Noodles wanted to know when I would be back on Sunday.
“Isn't the point of a girls' weekend,” I texted my friends P and J, “that we don't know if I'll be coming back until I actually do?” Unspool me out on the parasail and let me consider my options for a couple of days out in the air.
“All men are afraid we’ll choose the ending of Thelma and Louise over going home,” replied J.
We meet in Boston and the only thing we manage to map out other than “eat whenever we feel like it” is to book a slot to see the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday. We walk up the stairs with our prepaid tickets, bypassing a long line at admission like celebrities before losing each other searching for a toilet.
The exhibition is special in that the curators found and restored some of the intricate outfits worn by Sargent's subjects—ball gowns and opera coats and a snatch of red velvet laid out inside a glass coffin. These are positioned nearby his tall portraits, with their room-swallowing darks and dazzling bits of detail. We crowd through the doors with the masses limn’d in microplastics to look up at the silk and taffeta and tulle.
Instagram feeds me a lot of hyperrealist paintings with the naivety of a computer-on-training-wheels asking, Can you believe this is not just another photograph?! And I hope that with AI we can just agree to move away from hyperrealism, cede that territory to the robots and their terrible vectors. I know how things really look and want to know less about that. Sargent's thing is that his paintings have a pulse but are also very very soft and almost abstract up close. Limbs feather away into the background and the blood coming and going is rendered with slashes of periwinkle and rose. The fabric, on the other hand, shimmers and crumples and muffles the light coming at it. I have learned from my art teacher that often the last thing to do is to heavily layer on the white accents. Sargent articulates lace and velvet folds by spackling on his white, and it's a lesson for women who have reached their lifetime quota of people-pleasing that they can just announce it loudly like that: LIGHT HERE. No skirting things, no dropping of hints.
Moving through the exhibit, a lot of the gallery text is at pains to talk about how Sargent negotiated these portraits. One label explains that portraits of children had to be hammered out in detail with the parents, and it might explain why children are always pouting in 19th century art, waiting for the orange they were promised if they stood still another half hour. Sometimes the subject had something fabulous they wanted to wear for their sitting but Sargent insisted they keep on their house clothes (which, anyway, were very fancy). It is in the end his brush that makes the call.
In one painting, "Mrs Hugh Hammersley," wisps of embroidered tulle flutter around the subject's face, rendered with exquisite detail, while her left hand is left as a blurry hoof. "Do you think he had just had enough of this one?" asked J. "Like, near enough is good enough?" We know what it is to feel spent. We are so so tired but will stay up that night talking until 1 a.m. anyway.
Most of the paintings are of important ladies denoted as Mrs Her-Husband’s-Name and seated in such a way that the payoff of the compromise is very apparent: ribbons and turbans and beads for their name. The male subjects are generally less interesting but for a flamboyant gynecologist, Dr. Pozzi, who is immortalized in a red robe and a peep of red beaded slippers, which are very sensual and the focal point on the canvas.
There was no shortage of rich people who wanted to sit for portraits, so Sargent kept coming back to America from Europe to make some Benjamins, and the looking fabulous is a big part of the paintings, along with the eternal drive to capture yourself with your brood. I’m eight years into the brood and have started to lose the sharp memories of the early years. There is only a quarter-moon face now remembered from the moment, which is not necessarily bad. “I think you can push the darks,” my art teacher is always saying, and she’d know, she has more experience of life than me. J has a theory that we spend the first 40 years “becoming” and then the next 40 “unbecoming.” What will you keep, is the question.
In the last room, the MFA had curated some of Sargent’s later work—smaller and more impressionistic and done wet-on-wet or alla prima, a kitchen-sink approach to details where his Gilded Age portraits felt choosy about what to include. The sense is that his older stuff started to feel a bit naff and bougie, though it’s very beautiful. He’s generous, an aesthete, giving the Mrs Husbands an absolute bloom in their cheeks. How different things could have been had he been the one to contribute the first portrait of Mrs Prince of Wales, who was instead trapped in an organless, sexless rectangle, skin like a dirty window.
There on the wall in the 20th century room is a portrait of his sister, “Lady Fishing—Mrs Ormond (Violet Sargent),” with a label containing a hint to my mind from Sargent’s letter to a friend that his sister chose the colors, the clouds to include, the composition. “I am beginning to work on a picture of my sister dressed in white against a background of blue water with clouds reflected in it,” he wrote, and I can smell a 19th century Pinterest board when it puts a paint brush in a master’s hands. You can almost hear him sighing as he gives her what she wants: A Claude Monet by Sargent. It is an elaborate work of imitation that reflects little of what made him famous and different and is not entirely finished, stalled no doubt while he turned back to paying work. I felt glad that we could see men compromise too.
Best of all is a portrait of a woman who has HAD IT with the day, and lies splayed out in her enormous dress on a sofa, wrapped in the Gilded Age version of a Slanket. The tired angle of her face, the horizontal lines in background willing her to napppppp, it is a masterpiece. Better, it is titled “Nonchaloir (Repose),” which the gallery explains: “translates as indifference, or a lack of concern.”
We are funneled out with the crowds into a gift shop full of Sargent tea towels and calendars, finding that the artist’s eye for minutiae never quite translates to swag. You have your friends, but you cannot take the slashes of light with you.
In which a lunch note lovingly written by me is reused by my son as a note for his friend
The best book you missed during the pandemic
As you know (gestures at the pop-up morgues near our apartment c. April 2020), the pandemic was a bad time to have your book come out. Tours were out of the question, as was any media not explicitly concerned with figuring out whether or not to be Cloroxing the mail. Emily Temple’s The Lightness came out that summer, and I feel we all missed something exceptional.
In The Lightness, Olivia goes to a troubled-teen-girl retreat on a hillside where she finds that powerful breed of girl who knows things you don’t yet in Janet, Laurel and Serena. It’s a Buddhist retreat and the girls decide they want to jump ahead in their learnings to levitation. They spend time on a cliff top practicing different ways to get to The Feeling—the fainting game, comb-music-induced ASMR, kaku, and flirting with Luke, one of the counselors who lives in a hut at the retreat. Without going deeper into the mechanics, Emily writes a book about girlhood that tinkles up and down your spine and can jolt you back to the black sands of adolescence. It looks at the gap between passivity and action; between the cliff top and the air beyond. What is our power, etc. What do the battles with the mother mean, self fighting self? It reminded me a little of Picnic at Hanging Rock—which is a rich book, 10/10 rec—but also of the flirty, risky feel of Yellow Jackets. She’s very good, is what I’m saying. Go get it.
Any other good pandemic novels we all missed? I would love to hear!!!!
Goodies
Loved loved Catherine Newman’s essay on doing a polar plunge:
There are ice breakers, too. Not two truths and a lie, but axes and shovels and a kettlebell on a rope
This read on Labyrinth by Jude Doyle is so worth a tab:
Jareth steals children and changes them, and Sarah spends most of the movie trying to rescue a child, or a childhood, from his clutches, but the brother is just a symbol. The childhood she is trying to preserve is her own.
Patricia Lockwood meets the pope!!! (also: proxemics!)
‘You are children,’ the pope tells us, in his baby hat. When I go up to meet him, my body parts shining, I am calm, because I have thought of the right way to describe him.
yaa gyasi's transcendent kingdom was a dope 2020 novel. I read it while escaping the California wild fires, what a time