.
What comes next? More coverage seems unlikely, since we Moderns have no experience living through a conservative reversal. Yet there is one precedent, in the 19th century shift from the Mode Ă  la Grecque to Victorian sensibility.
Parisian Ladies in their Full Winter Dress for 1800, 1799 caricature print by Isaac Cruikshank.
Mode Ă  la Grecque itself was a radical departure from what came before. During the 1790s, women’s fashion underwent a dramatic transformation from periwigs, powder and panniers to natural hair and light, unrestricted clothing. This was a smart move during the Age of Revolution. The absurd and expensive clothing of the Ancien-Regimewas not just out of style, it was dangerously reactionary.
The new neo-classical style was both more democratic and more revealing. “The girdle of the dress was no longer bound to the hips, but under the breast; the powder was gradually abolished, the chopsticks were laid down, the whole clothing approached more to nature, and actually to the Greek taste, in which sense one went further and further in the following years, to scarcity in clothing, which scarcely left a fold, so that the most accurate description of the body shape underneath it seemed to be the actual purpose and fame of this fashion,” wrote contemporary Austrian novelist Caroline Pichler.
Madame Moitessier, 1856, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. She may be showing dĂ©colletage, but she is carefully laced into a steel-stayed corset. 
That freedom from stricture was, sadly, short-lived. By 1830, when waistlines had dropped back to the natural waist, corsets returned with a vengeance, culminating in the diabolical swan-bill corset of the early twentieth century. These 19th century corsets were actually tighter and more restrictive than what had come before the Mode Ă  la Grecque, thanks to modern steel stays. The steel-stay corset did not disappear from general use until World War I.
Why did women ever let themselves be caught back up in the restrictive clothing that was the hallmark of the Victorian era? There were women who lamented the return to stays and a few outliers like Amelia Bloomer who pushed for healthier, more rational clothing. Most, however, just acquiesced. 
Mrs. Cecil Wade, 1886, John Singer Sargent, is already showing the effects of the fashionable S-curve of the swan-bill corset. She can’t sit normally.
We live in tumultuous times. What seems inconceivable today may be reality in just a few short years. Heck, girls might even start wearing sleeves again at their weddings.
Fashion is just a reflection of history, after all, and history never runs in a straight line.
Posted on

The other faces of Madame X

Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, John Singer Sargent, 1882-83. This small, intimate painting was done a year before the infamous Madame X, and was given by Sargent to Madame Gautreau’s mother.
Madame X—Madame Pierre Gautreau—is remembered because of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait. Like him, she was an American expatriate and arriviste, which perhaps explains why she sat for him when so many artists were clamoring to paint her.
She was born Virginie AmĂ©lie Avegno in New Orleans in 1859. Her parents were Creoles: her father claimed he was Italian, and her mother was French. Her father—an officer—was killed in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.
Figure study of Madame Pierre Gautreau by Sargent in watercolor and graphite, c. 1883. The difficulties of painting a socialite’s portrait included getting her to settle down to posing.
The South being suddenly inhospitable to planter society, Virginie’s mother moved the two of them to Paris, where the girl was educated for her role as a parisienne. This was the 19th century equivalent of a Sloane Ranger or BCBG—a young, polished woman whose primary raison d’ĂȘtre was to exist beautifully. These women were sometimes called “professional beauties.”
Just as Virginie herself was being reengineered for a European career, Paris in 1867 was in the midst of reinventing itself. The ancient city had been largely redesigned and rebuilt by Baron Haussmann. A brash new city required brash new people, people like Virginie Avegno, now married to Pierre Gautreau, banker. They might not have had pedigrees, but they had money and youth and beauty.
The painting now known as Portrait of Madame X, by John Singer Sargent, 1884. The only one that mattered, and the one that scandalized Paris society.
Virginie was a very pale brunette with an arresting face and an hourglass figure. She was a fardée, or an openly painted lady. Her hennaed hair and lavender powder (to enhance her pallor) enhanced, rather than detracted from, her reputation. She was very much a new woman in the Parisian style. And because she was a stunner, and an American, people gossiped. Did she use arsenic to achieve that pallor? With whom was she sleeping?
Madame Pierre Gautreau, Antonio de La Gandara,1898. Mme. Gautreau went on to be painted by many other society artists, but never as memorably as by Sargent.
Her reputation and exotic looks also made her a magnet for artists. Among them was Sargent. “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. If you are bien avec elle and will see her in Paris, you might tell her I am a man of prodigious talent,” he wrote a friend.
Madame X was shown in the Paris Salon of 1884 under the title Portrait de Mme –, as if that could protect the sitter’s anonymity. Although Mme. Gautreau and Sargent both thought it was a masterpiece, the public reception was one of shock.  Mme. Gautreau’s mother asked him to withdraw the painting, which the artist refused.
Portrait de Madame Gautreau,1891,Gustave-Claude-Étienne Courtois. This was painted seven years after Sargent’s portrait, and the falling strap and dĂ©colletage raised nary an eyebrow.
Mme. Gautreau quickly recovered from her humiliation, and was painted again by other artists. Sargent moved on to greener pastures in London. And the painting is remembered as an iconic masterpiece.


I will be teaching in Acadia National Park next August. Read all about it here, or download a brochure here. 
Posted on

Off your game? Who cares?

Bathers with a Turtle (Baigneuses), 1907-08, Henri Matisse

This week some friends were discussing Thomas Kinkade, whose work is being dragged out into the public sphere through a retrospective, which in turn has engendered a flurry of new stories about his troubled life. (Predictably, none are positive.)
I was curious about why his landscapes said nothing about his personal struggles. “He did not paint what he wanted to paint; everything he painted was to sell,” said Brad Marshall.
Steamboat Leaving Boulogne, 1864, Édouard Manet
Then we moved on to bad moments by great painters. Karl Eric Leitzel mentioned how bad Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle is, which in turn reminded me of Manet’s Steamboat Leaving Boulogne and Sargent’s Spanish Dancer, in which either the head or the arms of the figure are inexplicably stuck on backwards.
Matisse, Manet and Sargent were brilliant painters; the rare duds in their oeuvre serve to point out just how brilliant they are. “When painters are that innovative and pushing painting in such new directions, they will be unsuccessful at times,” said Brad Marshall.
Spanish Dancer, 1879-82 (preparatory oil study for the main figure in El Jaleo), John Singer Sargent
And that is where I want to be: not painting what I know will sell, but painting outside myself.
This week, Pastor Bill Blakely suggested that if “I Am,” is the Lord’s name forever (Exodus 3:14), then all the “I am” statements we use to define and limit ourselves are in fact blasphemous. Thomas Kinkade was trapped by his “I am a great artist” statement; it was dissonant with the world’s opinion. Instead of painting setting him free, it made him miserable.

There are still a few openings in my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.