A Note from Prof. Emeritus James Mancuso, and References to two web
Sites that give even a deeper appreciation for John Singer Sargent.
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Richard:
I must tell you, again, how much I appreciate your diligence in circulating
material relevant to our heritage. Thanks, very much, especially for
the write up
on the Sargent show.
It is discouraging to find that more Italian-Americans are not RECONNECTING
to their heritage. I can understand the tremendous effort that has
been put in by
our Society into the DISCONNECTION (Assimilation), but I get impatient
about the reluctance to overcome that effort, and to RECONNECT (To help
Celebrate the Diversity of our Society, by Celebrating our Italian Heritage).
For instance, Last evening I attended a small venue performance, by a very competent Bass-Baritone, who sang about Twenty ITALIAN songs and arias. It was great....... I heard songs that I had never heard before, because he drew from the art songs as well as from the opera arias and neapolitan songs.
I had circulated the information on that performance to about 75 Italian-Americans.... NOT ONE of them was at the performance!!!!, although otherwise it was a Full House.
Here you have ..... Sargent, born in Italy, soaked in Italian art, becomes a great painter, feted in the upper classes of The USA and England : A TOTAL ITALOPHILE, who painted hundreds of all kinds of scenes of Italian life.....
John Singer Sargent should be appreciated and celebrated by every Italian-American,
and he is an opportunity for every Italian-American to further their
knowledge of their Italian Heritage
Thanks, Richard, for stimulating me to take another look at John Singer Sargent.
Both of these Sites are worthwhile:
The www site on which the LACMA announces the Sargent show
<< http://www.lacma.org/info/press/sargentPR.htm >>
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA
Michael Conforti, Director, comments on their Sargent show
<< http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus39.htm >>
Best wishes,
Jim Mancuso
RAA Note: See below for text of Sites, without Photos.
Brief RHETORICAL Question to Jim:
How often do you see those Contrarians, who constantly berate Activists for opposing I-A Negative Stereotyping, and state we should instead Accentuate the Positive of Italian Heritage, Actually promoting Positive Portrayals?
What do you call a person who Contributes little, but Criticizes much??
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LACMA PRESENTS GROUNDBREAKING EXHIBITION OF ITALIAN PAINTINGS BY AMERICA’S FAVORITE JOHN SINGER SARGENT
LACMA is sole West Coast venue for Sargent and Italy
February 2 through May 11, 2003
Mrs. Ralph Curtis
1898
Oil on canvas
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 1998.168
(Photo)
A Street in Venice
c. 1880-82
Oil on canvas
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
(Photo)
LOS ANGELES—The West Coast’s first comprehensive exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on February 2, 2003. Sargent and Italy explores the unique relationship between one of the best known American artists and Italy, the country of his birth. The extraordinary exhibition, which complements important works by Sargent in LACMA’s permanent collection, consists of more than 75 paintings that gives audiences an understanding of the enduring significance of Italy to Sargent. The works will remain on view through May 11, 2003.
Sargent is most famous for his grand manner portraits that epitomize the elegance and glamour of international high society at the end of the nineteenth century. But he began his career in the late 1870s and early 1880s painting the island of Capri and the hidden byways of Venice. Between 1897 and 1914, Sargent traveled to Italy every year to paint his favorite subjects.
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents. The Sargents traveled through Europe incessantly in pursuit of culture, returning most frequently to Italy—an older country, charged with classical culture, but also warm and sensual. Land of the Renaissance, of the Medici, of Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Italy was also a land of color, of uninhibited emotion, and extravagance; shards of sensation that feed the imagination of a visual artist. By the age of twelve, Sargent was sketching the artistic and scenic wonders of Italy. He received his first systematic art instruction in Florence but left in 1874 for training that one could obtain then only in Paris. In 1878 he made his first visit to the United States, where he claimed his American citizenship, and then embarked on his first professional painting trip to Italy.
Sargent sought new subject matter in the peasant life of Naples and Capri. Head of a Capri Girl (1878), represents one of the intriguing local models that Sargent loved to paint. In 1880, he took a studio in Venice. Street in Venice (1880-82) is one of Sargent’s first major Italian works and one of the most significant of his early views of Venice. The painting exemplifies Sargent’s attraction to the lesser-known parts and people of Venice and his interest in realistically depicting the gritty physical details of the Venetian environment. But in Paris, portraits were driving Sargent’s career. With the exception on one subsequent visit, Sargent did not return to Italy until he had established himself as the leading portrait painter in the English-speaking world.
In 1897, he came back to Italy. By now he had received a prestigious commission for a mural at the Boston Public Library, and his career had ascended in a perfect trajectory from genre painter to society portrait painter to history painter and muralist. The following year, Sargent was again in Venice, where he painted Mrs. Ralph Curtis. Mrs. Ralph Curtis (1898) not only represents the enticing glamour of some of Sargent’s most privileged clients and friends—Mrs. Curtis was the wife of his wealthy cousin whose family lived in the elaborate Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal—but also is the only full-length formal portrait Sargent painted in Italy.
Of all the places in Italy Sargent traveled Venice had perhaps the largest share of his attention. The city fascinated Sargent and was well suited to the watercolor medium in which he worked most often in Italy. His use of vivid colors, brushwork that varied from soft and fluid, to bold and dashing, and an overwhelming sense of light and air characterize his Italian scenes like Scuola di San Rocco (c. 1903) and rank Sargent as one of the finest watercolorists of all time.
Sargent always cast a fresh eye on the regular tourist subject. In Venice, where the city’s quintessential sight is of domes and towers melting into the light, Sargent looked at doors and foundations. He generally leaves enough detail for us to identify the building—but only for someone truly knowledgeable of Venice. His are never tourist views, a remarkable achievement in a city processed by artists for the tourist market for two hundred years.
Each summer Sargent returned to Italy where he painted landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits. In Italy, Sargent was at home. His landscapes are populated mainly by family and friends. He makes visible the vital hold that Italy had on all American visitors—not simply the abstract ideal of history, but rather the realm of the sensual, the special qualities of light, the attention to uncomplicated pleasures of the table, the balmy air. The Italian locales Sargent found himself drawn to were never exactly those in the guidebooks: at Lake Garda, he found a small fishing village, San Vigilio, on the unfashionable side of the lake; in Florence he avoided the Pitti Palace and instead painted the Boboli Gardens behind it; in the Alps, he stepped well off the beaten tract. At the very edge of Italy, high in the Alps, Sargent posed the young men and women among his family and friends in exotic costumes, toying with the conventions of both portraiture and exoticism. These are perhaps his most extraordinary and daring works, short of his virtually abstract landscape paintings. Dolce Far Niente (c.1907) is one of the greatest examples of Sargent’s interest in exotic themes. The cashmere shawl seen in Woman Reclining (1911) was the luxurious Eastern garment Sargent most frequently used to costume his female relatives so that he might study the shawl’s remarkable drape, folds, and patterns and especially the female figure in repose.
Sargent’s Italian landscapes generally evoke the world of people, a social and sensual matrix. Even when the scene is devoid of figures and almost abstract, he captures a world of sensation as it is registered not just by the eyes, but by the body as a whole: light as warmth, color as taste and texture. This is one reason why Italy is such a responsive subject, enhancing all of Sargent’s best qualities—and the reason why Italy remained a part of Sargent from the moment of his birth.
Sargent and Italy will begin with Sargent’s works from Capri and Venice
and then present works from the Alps, including his well-known cashmere
series. Visitors will then view works created in Carrara and San Vigilio,
watercolors and oils depicting gardens in Tuscany and Rome, as well as
paintings of art and architecture. There is then a return to works created
in Venice and the exhibition closes with portraits created while the artist
was vacationing in Italy.
# # #
Sargent and American Art at LACMA
This exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent complements LACMA’s
permanent collection, which includes several outstanding works by the artist.
Most notable is Sargent’s monumental portrait Mrs. Edward L. Davis and
her son, Livingston Davis (1890). Also from the permanent collection, and
included in Sargent and Italy, is Rose-Marie Ormond Reading in a Cashmere
Shawl (c. 1908-12), a watercolor given to LACMA by the Art Museum Council
in 1972. Paintings by John Singer Sargent and other important American
artists can be viewed on the plaza level of the Ahmanson Building.
About LACMA
LACMA’s permanent collection includes approximately 100,000 works spanning
the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier
encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States. The museum
uses its collection and resources to provide a variety of educational,
aesthetic, intellectual and cultural experiences for its visitors. In addition,
LACMA offers an ever-changing series of outstanding special exhibitions
of the work of the world’s leading artists, as well as lectures, classes,
family activities, film programs and musical events.
Exhibition Catalogue
Sargent and Italy is accompanied by a beautifully designed, full-color
catalogue edited and introduction by LACMA curator Bruce Robertson, with
essays by Jane Dini, Ilene Susan Fort, Stephanie L. Herdrich, R.W.B. Lewis,
and Richard Ormond.
Exhibition Credit
This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
and Ferrara Arte. It was funded by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
in celebration of its 25th Anniversary. The exhibition is supported by
an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Curators
Sargent and Italy was co-curated by Elaine Kilmurray, Richard Ormond,
and LACMA Curator Bruce Robertson.
Tour Schedule Following LACMA
Denver Art Museum: June 28 through September 21, 2003
LACMA: Press Release
http://www.lacma.org/info/press/sargentPR.htm
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Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Mass.
(413) 458-9545
The Clark Art Institute Explores the Making of Fame, In Uncanny Spectacle:
The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent
In the 1870s and 1880s, when the art world first took on the form it has today, a young American expatriate named John Singer Sargent began carefully and deliberately crafting an international reputation. He succeeded so well that he became known in his own lifetime as the greatest painter of his era.From June 15 through September 7, 1997, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will present the exhibition Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent, exploring how the artist, during the first decade of his career, manipulated the market using exhibition practices and patron systems of the time to develop a reputation for himself as a painter. Covering the period from 1877 to 1887--from the debut of Sargent's work in the Paris Salon to the artist's permanent relocation to London and first professional visit to the United States--the exhibition will present 35 paintings by Sargent drawn from public and private collections around the world. These works are considered by critics to be the best of his career and include Madame X (Virginie Avengno Gautreau) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), the notorious portrait that made viewers think the audacious Sargent had at last gone too far for the sensibilities of his Paris audience, and Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Gallery, London), a painting of light and mood that is the masterpiece of his early English career. The show will be seen only at the Clark.
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Virginie Avegno Gautreau), 1884 (Photo)
According to Marc Simpson, curator of the exhibition, "Just as Sargent's skills as a painter were not supernatural gifts but hard-won achievements, the foundations of his fame were laid not simply by chance or good fortune but by determined, focused effort. In Uncanny Spectacle, we see how he launched a multiple-front assault on fame, in Paris, New York, and London, pursuing a high-risk strategy here, hedging his bets there, and eventually gaining a reputation as one of the great figures of his age--in the words of Auguste Rodin, the 'Van Dyck of our times.'"On view in the exhibition will be Dr. Pozzi at Home (Armand Hammer Collection, UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles), one of Sargent's most startling paintings; Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (Des Moines Art Center), notable for the compellingly direct pose of its two young sitters; Fumee d'ambre gris (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute), a tour-de-force study of creams and whites; and Oyster Gatherers of Cancale (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a genre painting which met with much success in the Salon of 1878.According to Michael Conforti, Director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, "This show makes an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most natural and gifted painters of the nineteenth century. The public that regularly flocks to our museum each summer from around the world will be given a special treat, probably surprised that this institution, so focused on research and scholarship in the history of art, can apply those goals to the organization of an exhibition of such thematic vigor, visual majesty, and broad public appeal."
John Singer Sargent, Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881 (Photo)
In conjunction with the exhibition Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent, Yale University Press will publish a catalogue of the same title. Michael Conforti has contributed the foreword, and Richard Ormond, Director of the National Maritime Museum in London, has written the introduction, giving on overview of the issues to be addressed. The major essays are by H. Barbara Weinberg of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, writing on Sargent's artistic training and his relationship with his teacher, Carolus-Duran, and by Marc Simpson, on Sargent and his critics. The catalogue includes 110 illustrations, 38 in full color, with entries on each work in the exhibition and an appendix on Sargent's exhibition history through 1887. The 240-page catalogue will be available for $40 in hardcover and will be published in June. In autumn 1997, Yale University Press will also issue the first of a multiple volume catalogue raisonne of Sargent's work, by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray.
Click here: Clark Art Institute Clark Art Institute Explores the Making
of Fame, In Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of th
http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus39.htm
