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The Social Message of Sargent's Art
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17938 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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4 / 1999 |
471 Words |
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Sharon Hudgins is an author and journalist who lived for
fifteen years in Germany. Her ancestors emigrated from Prussia
to the United States in the 1860s. |
To the Editor:
I must dispute Herb Greer's claim that John Singer Sargent can be understood outside his social context ["Sargent's Exuberant Artistry," January 1999, p. 114]. Social context, of course, covers more ground than private life in the purely voyeuristic sense. Sargent is a voice of and for the American expatriate of the late nineteenth century, and his pictures are a kind of silent scream for help, as pathetic in their way as the works of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
Of course, to be able to understand them, you have to be able to read the codes, the hidden meanings. My skin crawls when I look at Sargent portraits. The expatriates had run away to Europe, abandoning their positions as Virginia squires, Kentucky colonels, and patricians of manufacturing towns like Yonkers, New York; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Waltham, Massachusetts.
In Europe, they found that they were merely rich, and for that matter, not even rich enough to count for much in an impersonal cosmopolitan society dominated by people like the Rothschilds. The expatriates had no positive place in society, no acknowledged role.
I think my late grandmother, a New England lady of the old school, captured it in the remark that the "daughters of Edward Darley Boit" were "hotel children." By this, she meant that they lived, seen and not heard, in darkened rooms on the fringes of a meretricious adult society. Because they did not have the privilege of belonging to a Volksgemeinschaft, they had no working-class playmates. They had no point of contact with the land, the soil, or
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