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Being Madame X / p.4
Professional Issues
Sargent, as artist, had adult, professional issues with Virginie Gautreau. In a letter to a friend, written from the Gautreau country house, he was frantic because his subject was "lazy." He needed her to pose, and posing was work.
This was not a commissioned portrait, by the way.
"Tell her I am a man of prodigious talents," he wrote to Ben del Castillo, his friend and Virginie Gautreau's cousin, enlisting his help to win this famous beauty as a sitter for a portrait he was sure would make his reputation. He'd persuaded her, she'd agreed, but clearly she was not as committed to the project as he was.
Early on, perhaps from the beginning, we see her looking away from the artist. At first, perhaps, this was determined by Sargent's desire to capture her elegant profile. There's a lovely sketch of her head, tracing the classic lines of forehead, nose, mouth, and chin. Even when her shoulders are chastely covered she withholds her gaze. Seated on a couch, looking down at a scatter of papers on her lap, or at a table, leaning forward to offer a toast, she allows herself to be viewed, but does not return the artist's gaze.
Desire and Frustration
At some point the frustration that Sargent expressed in his complaints about "struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness" of his subject became a part of this portrait of the woman who looks away. In the final portrayal she is more coolly aloof than in these early studies. She withholds, ignores, and willfully refuses to recognize the viewer.
This in itself had the power to call forth echoes of childish rage in at least a few of the early viewers, prompting modern critics to adopt the comments of 1884 as their own. Although today the portrait itself is praised, the fault still lies in its subject.
Desire and frustration are embedded in the portrait; we've all been four years old, and even the most caring mother turns away sometimes.
The Power of Ambiguity
"Above all she is a mother," insists the child. The deposits of time may bury this certainty, but its contours shape our emotional landscape, coloring our expectations. Both art and advertising gain power from this certainty, the former playing against it or layering ambiguities, the latter consciously manipulating our response through the use of icons.
Sargent's portrait of Virginie Gautreau makes no such statement, but instead offers a series of negatives: she is clearly not mother, not lover, not admiring subject or warm collaborator in the artist's project. But who she was didn't interest the child in Sargent. And the child within the viewer supplies quick, unthinking answers to this Rorschach test. The power of these infantile emotions bounces against adult experience and sensuality, those bare shoulders for instance, setting off reverberations that entice us into the portrait or send us scurrying to the shelter of the known.
Each work of art is brought forth by the viewer. A great one, and Sargent considered his portrait of Madame Gautreau "the best thing I've done," is brought forth in more depth and complexity. It's impossible to define Madame X or her portrait with a phrase or two, but the more she is reduced to icon the greater the temptation to attempt just such a summing up.
Madame X as Icon
Fairbrother illustrated such an attempt in his lecture, again referring to the portrait as "one of the great paintings of a woman in a sexy black dress" (26) and showing the extent to which Madame X has entered our visual vocabulary as an icon. Using slides from Alison Lurie's The Language of Clothes (28) and from aVogue feature showing Nicole Kidman in Madame X pose and gown, (29) he documented popular use of the portrait as a defining standard for female glamour.
Such familiarity may be inevitable, but it presents a problem. The excitement stirred by this portrait, originally and even now, arises when the viewer sees it fresh and unfiltered through iconic mesh. Icons stop our inward journey, block deeper connections with our own emotions, and trap us in the shallows of quick response and social shorthand. These are useful functions when it comes to selling us products - or candidates - but reasons for the artist to make it new. New is not comfortable, however, and making it new fails to reflect what we already know. |
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Memory IV
Some years ago I lent myself as an icon of breast cancer survivor to a local monthly.
Michelle called me after her editor had read her article on breast cancer. I was one of the women she'd interviewed by phone, first as a survivor, then following up after I'd told her about my work managing an online support space - chat rooms, message boards, content, resource links. But what caught her editor's attention was the tattoo. He thought it would make a great picture. Common Ground, a vaguely new age tabloid, had been using large headshots on the cover, but he wanted to try something different - a shot of the tattoo that I'd described as spread across the space where my right breast had been.
I agreed, more willing to have them feature the tattoo than my face. I wanted women to know this was an alternative to plastic surgery and implants. My tattoo was a declaration of independence from surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, nurses, insurance personnel, and hospital technicians, interviewers, and billing clerks - an entire army who knew what was good for me. They'd done their job, and I was out of there. I'd consulted with Viveen Lazonga, Seattle's premier tattoo artist. "Turtles," I found myself saying to my surprise after collecting pictures of flowers and birds. And she created a design of three turtles swimming in waves that curled from the bottom of my ribs to the tip of my shoulder.
I'd looked in the mirror a few hours after the mastectomy, viewing the incision and its stitches, still wrapped in clear plastic like leftovers in the fridge. Not that bad, I told myself. "It could be worse," I said to friends and family. But with the tattoo I'd gone from not that bad to pretty damn good. Now when I looked in the mirror I saw a desirable, sensuous woman. The history written on my ribs was no longer simply loss, or even survival. Delight, joy, play, and humor were all included in the package.
So there I was in Ballard on a hot summer afternoon, finding the photography studio above a tavern in a red brick building. Michelle was there, a slim and serious dark haired woman in her mid twenties. She'd emailed the story to me, and once again I told her how much I liked it. She introduced me to her editor, a short, wiry man, thirty-five or so, in command of us all and oppressively solemn toward me as artifact. The photographer was more relaxed, but workmanlike, used to putting subjects at their ease.
There'd been a change in plan. Now they wanted my face for a standard cover shot and the tattoo inside - less disturbing for their readers. Reasonable, I thought, wanting to be a good sport, until I understood what the editor was after. He turned director, directing me, directing the photographer, wanting solemnity, nobility. I was to be seen as Noble Survivor, the Woman Who Has Faced Death. The bright lights glared, paper unrolled like a window shade behind me, and I was sat on a stool and issued instructions - tilt your face, lift your chin, rotate your head, look upwards, look outwards, look solemn - while sweat glued my shirt to my back and I fought the urge to cross my eyes or stick out my tongue.
And it got worse. Michelle and I were posed as generic Mother and Daughter, bravely facing cancer across the generations.
Last came the tattoo shot. I traded my blouse for a drape of Indonesian fabric to cover my remaining breast. The resulting photo of the tattoo itself was fine. But in the full photo, the one I got for my troubles, I look like a caricature of a Tibetan monk, face frozen in solemnity, without a spark of life.
William Blake, refreshingly irascible, wrote this note to himself, "To generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone distinction of merit." Insisting that Michelle and I represent general categories of extremely solemn women, the editor stood between us and the photographer, blocking imagination and precluding surprise. The particularities of mother, daughter, cancer survivor, writer, and woman, at that time, in that moment, all were muffled in a blanket of sentimentality. |
Motion Caught
Noble mother, cancer survivor, woman in a sexy black dress - as icons the answer is given. No need to break the code and read for particularity. But Sargent was willing to particularize.
He made studies and drawings of Virginie Gautreau, more than for any other portrait, until he found or stumbled upon - for art requires room for accident - the pose that seemed to him to catch her essence. Stillness in motion, one hand on the table, wrist turned to an angle awkward in repose. But repose was not what was wanted. To catch motion in a subject famous for the grace with which she moved was the challenge, for a portrait in oil is a static medium.
Sargent had sketched her kneeling on a sofa, back to the viewer, at a table, lifting a glass to offer a toast. He'd tried repose in a watercolor of her seated on that same sofa, and rejected that approach. On her feet, though, caught just as she turns away - this was what he'd been looking for. In an instant her right arm will lift from the table as her shoulder follows the turning of her head.
The 1884 Portrait delineates the taut tendon of her neck as her head turns. No wonder she didn't want to hold that pose!
In the Study of Madame Gautreau, painted from the Portrait, Sargent softened that line and omitted the detail of her right hand. Apparently motion no longer held his interest.
The Still Center
The Seattle Art Museum couldn't resist the opportunity to use Sargent's Study of Madame Gautreau as icon in its ads and banners. Fortunately Madame X is recreated each time a viewer pauses long enough to see her, the still center of the emotions she called forth in Sargent and that shaped this work.
What each of us sees and feels is drawn from our particular history up to and including the moment we stand before her portrait. Sargent's art can only summon; the answer is already within us. When we respond to a portrait, we experience the subject in relation. The question, "what connects this person to me?" may be hidden, but it informs the very act of looking. Subject does not, cannot exist otherwise.
Time may multiply the strands connecting us to this other, yet the shuttle returns to the I of the present moment. Seeing in relation is not a defect to be overcome, but an intrinsic way of being, to be acknowledged, to be played with. Artist, critic, viewer, and subject dance together, identities refract and reform, and boundaries shift.
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© 2001-2002 Cecilie Scott
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