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Being Madame X / p.2
Out of the Rain
Madame X was in residence that winter in the form of Sargent's Study of Madame Pierre Gautreau, painted shortly after the 1884 portrait, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau).
In addition, the Sargent exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum featured a dozen portraits of the Wertheimer family, a goodly number of oils, sketches, and watercolors, and a collection of male nudes.
Compelling reasons to come in out of the rain, more precisely, down from our stump ranch in the Cascade foothills, exchanging soggy sheep and a never-ending remodeling project for SAM's proffered world of privilege, elegance, and warmth, complete with clean and polished hardwood floors.
Sargent's art served as antidote to the gray of a northwest winter - except for Madame X, cool and aloof, her white skin and black dress stark in contrast to the luscious fabrics and rich colors of the London portraits.
The Voice of Authority
Then the recorded comments on my handset shifted in tone and content:
" . . . her obviously showy costume . . . one of the great paintings of a woman in a sexy black dress . . . [her] almost compulsive need to show off and to be a spectacle."
I'd stumbled into an Edith Wharton drawing room - that young woman was making a spectacle of herself! What long dead matron was Trevor Fairbrother channeling? I'd been dutifully punching the buttons on this electronic device after viewing each painting, before moving on to the next, when that word, "compulsive," struck me and stuck with me like a piece of gravel in a hiking boot. Madame X still had the power to trigger censorious response.
The Myth of Objectivity
Objectivity is not only suspect, it is impossible. Without its cloak Fairbrother's words stood stark naked as the judgments, however well considered, of a single human being. To be fair, this could have been implicit in the writing, but museum texts echo the authority of the classroom, the newscast, and the informed source, their words legitimatised by the listener's belief in objectivity.
The depths of memory hold all we've ever felt, and the intense passions of childhood dart and flicker beneath the surface. In Remembrance of Things Past the taste of a madeleine returns Proust's hero to a previous identity, allowing his adult self to coexist with the child living the sensations of longing and loss that accompanied his mother's goodnight kiss, the kiss given when she left him for an evening. And these emotions surface with an immediacy that takes his breath away. Umberto Maturana said, "We are the history of our desires." Pausing to reflect upon that history we find times past our own geologic time, shaping the contours of the present.
Focus Groups
I shared ad clippings, museum flyers, and postcards with two writing groups. How would these women respond to Madame X?
"She's lovely!"
Sharing my puzzlement at references to her overflowing bosom, we searched for cleavage shadows. By modern standards there were none. The Portrait has a slight shadow, all the Study's shadows are fainter and less defined, and the hint of shadow on a watercolor of her seated on a couch could have been cast by the edge of her bodice. The more we looked the more we suspected that her curves were skillfully constructed.
If a professional beauty dressed years ahead of her time, Virginie Gautreau had most certainly succeeded. She was wearing a dress a woman could wear today without looking a period piece.
We recalled gowns past; we traded stories of waist cinchers, padded bras, foundations, mirrored fitting rooms, and stout women armed with tape measures. Of course Virginie Gautreau had worn a corset. Her dress, like those we'd worn, was boned to stay up without the support of purely decorative straps and to mimic the contours of an overflowing bosom - even when removed and tossed on a chair. |
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Trevor
Fairbrother curated this exhibit and wrote the handset commentary. He is the author of two books about John
Singer Sargent and his work:
John Singer Sargent
the Sensualist
&
John Singer Sargent
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| " . . . a pushy American social locomotive, Virginie Gautreau, all twisting, mannered pose and lunar, greenish-white skin, identified only as Madame X." (2)
" . . . notorious for her vanity and rumored infidelities." (3) " . . . I felt something predaceous was definitely in order." (4) |
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| A recipe for madeleines
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Reading about Sargent and Paris in the 1880's I re-entered the world of Marcel Proust. It was like visiting a city lived in long ago, my feet finding their way before my mind could instruct them. The first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way, is an enticing entry into Proust's exploration of childhood, memory, and love. Alternative: rent the video of Raul Ruiz' Time Regained, which attempts the impossible task of recreating the entire work - with amazing success. |
| ". . . [her] bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment." (5) |
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"It has been argued, for example, that Sargent's notorious Madame X . . . is a disguised portrait of a young man." (6) " . . . this figure represents something of the high relief of the profile images on great friezes" (7) | |
Memory II
There were three of us - Jaycie, Ann, and me - in the sunroom we shared in the sorority house. It was our first year at the University and our first formal dance there. I'd made my strapless gown the year before: pinning the Vogue pattern pieces to pale turquoise brocade, cutting, sewing, fitting, and finally hand stitching facings along the bodice seams to encase the thin strips of metal that had replaced whale bone (baleen) in dress construction by then.
Beneath the dress I wore my first and last "Merry Widow," an expensive contraption of elastic, wire, nylon, and (yes) more boning that smoothed my waist and - with the judicious use of padding - served up my breasts on the half shell. I fastened the track of tiny hooks running from breastbone to navel while lying on my back and holding my breath until dizzy. Not comfortable, but satisfying if you grew up on a diet of Technicolor costume drama: tighter, lace me tighter, demands Scarlett, holding the bedpost for support.
Beginning at her waist, Ann wrapped her ribs with 3-inch wide adhesive tape, snipping and shaping the final strip to grasp the flesh from underarm to underarm, lifting her breasts, drawing them forward and up, exaggerating their cleavage. "Voila! No bra line," she said. Her formal was black satin, wide necked and sleeveless, its collar edged in lipstick pink from shoulder tips to the valley between her breasts. Ann, the daughter of a successful screenwriter, had been cut and reshaped herself, nose altered and hairline lifted by electrolysis. "But I had them keep the widow's peak. It's just like my father's."
My high school friend Francesca had her nose shortened after she moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Were nose jobs obligatory in Southern California? Were Jewish and Italian noses there, like crooked teeth in San Francisco, a sign of poverty? My own teeth were straight; years of braces had corrected an overbite and closed the gap between my two front teeth - a gap that reappeared in my son's mouth years later - but my nose was long.
Jaycie's teeth were straight, as was her nose, which was as it had grown. Her formal exposed the flesh-covered bump at the outer end of her left collarbone, a souvenir of the day her horse had stumbled. "Five of us had pinned collar bones when we came out last year," she grinned.
Her strapless bra was well worn, as was her pale lavender gown, and her skin was freshly tanned from a desert expedition the weekend before.
Two large and active tarantulas had shared a box in our room until Jaycie drove them across the bay to their new home in San Francisco's natural history museum. We were growing used to Jaycie's wildlife.
That night was rehearsal only; we were refining our ability to view our bodies with the same detachment as our clothes. We'd been learning this skill for years, along with English and algebra, chemistry, and the required foreign language. We'd made it to UC-Berkeley and through rush into this sorority. We had shining hair and acceptable escorts for that dance. I worked part-time on campus, Ann drove a convertible, Jaycie was a debutante. I don't believe any of us wanted to be there. At 17 I was marking time at school, convinced my real life shimmered just beyond its borders.
But we didn't talk of breaking out. We didn't plan. That would have required conversations with the selves beneath the ones we laid aside each night, elasticized, taped, and boned to support the growing weight of expectations and assumptions we were being trained to carry. Lacking the confidence for those conversations, internal and external, we used transgression. By June, Ann and I separately - with no more method than bees in a bottle - had bumbled our way out, Ann by pilfering in a way that guaranteed she would be caught. And me? I just stopped going to class, one day at a time. |
Art is a Risky Business
In 1883, John Singer Sargent was 28 years old and a young man with ambitions, but once he started working on the portrait of Virginie Gautreau those ambitions were subordinated to his desires as an artist. The result is a gorgeous painting that works on multiple levels. It works by the composition of stark black fabric contrasting with pale skin, by the shadowed outline that guides the eye along elegant contours of profile and neck, shoulders and arms, and by a pose signaling the stillness between heartbeats, a freeze frame pulled from continuous motion.
Its spare simplicity was shockingly modern, heightening sensuality by its insistence on the woman's skin and hair (and in the portrait, as contrasted with the study, the black fabric of her gown) as the surfaces of interest, and on her contours and those of her gown as the only ones that matter. Her averted gaze permits these liberties, cloaking them with a modesty that may have given both Sargent and Virginie Gautreau a false sense of security.
That Off-the-Shoulder Strap
What's more, at the Salon in 1884, decorum was sacrificed in order to extend the line of her bodice horizontally by the diamond strap slipping off her right shoulder. That slipped shoulder strap generated more shock than either artist or sitter had bargained for.
One man's crude comment, offering his assistance in slipping her out of her dress was repeated again and again the first day the portrait was shown. The strap itself, pressing into the skin of her upper arm, carried a coded message of physical vulnerability, introducing a powerful note of ambiguity to this portrait of a proud lady. And remember, she was only 25 (9) and socially vulnerable.
A Professional Beauty
The portrait was a social affront, and the criticism recognized it as such. Although the phrase "professional beauty" was English, it is apt, describing a woman whose social capital is her style and beauty, a woman who dresses at the leading edge of fashion, who sets the standards other women will follow - in a few years. She will be talked about, gossiped about, but her indiscretions may only be rumored, not known. She lives on the right side of respectability.
Madame Pierre Gautreau, an American woman from New Orleans had moved to France with her widowed mother after the Civil War. Now married to a Parisian banker, she had social position, wealth, and beauty on her side, but her tenuous family connections with the nobility couldn't shelter her from criticism. It didn't help that her portrait was nearly seven-feet tall. Who did this bourgeois American think she was?
Charges of vanity and ostentatious display . . .
Page<< 1 2 3 4 Notes >>
© 2001-2002 Cecilie Scott
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