When John Singer Sargent Sang His Praises -With Madame X In Mind 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

 

Now that Bart Webber was retired from the day to day operations of the printing business that he had established back in the 1960s just after he had graduated from Carver High School he could devote himself to the things that he had missed along the way. Could do things that the press of running a small business, raising a brood of a family, and squeezing  in some progressive political work when he had a moment all of which sucked the air out of any free time he had and prohibited him from what another friend of ours, Frank Riley, called “getting culture.” Bart had been crazy to go to museums, particularity the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA), when several art teachers that he had had along the way in school encouraged him to explore his artistic talents. But after high school since he had decided against the rigors of applying to art schools, which a few art teachers were willing to write him recommendations for, he had as I said not spent much time in those institutions. Now he had time and was going at the “getting culture” idea with a vengeance.      

I made a mistake earlier, or maybe the reader would misunderstand, Bart did not open his own printing business right out of high school although he probably could have but went to work to learn the trade at Miles Connor’s print shop on Main Street for a few years (of course Main Street in every small town America and Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world, was nothing but a rat’s ass small town). There was another interlude when he took a couple of years off to “sow his wild oats” with us, me, Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Jimmy Jenkins, and the late Pete Markin and Allan Johnson going out west in the summers of love following what Pete called the search for the great blue-pink American West night. After he came back, settled down and married Betsy Binstock (whom he is still married to after all these years, the only one of the old Jack Slack’s corner boys to go the distance), Miles Connor decided to retire and Bart took over the business. And in turn his youngest son Sean took over the day to day operations a couple of years ago.

One of the virtues that Bart brought to his business was a sense of where things were going. He had been smart enough to hire Alice Burton, a silk screen artist out of the Massachusetts College of Art, when everybody desired silk screen posters and tee-shirts as a sign that they were part of the emerging youth nation coming out of the turmoil of the 1960s. Later he grabbed onto the photocopying business when that became a cheap way for people to get things copied. But when the great Internet explosion occurred and everybody could now become their own printer of choice he turned over the operation to his more tech-savvy son.

But back to that museum craze he is now on. A craze that got its start really way back when he was in sixth year and Mister Burne-Jones our art teacher kept on filling Bart’s ears about the treasures of the MFA, especially the great collection of Egyptian art and artifacts some guys from Harvard discovered out by the Pyramids back around 1900 or so. Kept filling his ears about guys like Picasso, Manet, Monet, Cezanne and Burne-Jones’ favorite, John Singer Sargent.

Here’s the way the craze came down the first time. Bart, filled with all that art talk, filling me with all that talk too, decided one summer day, a Tuesday, that we should take the bus to Boston and see what was what. We did so getting off at the Greyhound Bus Station near South Station, taking the Redline to Park Street and then the Green Line to Huntington Avenue where the MFA is located. Now part of the reason for going on Tuesday was, if you can believe this now in the age of mega-prices for museum tickets, that it was a free admission day.

So in we go. Went into the huge entrance all granite and severe, walked to the admissions desk for our tickets which it turned out we did not need and then walked up the marble stairs to the second floor where all the Impressionist paintings were, noticing above us the great panels on the ceiling from mythology that Sargent had done as a service to the MFA. Here is the real story though, the kid’s part of the story which shows how much “getting culture” we still needed then. Everybody knows, or should know, that you can’t realistically take in all the art in a major art museum in a day, maybe not in two days if you are thoughtful about what you are doing. We, Bart and I, sprinted through the whole museum in about two and one half hours that day. Said we had seen everything when we reported back to old Burne-Jones about our adventure when school began again in September. Yeah, we missed a few things, quite a few, which I didn’t realize until I started going to the MFA in a more serious frame of mind about a decade later. And which Bart as he told me recently was just discovering of late in his new craze period.  

Yeah, we, Bart had missed a few things about old Sargent in particular. Missed that he was a more serious painter than all the “silly” (our term) portraits of guys with three names, you know like John Singer Sargent himself, and their wives, also with three names except Mrs.in front. Bart says these days at the MFA (and in the National Museum of Art in Washington and the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum among other places) you can’t breathe for a minute without running into a Sargent something painting. He says that, if you can believe this, in the new wing of the MFA, the American Art wing which cost a ton of money to build onto the old building practically a whole floor is devoted to Sargent anchored by this cutesy, intriguing portrait of the four daughters of some Boston Brahmin with the inevitable three names. Plus don’t forget the great panels on the ceiling as you come in the Huntington Avenue side and lots of feeling for the place belonging to him. Bart said if that wasn’t enough there had recently been a retrospective of Sargent’s watercolors which he had missed seeing in person since he was still working then. No to worry though, Bart said on a recent visit in October [2015] to see an exhibition on the works of Dutch painters in the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer that he had gone down to the “catacombs” (his term) and seen a small Sargent exhibition of letters and other ephemera where there was a book sitting on a table, a catalogue of the watercolors from that exhibition. He had been impressed as he thumbed through the book about how much the Impressionists over in Europe had on that work. Had been amazed at what Sargent could do with such a tough medium to work in especially some things that he did of nomadic Arabs with their eyes practically staring the bejesus out of you.     

Here’s what Bart though was funny about his feelings for Sargent one night when we were at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyville Grille down near the Financial District in Boston having a couple of drinks. You could put all the works of that great artist together, the three name portraits, the lush pastoral watercolors, the fierce piercing Arab eyes, the obverse Venetian canals, the great mythological panels and cupolas, even those later dramatic World War I scenes like Gassed which would turn any sunny day patriot into a hard-boiled pacifist with one look, and he would not take all of them for one minute with the divine Madame X. The famous one of her posed full length in black and white (black dress, offset by extreme white complexion) not the other lesser studies of her taking a glass of wine or other poses.

That American beauty married to French money, a banker, painted by Sargent in the 1880s held him in awe, held him in some secret desire to have known her, to have been in her circle, although he was a mere son of a bogger, a nobody in admiration before her beauty. The ironic part; there is letter from her stating how much she liked the portrait to Sargent early on in that little Searching for Sargent exhibition but somehow after the critics panned the painting (too much white or something, too much sex really, 19^th century version), the critics being those who could not paint but could critique to their hearts’ content she lost faith, cried relentless tears and hence for so long Madame X. Jesus.