The Met in NYC Features John Singer Sargent

 

 

 

 

The Scandalous Madam X Portrait

  

 

Sargent in Paris

Through August 3

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

 

I’ve seen numerous John Singer Sargent exhibits in the past few years. If you live in Massachusetts, it’s almost unavoidable; few portrait painters come close to matching his reputation in the Bay State. He is considered the preeminent painter of society figures, though they were not his preferred company. He was paid handsomely for his endeavors, but not enough to put him in the social circle of his subjects. His work on the ceilings of MFA Boston and the Boston Public Library has been widely hailed. We’ve seen exhibits of Sargent and fashion, Sargent’s watercolors, Sargent and the Bott family, etc. MFA Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner have numerous Sargent portraits, the Clark in Williamstown has four, and you can also find his work at the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, at Harvard, and on the walls of museums in Andover, Gloucester, Salem, Springfield, and Smith College. There so many Sargents in Massachusetts that even AI doesn’t know exactly how many are in the Commonwealth.

 

Leave it to New York to try to one-up Boston. The Metropolitan Museum of Art show Sargent in Paris manages to give a new look on aspects of Sergent’s work by taking us back to his beginnings. Among other things, it reminds us of the basic absurdity of considering Sergent as a master of American portraiture. It would better to call him a master of then late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Though his parents were American, he was born in Florence, Italy, died in London, and spent more of his 69 years abroad (Corfu, England, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland) than he did in the United States. In short, John Singer Sargent was an expatriate American painter.

 

The Standard Bearer--Sargent channeling Franz Halls

 

 

 

 

Capri Girl on Rooftop--style a bit rough

 

 

 

Setting Out to Fish--channeling impressionists

 

 

 

His parents sent Sargent to study in Paris under portrait artist Léon Bonnat, who today is best remembered for his instructional skills. You can see in Sargent’s earliest works–he had a portrait displayed in the Paris Salón when he not yet 20–that he was doing what most young artists do. That is, he channeled artists who inspired him, including Velásquez, Franz Hals, Whistler, and Ingres. That he could do so with such skill was remarkable considering that he was accepted for study at the Accademia de Bell Arte in 1873, when he was just 17. The Met show features the work he produced from his three years in Paris.

 

 

 About 5 yrs later-Madam Errazuriz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, to showcase what he accomplished requires a look at more mature work, like Madame X and other Sargent masterpieces. To remind you, his portrait of “Madame X” (Virginie Amélie Gautreau) was considered one of the most scandalous portraits of the late 19^th century, as she posed in a slinky, sleeveless gown whose first iteration had one of the straps falling from her shoulder. It might not seem risqué today, but to show a married woman in such a state of relative undress shocked audiences whose values were informed by French and American versions of Victorianism. Tongues waged and many presumed an affair between painter and subject. Probably not! Sargent is thought by many art scholars to have been gay and there are many nudes of young men that strongly suggest it was so.

 

If you can get to New York before this show closes, it’s a quintessential look at a young man honing his genius and how he took his raw talents to the next level.

 

Rob Weir

 

If you're curious, here's Madam X in real-life

 

 

 

 

 

Anna O Sparkles and Thrills

 

 

 

 

Anna O (2024)

By Matthew Blake

Harper, 421 pages (seems shorter than that!)

★★★★★

 

You might recall from a psychology course that Anna O was the case that led Sigmund Freud to develop his theories of psychoanalysis. Freud never actually met  Anna O, her real name being Anna Pappenheim (1853-1936); she was a patient of Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer, in the years 1880-82, but Freud was fascinated with the case. Anna O became to poster child for hysteria and exhibited symptoms such as eating and speech disorders, vision problems, headaches, partial paralysis, hallucinations, and amnesia. The question Breuer did not probe to Freud’s satisfaction was the root cause of Anna’s illness. Freud famously (and controversially) linked it to frustrated sexual desire.

 

Novelist Matthew Blake updated and altered the case in his stunning mystery/thriller Anna O. Forensic psychologist Ben(edict) Prince has been working in a quiet private residency clinic in London, where he, with the help of mentor Virginia Bloom, became an expert on sleepwalking and a frequent court witness. His life is about to become more interesting intellectually and traumatic politically and emotionally. This novel has all the twists, turnabouts, danger, and enigma of a Dan Brown book, though Blake is a far better literary stylist.

 

Much of the book is set in the early 21^st century. Ben is divorced from his wife Clara and has limited contact with his daughter Kitty. For good and ill, this gives him plenty of time to become a workaholic. He and the clinic are approached by the Ministry of Justice to take on a patient about whom they can say nothing and must swear to abide by the Official Secrecy Act. She is Anna Ogilvy–code-named “Anna O”–who has been asleep for four years. She is the presumed murderess of her two friends, Indira and Douglas. Just before the big sleep (!), Anna found them in pools of blood and a dripping knife in her hand. She left a distressed message saying, “I think I killed them.” She also had a motive: the two were conspiring to wrest control of a magazine Anna started and squeeze her out of a deal to sell it to a larger firm. Open and shut case? Not quite. Her mother Emily Ogilvy is  a former Minister of State for Mental Health. Plus, Ben’s task goes against the grain. Doctors are supposed to cure people, but his marching order is to wake her up any way possible so that she can be put on trial for murder.

 

It seemed odd logic at the time. Why intervene in the murder of two unknowns with no connection to state security? Plus, Anna has been diagnosed as having “resignation syndrome," a form of amnesia mixed with mental illness. Wouldn’t this make an awakened Anna innocent by reason of insanity? (In legalese, to be guilty of a crime the prosecution must prove both actus reus, a criminal action, and mens rea, intent to commit it.) Are politics at play more than state security? Maybe. Years earlier Britain was convulsed by horrific killings, including the infamous “Stockwell Monster” case in which Sally Turner murdered her two stepsons. Is there some sort of connection? Not that Ben can determine, nor Clara, a police detective, who discovered and investigated the deaths of Indira and Douglas. It is to shut up the tittering conspiracy nuts?

Will Ben awaken Anna? I’d be a spoilsport to tattle. Suffice it to say that Anna’s disposition and mystery serves mainly to unlock others. Don’t fall asleep (joke intended) as you will find out about Anna roughly three-quarters of the way through, and Blake has just gotten started throwing deflecting blows before he delivers the knockout punch. Among the things that must be resolved are multiple identities (most not in the psychological sense), a drug nicknamed Devil’s Breath, implanted false memory syndrome, a massive conspiracy, the role of Internet trolls, a leaked secret, a tell-all memoir, Ben’s arrest, more code names, maternity mysteries, and a dish of revenge served so cold you’ll need gloves to turn the pages.

 

I adored this book and was indeed chilled by its revelations. I read a lot of mysteries, but few are as intelligent, complex, and detailed as Anna O. Time management warning: “I couldn’t put it down” is a phrase so shopworn it’s trite. Nonetheless, I zipped through all 421 pages in just three sittings during one of my busiest weeks in years. I missed enough sleep to be a suspect in Anna O.

 

Rob Weir

 

Black Cherokee a Good Debut, But Leaves Too Much Unexamined

 

 

 

 

Black Cherokee (Releasing August 3, 2025)

By Antonio Michael Downing

Simon and Schuster, 272 pages.

★★★

 

Is there an American conundrum any more vexing than race? Black Cherokee shows just how complicated it is. It is easy to say that race is a matter of self-identity, but that’s too pat. Do we define it by physical characteristics? Nope. That won’t work either. Is it a status conferred by others? To some degree it is, though Mark Twain demonstrated its overall artificiality in his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. Is it cultural? Maybe, but which culture does the labeling?

 

The central dilemma in the debut novel of Antonio Michael Downing is embedded in its title. Historians have known for quite some time that some Native Americans owned Black slaves. Perhaps you associate the Cherokee with the Trail of Tears. That’s right, but only to a point. The Cherokee were once primarily a “Western” tribe, but in the early days of the American Republic that meant the highlands of the Appalachians and beyond. Yet, shortly after the United States became independent, many Cherokee had begun a transformation into one of the so-called “Five Civilized Nations.” Many had converted to Christianity, developed a written language, embraced a settled agricultural life, and had a central government. In the South, another marker of being “civilized” was acceptance of slavery. About 60,000 Cherokee were sent to the future Oklahoma as a result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, but quite a few managed to stay and even fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War. There was an added level of tragedy in that before the American Revolution, Natives gave refuge to enslaved peoples who escaped bondage. They were the so-called Black Cherokee, as were those freed before and after the war who settled among Native Americans.

 

Downing’s fictionalized account of this begins in 1992, when his protagonist, Ophelia Blue Rivers is six years old. She is an orphan being raised by her activist grandmother Blue who has been fighting a local corporation polluting Etsi, South Carolina, for quite some time. Ophelia sees herself as Cherokee, has played with Cherokee children, and is largely ignorant of her Black heritage except when others insist she’s not Cherokee. As she grows older, more and more Natives insist that she’s “Black” and mean it in a disparaging way. Part of the reason is that Etsi is in crisis; it has been deregistered as a reservation which, among other things, alters the region’s economic base. Ophelia is rejected though Blue is acknowledged as a Black Cherokee Freedman because she was married to Etsi’s last chief.

 

This coming-of-age tale of sadness, defiance, place, poverty, and identity takes Ophelia to unexpected places, beginning with her move to be with her flamboyant and assertive Aunt Oba. She’s something of an enigmatic character who on one hand helps Ophelia embrace her Blackness, though it’s not entirely clear if this is out of pride, or simply that she doesn’t care what people think.

 

Ophelia is brighter than most of the other kids in her mostly White schools, but there’s nothing like high school to make you uncertain of who you are or what you want to be. Sizeism plays a part in the novel, as does Downing’s dig at Southern piety. Ophelia immerses herself in an evangelical youth group led by a charismatic (in both senses of the word) minister. Suffice it to say that the church and minister are filled more with raging hormones and hypocrisy than with the Holy Spirit. Later she will meet a free-spirited White boy who tells her that she is beautiful. They have a torrid affair and he seems akin to a grunge devotee crossed with a 70s throwback hippie. Or is he just slumming it? Does he care about Ophelia or just want easy sex?

 

The book comes around full circle and returns to Grandmother Blue. In many ways, she’s the most interesting character in the novel. She is certainly the most self-actualized. Ophelia’s encounters with White culture disappoint because it’s too easy to see what Ophelia does not and Downing plays too close to formula. Nonetheless, Blue and Ophelia are both well-developed and likable. I wonder if the book’s cultural issues could have been equally well-developed had Downing written a slightly longer book.

 

It's a very good debut, though, and I anticipate hearing more in the future from Downing. Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an advance copy of this book.

 

Rob Weir