Strapless

by Deborah Davis

  Coolidge took one look at the display and decided that El Jaleo should stay in Gardner’s home. Elsewhere in the house, in the Gothic Room, Gardner hung Sargent’s portrait of her, the one that had been such a source of embarrassment to her husband. She respected his wish to withhold Isabella Stewart Gardner from public view until his death in 1898. Sargent painted Gardner again, not long before her death in 1924. Lady in White shows this once vibrant woman reclining on her couch, swathed in white veils, like Amélie at the end of her life, her energy subdued by illness.

  Sargent’s paintings hung in museums through the 1930s and 1940s, but he was overlooked, considered obsolete if he was considered at all. In the early fifties, a confluence of events thrust him into the spotlight once again. A vivid biography by Charles Merrill Mount, published in 1955, portrayed Sargent’s life as colorful and filled with incident, and it generated new interest in the forgotten artist. While Mount had a tendency to make mistakes and to exaggerate for dramatic purposes (Mount is, for example, the only biographer to suggest that Sargent had an affair with Judith Gautier), his lively writing made the artist seem accessible and appealing.

  In the early 1950s and through the 1960s, a series of successful exhibitions brought Sargent’s paintings back into the public eye. Viewers who lined up to see his works in museums in Chicago, New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Birmingham, England—some of whom were seeing them for the first time—were impressed by Sargent’s undeniable talents. Instead of dismissing him as old-fashioned, critics now hailed his works as classic, and recognized his extraordinary combination of unsurpassed technique and penetrating psychology.

  By the 1970s, Sargent had made a comeback, and his portraits in particular were held in high regard. When asked to comment on Sargent’s work, Andy Warhol, the artist who was the definition of contemporary cool and who, like Sargent, specialized in images of the rich and the famous, said, “Oh God, I wish I could paint this good.” Warhol understood that Sargent’s subjects, though dressed in the clothing of a different era, were like many of the people he encountered at his ultra-hip Factory, brilliant creatures who used art to make a statement about their wealth and their privileged insider status.

  Sargent’s star continued to rise, culminating with a block-buster exhibition that originated at London’s Tate Gallery in 1998 and traveled to Washington, D.C., Boston, and Seattle through 2001. Sargent’s triumphant tour of America featured 130 of his paintings, watercolors, and drawings, and met with awe and acclaim in every city. The new millennium brought Sargent a highly enthusiastic public, who were dazzled by his bravura painting and did not find it at all politically incorrect to admire his masterly renderings of the wealthy and their elegant, glittering world. In the end, Sargent overcame the death sentence his reputation suffered after his demise. In the words of the art historian Robert Rosenblum, the once forgotten painter was “hot stuff again,” and his most famous painting was Madame X.

  As Sargent’s exhibitions attracted huge audiences and his paintings were once again popular subjects of study, art scholars zealously turned their attention to the artist’s personal life, determined to uncover the “real” story of his elusive and ambiguous sexuality. Was he heterosexual, homosexual, or even asexual? Early biographers maintained that Sargent was uninterested in romance or sex because he worked constantly and had no time for anything but his art. Even Stanley Olson, who wrote in great depth about Sargent in the 1980s, suggested that the artist did not conceal his private passions, but simply did not have any.

  Other experts, however, Trevor Fairbrother among them, hold that Sargent was a sensualist in his life as well as in his work. Fairbrother argues that biographers and critics have sidestepped the fact that many of Sargent’s paintings and drawings are charged with homoeroticism, and proposes that “the visual edge and emotional volatility of his work may have been shaped by his attraction to male beauty.” Throughout his career, Sargent frequently drew and painted naked and athletically built men, including his manservant Nicola d’Inverno, numerous Venetian gondoliers, and the models who posed for his Boston Public Library murals. His male nudes hint at a sexual side that he otherwise tried to suppress and keep hidden, as do the portraits born of his romantic crushes of the early 1880s, when he was young and still exploring his desires. The impassioned brushstrokes evident in these works may well indicate deeper—and unfulfilled—longings on Sargent’s part.

  After decades of study and debate, experts have established that Sargent’s portraits were never just pretty pictures. They were always powerful and insightful character studies that exposed the essence of their subjects and the passionate nature of the artist. In Sargent’s hands, Dr. Pozzi at Home was both ironic and prescient: Pozzi, the chronic philanderer, was never at home. It is as if Sargent conceived his painting, which hung in the doctor’s salon, as Pozzi’s perpetual stand-in. In Lady with the Rose and Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise, Sargent seems to have intuited Louise’s sad and tenuous future, just as in Mrs. Frank D. Millet he sensed Lily Millet’s grace and strength—the traits that later sustained her in the face of personal tragedy.

  In Madame X, Sargent’s greatest psychological portrait, he revealed the unattainable beauty and self-destructive narcissism of both the woman and the decadent society she embodied. “I do not judge, I only chronicle,” went Sargent’s credo. Madame X can, of course, be seen as the abstract and iconic image of dangerous beauty. But the subject of the painting also had great personal meaning for Sargent. On the fateful day at Les Chênes when Sargent determined Amélie’s pose, he painted her with her face turned away from him, a disturbing vision of a woman he could never possess and a world he could never inhabit.

  Afterword

  Madame X was described as sphinxlike when she debuted at the 1884 Paris Salon. She had an ineffable quality of mystery and elusiveness—a quality that has made her, in the ensuing century and more, among the most studied of the paintings of a much-studied man. Hundreds of Sargent scholars spend hundreds of hours discussing the portrait’s meaning. Madame X has been described, analyzed, and deconstructed. Scholars have argued over her position in the Sargent oeuvre, picked apart her every detail, and debated her significance.

  In spite of all this attention, however, the story of Amélie’s fallen strap was overlooked until 1981, when the Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother uncovered and published evidence that had been buried in nineteenth-century art journals and archives. In an 1889 issue of Art Amateur, he saw a passing reference to the fact that Sargent “repainted one part of the picture which gave offense to the lady’s friends.” The offensive detail, Fairbrother discovered, was the strap of Amélie’s dress. He realized that the Madame X hanging at the Metropolitan Museum differed markedly from the one that had outraged Belle Époque Paris. There are two known representations of the portrait in its original state—an engraving by Charles Baude that appeared in the Salon issue of Le Monde Illustré, and a photograph of the painting at the Salon. Fairbrother called attention to these images and the story they had to tell.

  Subsequently, Fairbrother turned his eye to another mystery involving Madame X. At the Tate Gallery in London was an unfinished copy of the portrait, which Sir Joseph Duveen had purchased from Sargent’s estate in 1925 and then presented to the gallery. The copy had confounded experts for decades. Had Sargent painted it at the same time he was working on Madame X ? Or had he painted it after the Salon version was finished and exhibited? If so, why would he attempt to re-create a painting he had already completed?

  Upon examining the version at the Tate, Fairbrother noted that, while incomplete, it more or less matched the finished Madame X. Thus it was not an early, experimental study, but in fact a replica, a copy Sargent may have been rushing to finish and then exhibit at the Salon. Because Sargent left his subject’s shoulder bare in the copy, Fairbrother suggested that the artist might have had second thoughts about the positioning of Amélie’s strap and wasn’t sure whether to paint it off—or
on—her shoulder. Had Sargent finished the copy in time, he might have offered a far less scandalous version of the painting to Salon audiences.

  Years after the portrait arrived at its current home in New York, yet another mystery presented itself. Curators at the Metropolitan realized that Madame X was not wearing her original gold frame. A photograph of Sargent posing with the painting in his Paris studio in 1884 showed that first frame in glorious detail, a contrast to the simple gilded strip of wood enclosing Madame X in her new home.

  In 1989, the museum began an extensive inventory, and in the process searched through its vast collection of frames in the hope that the original one for Madame X might be there. After a year of studying and measuring hundreds of frames, curators reached the disappointing conclusion that Sargent had removed the original frame before sending the painting to San Francisco in 1915. Perhaps the heavy weight was a problem; the painting was being shipped all the way to America’s West Coast. A more appropriate frame than the single wood-strip version was, however, found in the museum’s inventory, one constructed between 1892 and 1899 in a lavish period style by the New York framer Thomas A. Wilmurt. This is the frame that Madame X wears today.

  Even in the case of the most well-known works of art, details are obscured by time and things get lost. With Madame X, the frame was lost, the replica was lost, and even the scandal itself was lost, as eyewitnesses died off and the fallen strap was forgotten. Most significant, the person in the painting was lost.

  The woman who never worked a day in her life, except as a professional beauty, now works six days a week, putting her best face forward for the thousands who pass through the American Wing of the Metropolitan weekly. Madame X has been described as “the face that launched a thousand loan requests.” Museums around the world frequently ask to borrow the painting to hang in temporary exhibitions; most of these requests are refused. In a rare exception, she was absent from the Metropolitan for several months in 2002, when she was sent to Jefferson Alumni Hall at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia to take the place of Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, which had been loaned for a traveling Eakins exhibition that was then at the Metropolitan.

  If Madame X were on the market today, the line of suitors would be endless. The works of the artists who were stars in 1884—Gérôme, Henner, Puvis de Chavannes, Benjamin-Constant, Bouguereau, Cormon, and Chaplin—have not had the enduring fame that has been bestowed on Madame X. Today, a great Gérôme or a Bouguereau might command a few million dollars. But Madame X would be worth tens of millions, for she is a star attraction.

  Amélie Gautreau’s image is immediately familiar to people who have never entered the Metropolitan Museum. She is the idol of fashion designers who invoke the elegance of her famous black gown when searching for a definition for chic. One of her descendants, the artist and designer Angèle Parlange, has paid homage to her with a line of sumptuous fabrics that feature Amélie’s profile and a signature X. Parlange’s parents live on Parlange plantation, once home to Virginie Ternant Parlange, her daughter Marie Virginie, and young Amélie. It is still a working farm, and it is just as much a showplace as it was in the nineteenth century.

  New Orleans residents continue to fall under Madame X’s spell. Several years ago, an Avegno descendant opened a restaurant and named it Gautreau’s. Diners there sit beneath framed hotel and restaurant bills from the south of France—all bearing the name Gautreau. An antique dealer, Charles “Chuck” Robinson, has spent ten years restoring 927 Toulouse, the French Quarter house built by Philippe Avegno, Amélie’s grandfather, which she inherited from her father and sold in 1884, the year of her great disappointment. This monument to Creole life, complete with its original walled garden, now features a Madame X suite, where a full-size copy of the portrait hangs over the fireplace.

  In 2000, the noted doll maker Madame Alexander included a Madame X doll in its limited-edition Arts series. The doll, a brunette with jeweled straps, black gloves, and a train on her dress, is already a collector’s item, subject to feverish rounds of bidding on eBay.

  Madame X, or versions of her, appear widely in the media: on the cover of The New Yorker; as embodied by the actress Nicole Kidman posing in Vogue; in an episode of the television show Will & Grace. Almost 120 years old, Madame X was paid a high compliment when she was named “Babe du Jour” at popula.com, a website that identifies the best of vintage images and objects. She has also inspired a play by Ann Ciccolella, a ballet score by Patrick Soluri, and a memoir by one of her Avegno relatives, Mettha Westfeldt Eshleman.

  Today, Madame X shows some signs of age; the cracks in the paint are due probably to Sargent’s rolling up the canvas to transport it from Brittany to Paris before it was completely dry, or to his applying quick-drying paints over slow-drying ones. The professional beauty whose fashion choices were reported in the newspapers and who was rarely seen in the same dress twice now wears the same gown every day. She is famous, as she once wished, but no one ever calls Madame X by her true name: Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau.

  NOTES

  LA LOUISIANE

  8 “have seen the last of Mardi Gras”: Augusto Miceli, The Pickwick Club of New Orleans (New Orleans: Pickwick, n.d.), p. 8.

  8 The event was a great success: Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1998), p. 157.

  8 The Krewe of Comus resolved: Miceli, The Pickwick Club of New Orleans, p. 11.

  8 “The city care forgot,” the best place, “the most glamorous”: Reinders, End of an Era, pp. 151-152.

  10 one of the unhealthiest cities: Ibid., p. 87.

  11 the largest real estate holdings: Robert de Berardinis, telephone interview with the author, July 13, 2002.

  13 Ternant home inventory: Brian J. Costello, From Ternant to Parlange (Baton Rouge: Franklin, 2002), pp. 65-73.

  14 “the Lady of False River”: Ibid., p. 56.

  15 an extensive library: Ibid., p. 81.

  15 one who did not survive: Ibid., p. 83.

  16 “le grand m’sieu”: Ibid., p. 99.

  16 “the girls of False River”: Ibid., p. 97.

  17 Her Acadian grandfather: Ibid., p. 52.

  19 “Dixie”: www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/dixie.html.

  20 He and his brother Jean-Bernard: Robert de Berardinis, telephone interview.

  21 Major Avegno’s “gallant little band”: United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, vol. 52, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), p. 491.

  21 “rallied for a moment”: Daily Delta, April 16, 1862.

  21 “where the brave love to die”: Ibid.

  23 In 1867 she and young Amélie: Theories conflict as to when the widowed Marie Virginie left New Orleans. If she traveled with Jean-Bernard Avegno and his family, she left soon after her husband died, in 1862. She would then have returned to Louisiana a few years later, since she was in New Orleans to sign papers relating to Anatole’s will and to bury her younger daughter, Valentine, in 1866. A more plausible theory is that Marie Virginie, Amélie, and Julie Ternant sailed together for France in 1867.

  CITY OF LIGHT

  26 “an army whose task”: David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 220.

  27 the first grand passage: “Paris Under Glass,” France Magazine, July/ August 2002, p. 48.

  31 Such behavior would have been: Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 20.

  31 filles à la cassette: George Washington Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2000), p. 26.

  32 hot-air balloon escape: http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Hoop/4390/history2.htm.

  33 But the genealogist Robert de Berardinis: Robert de Berardinis, “‘Madame X’: Virginie Amélie ‘Mimi’ Avegno (Mme. Gautreau) and a Family Note to Art History,” National Genealogical Soc
iety Quarterly, 90, no. 1 (March 2002), p. 65.

  33 The Communards, as the dissidents: Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 345.

  36 “an habitual state of mental derangement”: Costello, From Ternant to Parlange, p. 113.

  41 They would instead share: Contract de Mariage entre M. Pierre-Louis Gautreau et Mademoiselle Avegno. Paris, M. Deves, notary, 1878.

  A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY

  48 “genius for grooming,” “fragrance of sensuality”: Patrice Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 115.

  48 “In Paris, half the female population”: Quoted ibid., p. 115.

  49 “There is no falsehood”: Baronne Staffe, My Lady’s Dressing Room (New York: Cassell, 1892), p. 8.

  50 “to be seen and to shine”: Octave Uzanne, The Modern Parisienne (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), p. 170.

  50 “spiritualized”: Ibid., p. 28.

  50 “is even accomplishing” . . . “anathematized”: Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 33.

  51 “The combined business”: Uzanne, The Modern Parisienne, p. 27.

  53 A famous cartoon: Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 101.

  54 “women wore high coiffures,” “effervescence”: Gabriel-Louis Pringue, 30 Ans de Dîners en Ville (Paris: Édition Revue Adam, 1948), p. 212. Translation by Mark Urman.

  57 “La Belle Américaine”: The New York Herald, March 30, 1880.

  57 “And if I am”: Edwin H. Blashfield, “John Singer Sargent—Recollections,” The North American Review, June 1925.

  58 “The mother-of-pearl coloring”: Pringue, 30 Ans de Dîners en Ville, p. 213.