Two eras—and two distinct views of social portraiture
The Edwardian era, which lasted from 1901 to 1914, was the last great age of the society portrait in Europe—"great" not in artistic merit but in the large expectations that people had of portraiture as a form. For us, that appeal has largely vanished: artists like Munch, Kirchner and Giacometti have taught us to expect anything but social ease and confident display from the human head. The social portrait seems exhausted now, a cultural irrelevance. This fall has brought two exhibitions by American artists that underline the demise by recalling portraiture's vanished glories and suggesting its dubious status today. One is a retrospective of John Singer Sargent at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The other is a review of Andy Warhol's portraits, which opened last week at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
For the Edwardians, photography was still a minor art. Journalistic celebrity, except for actors and the high-society whores delicately known as "les grandes horizontals," was something to shun at all costs. It was the portrait that condensed fame and status, and to do so it needed to be painted by one of the lions of the medium, those astonishingly facile and brisk painters who plied their trade in the upper reaches of a society through which they moved on almost equal terms with their clients—Paul-César Helleu, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent, who became to the British Empire what Velásquez had been to the Habsburg court of Madrid or Sir Anthony van Dyck to Charles I: the official portraitist par excellence, the unrivaled chronicler of male power and female beauty at the top of the social heap. Sargent paid the penalty of success after he died in 1925. Reputations like his were exactly what the English defenders of modernism, starting with Roger Fry, felt most obliged to destroy.
Nothing could have been less congenial to the spirit of modernism than Sargent's work, with its showcase view of human character. By the '30s, few writers were ready to endorse the social attitudes that his paintings reflect—the belief in a natural ruling class, a government above politics, that was bitterly expressed in Hilaire Belloc's epigram on an English general election:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege (And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge) Broke—and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).
Could Sargent be revived? Fifteen years ago, the very question would have seemed absurd. But as the Edwardians recede from us, curiosity about their now remote era grows, and now—fortunately, as it turns out—we have a Sargent retrospective. Organized by Art Historians James Lomax, Richard Ormond and Nancy Rivard, it was seen in England during the spring and summer of 1979, and opened last month in Detroit.