Madame X

Madame X

I was glad to finally get to see Madame X [2] at the Metropolitan Art Museum last New Year's, though given the shadows, varnish and glare, I am still very confused as to what her hairdo actually was other than a lump of rats. I still think Sargent's sketch and the Met's luscious portrait by Boldini of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough are much easier on the eyes. I suffered a fairly significant crush on the latter as a teenager, though I was conflicted by serious competing feelings for the feisty Alice Roosevelt whom I considered preferable due to intelligence and pluck. My normal powers in daydreams included space-time travel, control over matter, and immortality, which poses problems since you end up spending a lot of time waiting around (such as most of the 1800's) for a particular interesting person. Meanwhile, other less interesting but pretty people develop horrible crushes on you and you have to... consider the many different possibilities of what you'd do with that!

Yes, including Hugo and Millie here is an anachronism since Madame X was displayed at the 1884 Paris Salon-- or it's simply a tourist photo from a jaunt on a Hugo/Tesla plasma time machine!

Note that a majority of the visceral details in the wikipedia entries on these two were not available to me at the time. I instead had to rely a few cursory, romanticized and child-safe paragraphs and pictures in the Time Life This Fabulous Century: 1900-1910 which I renewed at least 7 times in a row from the library.

If you're unfamiliar with the painting's history, Sargent was infatuated with this woman who was a gem if you liked strange features and "perchlorate of potash skin" or some such. He submitted it to the evil French salon, scandal resulted. Firstly, because her shoulder strap was off (which seems ludicrous given Bugnereau's normal fare of buck-naked cheesecake girls ridiculously posed on tables, er ocean waves or other "academic" fare, though I admit The Broken Pitcher [2] is well done), secondly because Madame Gautreau was a married member of Parisian society making the result bite much deeper. Sargent stole the painting to repaint the strap properly, and resubmitted it, yet the damage was already done. Like Verdi's poor Violetta, Gautreau was "driven" from Paris back to her country home in disgrace, and Sargent later sold the painting to the Met saying "I suppose it's the best thing I've done." The small-minded Parisian Prom Queens and Kings prevailed in the near term, but Gautreau left the deeper historical mark. There's bitterness all around, but we get a great painting out of it and a nice nasty story about insufferable Parisian High Society.

The large question is, how much of the panting's historical importance is due to the scandal versus the painting as an image rendered by Sargent? I would contend after seeing it that the painting would stand up quite well to any portrait from any time without the story. Gautreau is such an unusual subject, and, even approaching the work skeptically, Sargent's handling is impressive, particularly the execution of her arm, even if her dress is fudged in places, who cares. Simply his choice of the strange Gautreau at that time for such a monumental work may be the largest factor. She'd be striking even today, far outclassing the supposedly gritty yet superficial Outwin Boochever finalists. OB would, of course, only accept Gautreau if she were painted from projected photograph in acid colors and some bleak factory landscape with some gimmicky American painting history reference-- because that's what matters and what makes the best paintings the best, right? You'd think the whole modernism fetish thing was already long dead, but apparently not.

Millie likes acid, too. Sounds like a play date. I'm sure she'd have a really great time-- and since history's all about who can use a pen at the end, it'd be mutual.