Eliana Willis

Born in 1976, in the year of the dragon according to the Chinese zodiac, artist Tu Hongtao welcomes the fifth dragon year of his life with an exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, making his New York debut.
Best known for his visceral portrayal of dense cityscapes packed with bodies, Tu Hongtao developed his distinctive style in the early 2000s, following a brief stint in the clothing business in Guangdong Province, where he witnessed firsthand the frenzy and debauchery of a society grappling with rapid urbanization and globalization.
For the following decade, Tu maintained a studio on the outskirts of his hometown of Chengdu, and sought solace in nature, poetry, and classical Chinese arts. His earlier critique of rampant consumerism and unbridled desires turned introspective, morphing into psychologically charged landscapes that grew increasingly abstract.
The Covid years marked the latest evolution of that style, which is on display in Tu’s current show, “Beyond Babel.” A general reference to the biblical story, as well as a literary one to George Steiner’s linguistic treatise After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), the mythical tower stands as the symbol for a new language in an era of technological advancement.
Installation view of Tu Hongtao’s exhibition “Beyond Babel” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
“I feel the new Tower of Babel is artificial intelligence,” Tu said in an interview with gallery co-founder Brett Gorvy. “Man has advanced technology and the homogeneity of the world and global communication appear to have been restored. But how much longer can the world order and our existing social ecology remain?”
Such reflections stem from Tu’s experiences during the Covid lockdowns in China, which prompted him to question the application of technology in societal control. While such technology emphasizes the precision of converting individuals into digital data, just like AI aims to achieve an ever-higher degree of mimetic accuracy, Tu Hongtao seeks the opposite—an appreciation for ambiguity and uncertainty that remains distinctly human.
For the artist, this poetic uncertainty is where creative freedom lies, and it is also part of the reason that Tu has turned to abstraction.
“Tu Hongtao is a highly trained artist who brings together a deep understanding of traditional picture-making and a powerful gestural expressionism. While proudly Chinese in his identity, he strives for an international language that can be understood universally,” said Gorvy, commenting on Tu’s painting “language.”
Tu Hongtao, The Corrupted Garden of Eden, 2020-23. Image courtesy of Tu Hongtao Studio and Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
A highlight of the exhibition, the monumental, three-panel composition The Corrupted Garden of Eden (2020-23) reveals the artist’s process, in which he covers an initially figurative composition with layers of gestural lines and colors. This piece, three years in the making, also chronicles Tu’s emotional tumults and creative challenges throughout the pandemic. He nearly abandoned the painting twice. The many sheep that appear are a playful reminder of that period, playing on the homophonic nature of the Chinese word for “sheep” (yáng) and “testing positive.”
As his inaugural exhibition in New York launched, we had a conversation with Tu Hongtao about his latest creations, his reflections on the Covid years, and his outlook on the world.
Installation view of Tu Hongtao’s exhibition “Beyond Babel” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
How was your experience during the years of the pandemic?
In my city, Chengdu, there were intermittent lockdowns. We had to get vaccinated because without the vaccine, my child couldn’t go to school, and then after attending school for a few days, classes would stop again. In the first two years, people’s values, as well as their emotions, were all somewhat dazed. Starting from the third year, especially in the latter stages of preparing for the exhibition, I felt that people’s vitality was gradually restored. Last October, I chatted with some artists from Nanjing and Beijing, and it seems that everyone was more or less the same. Our values were shrouded in confusion.
During that time, were you able to go to your studio? Did you have the motivation and inspiration to paint?
For nearly two months, I was locked in my studio by myself. Creation came in stages. It was especially apparent with the large painting [The Corrupted Garden of Eden] that took three years to complete. At the beginning, I was very impulsive and painted for two or three months, then suddenly I lost the desire to paint and left it there for half a year before I felt the urge to continue painting. It was like adjusting to a new time zone, sometimes my eyes couldn’t focus. In the second year, I was so angry at one point that I tore the canvas down from the stretcher. Later, I made a new frame and stretched the canvas back onto it before finally finishing the painting. It was a process that happened in stages.
Installation view of Tu Hongtao’s exhibition “Beyond Babel” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Could you tell us more about Babel and how it became the theme that tied the show together?
The Tower of Babel has provoked a lot of thought in me. On the one hand, it represents globalization, as if everyone has a shared dream. But today that dream seems to have collapsed or, rather, torn apart. Reality is moving in the completely opposite direction. On the other hand, the Tower of Babel comes from George Steiner’s book After Babel, in which he questioned the language of technology and consumerism. In the book, Steiner says language has become very much like advertising, losing a lot of its original implications and experiences about humanity. Today, technology is advancing very quickly, and scientism has become a collective Tower of Babel. Steiner felt that language could save the collective unconsciousness of humanity from the turmoil of reality. And I agree with him.
You mentioned that consumerism, including the commercial shaping of language, has been an important theme in your work. Is it still the case?
Before 2010, I would criticize or mock consumerism more directly. Later, I moved beyond it. At that time, consumerism constituted a dilemma in reality, and today I feel that this dilemma might be created instead by technology and technicism. I want to find a more personal visual logic. Influenced by poetry and philosophy, I feel that nonfigurative forms are purer, hence I have gradually moved towards abstraction.
Abstraction is an attitude. AI can do a better job of depicting things. Abstraction, like poetry, is inherently undetermined. Technologies like AI are moving towards certainty; the larger the dataset, the more accurate it becomes, whereas human thought and language are uncertain and infinite. On the surface, abstraction seems vaguer, but in fact, it is more accurate. Like poetry, the mood they create are more fitting, even though it is not precise or quantifiable. In this sense, abstractness is actually more accurate.
Tu Hongtao, Melancholic Neuschwanstein, 2023. Image courtesy of Tu Hongtao Studio and Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Is this attitude rooted in an understanding of classical Chinese culture?
I’ve spent a long time studying and understanding classical Chinese culture, as well as being familiar with Western and post-war culture, trying to blend the two. However, overall, I lean more towards the classical and the spiritual. I really have no interest in the materiality that the West often focuses on. Chinese classical culture has its own issues; it later became rigid and closed-off. When the classical spirit encounters today’s realities, having learned and understood a lot about Western art, whether Chinese art can release a new kind of feeling and perspective is a concern and practice of mine.
Are you worried that doing more abstract work will reduce the recognizability of your works?
I’ve been quite confident recently because I’ve found that the rhythm and sense of abstraction of lines are very unique. Western artists might have more experience with light, so they are good at colors and layers. If I were to progress in the direction of color blocks, it would indeed be difficult to truly step out of the contemporary context. I have come to value lines more and more. Especially the paintings upstairs, they are representative of my latest developments. They are powerful and full of energy, and I believe painting as a language can transcend other human languages.
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Last year, New York celebrated the 50th birthday of its proudest musical offspring, hip-hop, with a string of exhibitions and concerts across the city. On May 9, the American Museum of Natural History continues the festivities by spotlighting an aspect of hip-hop culture with a slightly longer timeline: its minerals and gemstones.
From the gold rope chains of early pioneers Run DMC to the diamonds of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Tiffany campaign, hip-hop artists have forever used jewelry as a means of creative expression. “Ice Cold” will speak to this fact by bringing together a dazzling collection in which items of jewelry blur the lines between status symbol and work of art.
Housed in the moody atmospherics of the museum’s recently revamped Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems, the exhibition offers pieces from each decade of hip-hop, from items sported by the 1980s Bronx trailblazers through to those worn by contemporary artists who continue to innovate the genre today.
There’s Notorious B.I.G.’s gold Jesus piece (seen on his posthumous 1999 record Born Again), which boasts a lineage of wearers including Ghostface Killah from Wu-Tang Clan and Jay-Z. Slick Rick has called jewels a “super hero suit” and his gem-studded crown is included here, a nod to having being raised in the U.K. There’s the diamond-studded medallion of Roc-A-Fella, the record label that has platformed the likes of Kanye West and Cam’ron. There’s Nicki Minaj’s “Barbie” necklaces and further jewelry from the likes of Erykah Badu, A$AP Rocky, and Tyler, the Creator.
“Hip-hop jewelry has had a huge impact on our wider modern culture,” said Sean M. Decatur, the museum’s president, in a statement. “These jewelry pieces are not just magnificent in and of themselves, they’re an important part of hip-hop history and hip-hop culture as artists claimed and transformed traditional symbols of luxury and success.”
The show is in essence part three of a trilogy on the subject of hip-hop and its eye-catching jewelry. All parts are named Ice Cold. First came a documentary series by Karam Gill that sought to answer the question of how and when jewelry became incorporated in hip-hop culture.
The follow-up was a glossy Taschen tome that told hip-hop’s “transformative story” of “loud and proud” with photography by Wolfgang Tillmans and David LaChapelle, and guest essays from A$AP Ferg and LL Cool J. It was compiled and edited by Vikki Tobak, who, alongside Gill and a star-studded advisory board, acts as guest curator at the American Museum of Natural History.
“Jewelry is a cornerstone of hip-hop culture and you can see the evolution of jewelry alongside the rise of hip-hop itself,” Tobak said. “This exhibition explores that world of hip-hop’s culture of adornment and celebrates the pioneering artists and jewelers who made it all come together.”
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Success arrived belatedly for generative art pioneer Vera Molnár: a major retrospective now on view opened a mere two months after her death.
It was Paris’s Centre Pompidou that broke the news on X in December with a message that read, “It is with deep emotion that we learn of the death of Vera Molnár, with whom we had worked passionately for her next major exhibition.”
That show, “Speak to the Eye,” now occupies the fourth floor of the Pompidou and offers a comprehensive look at an artist who seemed forever ahead of the curve.
To gauge Molnár’s art world standing today, look no further than the tributes that followed her passing. Aside from institutions, curators, and critics, prominent digital artists, and NFT platforms chimed in to herald the impact of her algorithmic experiments, or “Machine Imaginaire,” as she called them.
Vera Molnár, Four Randomly Distributed Elements (1959). Photo: Georges Meguerditchian Centre Pompidou.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1924, Molnár studied art history at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She would later say that her first impactful encounter with art came through the pastoral paintings of her uncle. This influence is evident in the earliest works presented in “Speak to the Eye,” a collection of drawings from 1946 that present landscapes as geometric abstractions.
A year later, Molnár moved to Paris with her husband and sometime collaborator, the scientist François Molnár. There she fell in with a crowd of abstract artists that included Fernand Léger and Victor Vasarely, who pushed her geometric inclinations further. Works such as Circles and Half Circles (1953) and Four Randomly Distributed Elements (1959) speak to her contributions to the post-war geometric abstraction movement.
But the concept that would come to guide Molnár’s practice and shape her legacy was the “Machine Imaginaire.” Beginning in 1959, she used simple algorithms to inform the placement of lines and shapes. At the time, computers were elephantine, academic, screen-less things, and for nearly a decade she worked on grid paper by hand.
In 1968, Molnár talked her way into gaining access to a computer at the Sorbonne. She duly taught herself early programming languages such as Basic and Fortran and began producing work using punch cards and a plotter printer. This period is captured at the Pompidou in works such as A Stroll Between Order and Chaos (1975) and 160 Squares Pushed to the Limit (1976).
Installation view of “Speak to the Eye” at Centre Pompidou. Photo: Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/Centre Pompidou.
This may be the breakthrough for which Molnár is best known, but “Speak to the Eye” offers an artist whose oeuvre is broader.
There’s sculpture in the form of Perspective on a Line (2014-2019), a site-specific installation that contorts exhibition walls, and a photographic series of sand and shadows from the 2000s.
Thrown in for good measure are 22 of Molnár’s diaries, filled with jottings and photographs and plans for upcoming works. She once said in interview that her whole life was squares, triangles, and lines. These diaries prove the point.
See images of works in the show below.
Vera Molnár, Icon (1964). Photo: Bertrand Prévost / Centre Pompidou.
Vera Molnár, Same But Different (2010). Photo: Philippe Migeat / Centre Pompidou.
Installation view of “Speak to the Eye” at Centre Pompidou. Photo: Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/Centre Pompidou.
Vera Molnár, “In Search of Paul Klee”, 1970. Photo: Hervé Beurel.
“Speak to the Eye” is on view at Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, 75004 Paris, France, through August 26.
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“Nightlife,” a new exhibition at New York’s Marlborough gallery, brings together the works of six photographers known for chronicling the nocturnal goings-on of European and American cities in the early 20th century, including Berenice Abbot, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Weegee, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn.
Each of these photographers approached their subject from a different angle. In the 1920s, French-Hungarian photographer Brassaï spent his evenings walking past Parisian bars and brothels, armed with his camera and 24 glass plate negatives. His images variously captured the intimacies, excesses, and joys of night-crawlers, and were celebrated upon the release of his 1933 book, Paris de nuit. Henry Miller dubbed him “the eye of Paris.”
Inspired by Brassaï, Brandt did the same for 1930s London, where he documented the nightly festivities of both the upper and lower classes. His own photography book, A Night in London, published in 1938, offered a glimpse into the prewar night life and labors of British folk across social classes.
Bill Brandt, In the Public Bar at Charlie Brown’s, Limehouse (ca. 1942). © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Many of the photographs in “Nightlife” were made possible by the invention and commercialization of the flashbulb, which for the first time in history allowed photographers to take pictures in the absence of natural or artificial light. Prior to the flashbulb, visual documentation of nightlife had fallen to draftsmen to record these environments in sketches.
Photographers Penn and Newton, however, worked in far more controlled settings. Both were active in the field of fashion photography and vastly expanded its scope. Penn’s minimalist portraits hinted at nocturnal trends and styles. Meanwhile, German-Australian photographer Newton favored private as opposed to public scenes. His first two photography books, 1976’s White Women and 1978’s Sleepless Nights, are filled with intimate and erotic pictures of fully or partially nude women posing in bedrooms—a reflection of changing gender norms as well as a commentary on the male gaze that turns observers into voyeurs.
Helmut Newton, Security, New York III (1976). © Helmut Newton Foundation. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Then there’s Abbott and Weegee, two New York-based photographers who used the same documentary style to depict the Big Apple from opposite perspectives. Abbott’s images of 1930s New York see her hovering in the sky, presenting skylines, squares, and neighborhoods as they developed over time. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystalized now in permanent form, it will be forever lost,” she once said. “The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”
Conversely, Weegee stayed on the ground, listening in on police radio broadcasts so he could capture inner-city mishaps such as crime scenes and brawls in the moment. “What I did,” he said, “anybody else can do.” Though ostensibly a press photographer, Weegee’s dynamic frames appealed to the fine art world: his work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, included the show “Action Photography,” and later compiled in his first photography volume, 1945’s Naked City.
See more images from the show below.
Berenice Abbott, New York at Night (1932). © Berenice Abbott/Getty Images. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Weegee, Lovers at the Palace Theatre (1945). Photo courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery © Weegee Archive/International Center of Photography.
Brassaï, Le bal des Quatres Saisons (1932). © ESTATE BRASSAÏ – RMN-Grand Palais. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Bill Brandt, Hermitage Stairs, Wapping (1930s). © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Irving Penn, Girl Behind Bottle (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949 (1978). © Helmut Newton Foundation. Photo courtesy of Marlborough New York.
Weegee, Woman at a bar (1940s). Photo courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery © Weegee Archive/International Center of Photography.
“Nightlife” is on view at Marlborough gallery, 545 West 25th Street, New York, March 7 through April 20.
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Another wave of Basquiat-fever is about to crest over the art world this spring, with a soon-to-open blockbuster show at Gagosian Gallery’s Beverly Hills outpost in Los Angeles, along with a major accompanying exhibition catalogue. It’s just one of many Basquiat projects on the horizon for 2024. 
At a time when it seems the world can’t get enough of Basquiat—the two projects promise to further deepen appreciation and understanding of the artist’s brief but fascinating and dynamic life. As most fans know, he skyrocketed to fame in the New York art world in the 1980s and died at the age of just 27, in 1988.
Then, of course, there’s his market. Basquiat’s current auction record (set at Sotheby’s in 2018) clocks in at a cool $110.5 million, with the second highest auction result not far behind at $93 million, paid at Christie’s New York in 2021. To date, five Basquiat works have fetched above $50 million each at auction. Since 2005, searches for Basquiat on Artnet’s Price Database have skyrocketed; just last year, he was the 8th most-searched artist, keeping company with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Last year also marked the opening of the stellar show “Basquiat: KIng Pleasure” which debuted in New York at the direction of the Basquiat Estate and later traveled to Los Angeles. If ever there was proof that the artist’s star is burning bright as ever, and reaching a new fan base, it’s the news that Taylor Swift’s beau, pro football player Travis Kelce, is helping to finance a new documentary on the artist.
Basquiat’s Untitled unveiled in Phillips London. Courtesy of Phillips.
Taken together, the forthcoming Gagosian show and its accompanying catalogue will highlight Basquiat’s lesser-known L.A. period. That’s because, although the artist is often closely associated with New York City and Brooklyn, where he came of age in the heyday of street art and hip-hop, the Gagosian show delves into the heady time he spent in California, where, with the direct support and enthusiasm of the dealer himself (he even had the artist live temporarily at his townhouse with then-girlfriend Madonna) and others, the artist flourished and met a host of like-minded creatives and other artists during his time there.
Meanwhile, Rizzoli is set to release a major monograph on the artist this May, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Iconic Work,” by Dieter Buchhart, the Vienna-based curator and Basquiat expert who has already published numerous books on the artist. The book also serves as the exhibition catalogue to “Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the major exhibition that took place at the Brant Foundation in 2019. That Dieter-curated show delved into the myriad sources of inspiration that influenced Basquiat and his work, ranging from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. Reflecting on that 2019 show, Brant Foundation founder Peter Brant said, “It was an honor to inaugurate The Brant Foundation’s East Village space by bringing these important works back to the very neighborhood where Basquiat lived and worked, and to share his legacy with the community that was fundamental in shaping it.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, (1983). © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NYImage courtesy Gagosian.
Jumping back to the West Coast for a moment, the show, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street” (March 7–June 1),  is curated by Gagosian and Fred Hoffman, owner of New City Editions, a Venice-based prints and multiples publishing company, who worked closely with the artist in the early 1980s to create now iconic editions.
“For an artist who has long been affiliated with New York, Jean-Michel was surprisingly productive during the time he spent in California—he created nearly one hundred works of art in two different studios near the beach on Market Street in Venice over a two-year period, between 1982 and 1984,” Gagosian writes in the introduction to the catalogue. The show will reunite 30 works produced in Venice, including loans from major collections such as the Broad Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum in New York
Gagosian first met the artist in 1981 at dealer Anina Nosei’s Soho space and immediately offered him a show, which took place the following year, at the North Almont space in Los Angeles. Gagosian hosted a second solo LA exhibition at a larger space, in 1983.
It was in 1982 that Hoffman also met Basquiat, and together the next year they produced six editioned prints including Tuxedo and Untitled, large-scale silkscreens on canvas that feature vibrant colors as well as the clusters of allusive phrases that became one of the artist’s signature marks.
The book includes a written transcript of a panel discussion held in LA in August 2023, between Basquiat’s two sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, Gagosian, Hoffman, and filmmaker Tamra Davis who spent a good deal of time with the artist while he was in L.A. and in 2010 released the documentary, “Basquiat: The Radiant Child.“
Jean-Michel Basquiat Horn Players, (1983). The Broad Art Foundation. Image courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
Asked about the first time he ever saw Basquiat’s work, Gagosian said: “I saw five or six paintings—and they stopped me cold in my tracks. I mean, my hair stood on end. I was just transfixed by these paintings and how powerful and original they were.”
Noting that it has been more than four decades since he met the artist, Gagosian called it “astonishing” to see the impact that his art and legacy have had across the cultural realm, adding that his influence is present everywhere. On a personal note, he writes, the show “has allowed me to relive the time I shared with Jean-Michel in California and to think back to when we were young and first getting to know each other in the early 1980s. I could see it then. Today his mark is one of the most widely recognized and celebrated in the world.”
Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure.” Photo by Ivane Katamashvili, courtesy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate.
Following this  West Coast deep dive, Rizzoli’s May release will yield even more insight to the artist’s broader oeuvre once again. According to Buchhart, Basquiat “took the 1980s art world by storm: first New York, then Europe and the entire world.”
The book delves into 100 works and explores both the inspiration and creation process behind them. Buchart describes the artist’s work as “symbolically charged, highly complex, [and] angry.”
“Thirty-five years after Basquiat’s death,” Buchart continues, “his works and their unmistakeable aesthetic attract the highest attention on both the art market—achieving record prices on the secondary market and at auction—and in art historical writing.”
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Opening at Paris’s Louvre Museum on April 24, “Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy” celebrates the history of the Olympics and its designs from ancient times to today. The exhibition comes as Paris prepares to host its third Olympic Games, a whole century since it lasted hosted the event in 1924.
The show delves into the history and political context that birthed the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, tracing how its organizers sought to reimagine the gaming tournaments of ancient Greece. Celebrated here are figures, namely Pierre de Courbetin—known as the “Father of the modern Olympic Games“—as well as the event’s first official artist, French-Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron, and the first President of the International Olympic Committee, Dimitrios Vikélas.
Bréal Cup awarded to Spyridon Louis in 1896. © Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
One starring artifact is the very first Olympic Cup. It was awarded to a Greek water carrier called Spyridon Louis, who was the first-ever winner of the marathon race, which had been invented by the French linguist Michel Bréal for the inaugural modern Games in 1896. The ‘Bréal Cup’ has never before been exhibited in Paris.
Luc Olivier Merson, The Marathon Soldier. © Beaux Arts Paris.
Other commemorative objects round out the exhibition, not limited to postage stamps and flyers immortalizing the games. Ancient vessels and sculptures depicting runners, wrestlers, and disc-throwers further illustrate how Olympic sports have captured the creative imagination through the ages.
Plaster Plaque. © French School of Athens.
The exhibition is part of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games’ cultural program. Ahead of the competition—the Olympic Games commence July 26 and the Paralympic Games August 28—the city of Paris has unveiled this year’s medals, which were designed by jeweler Chaumet and are embedded with iron bits from the Eiffel Tower. Foreseeing a swell of visitors, museums in Paris, including the Louvre, have also raised admission fees.
Sneak a peek at the objects in the exhibition below.
Red Figure Cup. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Child’s Sarcophagus. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Commemorative Cover for 1896 Athens Olympic Games. © Olympic Museum Collections.
Modern Plaster Medici Wrestlers. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
Commemorative Stamp for 1906 Mesolympiad. © Museum of Philately and Posts Athens.
Trophy Designs for 1906 Mesolympiad. © École Française d’Espagne.
Mesolympiad 1906 Marathon and Athletics Trophy. © Thessaloniki Olympic Museum.
Plaster Relief. © French School of Athens.
Runner Statuette. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Commemorative Stamp for 1906 Mesolympiad. © Museum of Philately and Posts Athens.
Red Figure Cup. © RMN Grand Palais Louvre Museum.
“Olympism: Modern Invention, Ancient Legacy” is on view at the Louvre, Paris, April 24 through September 16.
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Wander the painting galleries of a major museum on either side of the Atlantic and chances are you’ll encounter John Singer Sargent. The reasons are as much geographic as artistic. Born in Europe to American parents, Sargent flitted between London and Boston and by the final decade of the 19th century was the portraitist of choice for New England’s nouveau riche and Britain’s aristocracy.
On his death in 1925, his legacy seemed settled—Rodin, for one, had called him the era’s Van Dyck. But in time Sargent was labelled a pandering society painter, a traditionalist who devoted his talents to depicting the luxurious draperies of the elite.
Over the past decade, however, Sargent has received renewed attention. First came an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery that suggested his paintings offered a prophetic glimpse at the modern world. Now a show fittingly co-organized by MFA Boston and the Tate Britain — organizations that supported Sargent during his lifetime— presents Sargent’s fastidiousness towards dress not as a shallow vanity, but as a powerful tool used to reveal the interiority of his subjects.
“Fashioned by Sargent”, whose three-month stint in Boston last year is followed in London from Feb 22 to July 7, marries 50-something Sargent paintings with period dresses and accessories, including exact items worn by sitters.
“By showing original garments alongside the paintings in which they are depicted, visitors have a unique opportunity to see exactly how Sargent translated clothing into paint,” Tate curator, James Finch said via email. ” His distinction as a portraitist derives from the special sensitivity he brought to the rendering of clothing and fabric.”
Costume worn by Carmen Dauset Moreno (c.1890). Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall.
And, yes, the garb is gorgeous. There’s the costume of Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno as shown in La Carmencita (1890). It’s a thing of sun-golden satin trimmed with waves and florets of silver that must have dazzled as it twirled. There’s the flowing sylvan “Beetle Wing Dress” worn by Ellen Terry in her 1888 Macbeth production, so-called because it’s affixed with beetle wing cases. On canvas, Terry has the look of an awed zombie, the crown held aloft, her auburn locks tumbling down her sleeves.
These works, along with Vernon Lee (1881), a dashed portrait of the expansive English writer, speak to Sargent’s place amid the frenetic cultural movements of the late 19th century—he also painted the likes of W.B. Yates, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Edwin Booth. But most interesting are works in which Sargent uses fashion to express the difference and character of his sitters. There’s certainly something to the organizers’ comparison with a fashion shoot director. Here was a painter who would step away from the easel, cross the room to tweak and cajole garments precisely into place.
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (1883). Photo: courtesy TheMetropolitan Museum of Art.
Most notoriously, his submission to the Paris Salon of 1884, Madame X, depicted Mme Gautreau in a black satin evening dress with a jeweled strap loosed off the shoulder. It proved too salacious with Sargent correcting the strap a year later. In “Lady Sassoon” from 1907 he offers sharp intellect shrouded in refinement through flashes of pink that burst from the folds of a black taffeta opera cloak.
And how did the artist himself dress, you ask? With plain simplicity. “Sargent was not an extrovert, and preferred to dress in the dark suits of the bourgeois middle-class,” Finch said, noting that when the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt first met Sargent he called the painter a ‘superior mechanic’ on account of his suit and pot hat.
Other times, Sargent reconfigures dress entirely. In W. Graham Robertson (1894), in spite of the summer heat, he insisted that his sitter don a long woollen coat to complete the dandy look. In his wedding portrait for Ena Wertheimer he has her gleefully mocking societal conventions. She wears the garments of the male-only Order of the Garter and waves a broomstick as though a sword. It was broadly criticized when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1905 as crass and deliberately provocative.
This reception is a reminder to consider art in the context of its time. Sargent regarded himself an outsider and enjoyed painting those he found kinship with. His tweaks and subtle subversions may seem tame by today’s standards, but as “Fashioned by Sargent” insists, we would do well to pay closer attention.
See more images:
John Singer Sargent, Lady Sassoon (1907). Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall
Opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon, c.1895. Photo: courtesy Houghton Hall.
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie (1904). Photo: Tate Britain.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs Carl Meyer and her Children, (1896). Photo: courtesy Tate Britain.
John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home (1881). Photo: courtesy The Armand Hammer Collection.
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