How to Opt Out of Christmas Yearly PSA

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Ho Ho, No!

Here’s our annual Black Friday “How to Opt Out of Christmas” piece.

We opted out of Christmas years ago. It wasn’t the money; we simply wanted release from the stress, crowds, and mindless consumerism associated with the most intensely crass and secular of all American holidays. Spare us the Babe in the Manger speeches; Christmas in America has more to do with Adam Smith than Baby Jesus. 

We decided to reinvent December as a month of dining with friends, making contact with family, and consuming fun rather than getting caught up in rituals of reciprocity and gluttony. The breaking point came about 15 years ago, when our nieces were still children. One Christmas morning they were literally swamped under a mound of gifts. (Seriously! The wrapping paper debris was piled to twice the height of the youngest.) Our nieces no sooner opened one present than another was thrust in front of them so that every relative under the sun could snap a photo of the bewildered lasses. Soon, they were dazed and numb. As clichéd as it sounds, by mid-afternoon they were having more fun with the wrapping paper and boxes than with the presents. (The boxes made a nice makeshift fort.) And here’s the worst part: the wreckage represented expenditures of hundreds of dollars, much of it from folks that could have used the cash for much better purposes.

Christmas was even more crass when we bought for adults. It had degenerated into a zero sum game–you buy me the item on page 72 of the L.L. Bean catalog and I’ll buy you one from page 104. Christmas shopping sucks for two types of adults: those who can afford to buy things and have all they need (but nonetheless invent things to want “in the spirit of the season”); and those who shouldn’t engage in consumer frenzy, yet are pressured into doing so. If you fall into the second category, for heaven’s sake stop! Consider this sobering statistic–if you rack up $6,000 on your credit card and try to pay it off by making the minimum payment, it will take roughly 54 years to do so even if you never use the card again! Fa, la, la, indeed! In trying to conform to manufactured images of seasonal jollity you have placed yourself in economic thralldom akin to that of 19^th-century sharecroppers.

It’s our seasonal prayer that none of you are in that sinking boat. But even if you have plenty of dough, there’s simply no reason to put up with the stress and the madness. Just say no. Here’s a how-to-guide for opting out.

1. Step One: The Power of Guilt. We must ask ourselves how Christmas got to be such a mess in the first place. The answer is simple: We’ve been sold a bill of literal and metaphorical goods on what a “perfect” Christmas is supposed to be like. Don’t underestimated how powerful that imagery is. To counter it, you need to present an equally powerful counter image.

As Christmas approaches, subtly drop remarks to loved ones such as “We have so much and there are others who have so little. What do you think about scaling way back and making donations to charity instead?” My guess is that about three-quarters of your friends and relatives will breathe a sigh of relief and get on board immediately. Your job is to follow up by continuing to drop reminders. Don’t call a week before Christmas and say, “We’re not giving presents this year, right?” Instead, make a plan in the next few days, and follow up in a week by reminding down with the plan that they said they wanted to give to charity. Tell them you are writing a check for a donation in their name and ask which charity they’d like you to support.

2. Step Two: Phasing In the Plan. There will be some people on your list who won’t buy in immediately. One or two may even feel hurt and assume you don’t care enough to buy them something. You need to go gentle with these folks. Start by scaling back instead of going cold turkey. Appeal to their soft side. Do they love animals? In addition to a modest gift, get a really nice card and insert a Heifer International brochure with a note that you’ve given a donation in their name. It may take a few years before these folks stop the gift cycle altogether, but they will.

3. Step Three: Be True to Your Principles. It’s not enough to say you want to spend time with friends and family instead of gift buying; you need to do it! Make sure you schedule dinners out (or potlucks in) with close friends and family. The goal is to make the holidays joyous, not to become the Grinch.

4. Step Four: Replace Consumer Goods with Thoughtful Ones. What people really want during the holidays is a reminder that you care. A plate of home-baked cookies can say this louder than an item plucked from a catalog. So too can cleaning someone’s gutters, fixing a squeaky door, or taking their car for an oil change. Are you craft-oriented? Phoenix makes earrings that cost next to nothing to make, but resonate with friends more than those $50 mass-produced “holiday” earrings you see all over the country. I’ve written a few stories and songs that I’ve shared. Want to do something really simple? Rent “It’s a Wonderful Life” and watch it with someone you care about. Provide the buttered popcorn. The biggest gift you can give is your time!

5. Step Five: Buy Your Kids a Pen Pal. If you have little ones, it’s hard to eliminate gifts totally, but the U.N. and other agencies have programs that allow you to sponsor a child abroad. Do this for your kids and spend part of Christmas with books, pictures, and maps that illustrate where their pen pal lives. Help your kids write a letter to that child. Follow it up in the weeks to come with language lessons, food, and other such items. I had international pen pals as a kid and they made me think about the world. I remember a correspondent from Peru way more than I remember most of my toys.

6. Step Six: Remember the Box Rule. Overindulge children and you run the risk of overwhelming them (or having them grow up to be pampered brats!). Kids need to exercise their imaginations more than they need some toy from China that will be broken by Ground Hog's Day. Buy and make things in which they can participate, not merely consume. The box fort was fun. So too are time-tested things that last: Lincoln logs, blocks, Legos, Slinkies, bikes, fantasy dolls, train sets, interactive books, musical instruments…. Google “top ten toys of all time” and you’ll find none of the glitzy über-expensive “hot” toys of this or any other Christmas. Those things are just ads-of-the-moment that will fade from consciousness as soon as the latest “next big thing” comes along (and proves not to be the next big thing!)

7. Step Seven: Treat Yourself in December. Take some of the dough you’re not spending on prezzies and go out. Take in a concert or a show. Fun is always a good antidote for stress!

8. Step into the Light: If you live in the North, the stretch between Thanksgiving and Ground Hog’s Day is filled with (way too much) darkness. Turn this time into something pagan: festivals of light. Go for hikes in the daylight and gather pinecones, bittersweet, pine boughs, and other such things to make into Christmas decorations. We made an “Electric Forest” one year–an unsightly welter of pine boughs through which we strung dollar-store lights. It was as ugly a hound dog’s fanny, but it’s a memory over which we laugh years later. Other light-themed events include taking short drives to see electric displays, after-sunset window shopping, bonfires, and hitting an after-hours spot (ice cream shop for kids, cafes and bars for adults) in which the darkness is tempered by holiday or atmospheric lights).

9. Step Nine: Replace Old Rituals with New Ones. Okay, I admit that If I hear “Silent Night” at a mall one more time, I may spew. I loathe Christmas carols, plastic reindeer, and blow-up lawn displays. But I’d be the last to say that rituals are bad. If you dislike the old ones, make some new ones. We buy a new tree ornament every year, label it, and try to recall when we bought it when it comes out of storage. We also have some invented holidays, such as Moosemas on December 16, which is celebrated by eating clam chowder and drinking Scotch. A small ritual is walking amidst the downtown lights on Christmas Eve after the stores have closed. Another is a short walk in the woods behind the house on late Christmas morning. Still another is playing CDs of English and Scottish carols that we’ve not heard a billion times. Our most cherished is an annual pre-Christmas dinner at a restaurant with our dearest friends.

10. Step Ten: Make a Wish. Some families may find it impossible to eliminate Christmas presents altogether. Fair enough. But let’s not confuse quantity with quality. Even if you have kids, there’s nothing wrong with limiting their desires. Break out The Rolling Stones and make them listen to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” until it sinks in. Instead of buying everything under the sun, ask people in your lives to set priorities. If you could only get one thing, what would you really like? (If you have kids, ask for a list of three or four and tell them you’ll ask Santa to bring one of them so that he doesn’t run out of gifts for other children.)

11. Socks are not Stinky! Everyone loves to open presents. It’s horribly environmentally unsound, but a certain degree of debris is part of Christmas. So who says the stuff inside has to cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney? Sock gifts are a lot of fun–dollar store Etch-a-Sketches, crayons, and wind-up toys for kids, inexpensive foodstuffs for adults, card games to share…. You can get very creative about sock gifts; you can also fill one for a fraction of what it costs to provide gifts that will soon be forgotten.

12. Step Twelve: Make Christmas all about the Food. When you ask most people to name their favorite holiday, it’s usually Thanksgiving. Why not? It’s about food, family, and a relaxed pace. So make Christmas into a second Thanksgiving. Prepare foods that take a long time to make. Buy a really, really good bottle of wine. Have a multi-course meal that unfolds over several hours. And, above all, share it with friends and family. Don’t forget to mention how lucky you are to have so much when others have so little.   

Leni Stern Sways to Senegalese Groove

LENI STERN

Jelell

Leni Stern Recordings

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Leni Stern was a gal playing sizzling electric long before it was sexy to do so. She did mash-ups before any hipster jumped on the jargon bandwagon with the term. World music? Been there, done that. It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that her latest record falls into no hard-fast category. It’s a bit jazzy, a bit of rock and roll, meditative and ambient, but with flashes of gritty rawness. Mostly it dances in to Senegalese groove, courtesy of sidemen Mamadou Ba (bass), Alioune Faye (percussion), and numerous guest musicians. Or, perhaps sways would be a better term. This is a record that takes its time. Stern plays off various drums, and bass lines to allow her liquid notes to flow through the mix in ways in which dancing or contemplation are equally valid. The effect and the crystalline executions of her runs are reminiscent of Jerry Garcia when he was in the zone. Stern and her band mates add vocals, but even these are more overlay than structure. If you must label it, call it West African bass and drum with value-added guitar.

Rob Weir

There are no YouTube selections from this album as of yet, but you can sample a bit of the title track here.

Blue is the Warmest Color Not a Masterpiece but More than a Sex Film

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Blue is the Warmest Color: La Vie d’Adèle  (2013)

Directed by Adbellatif Kechiche

Sundance Classics, 179 mins. NC-17 (graphic sex)

In French (English subtitles)

* * * ½

The color blue is associated with valor, harmony, faithfulness, and confidence. It also signifies sadness and depression, Blue is the Warmest Color has very few of the first qualities, but quite a few of the latter.

Anyone who has heard of this film knows that it has generated controversy on several levels. First, it’s the first adapted graphic novel to ever win France’s coveted Palme d’Or, which it carried off at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Second, it’s based on a very graphic graphic novel. Here in the Land of Bible Readers Who Can’t Mind Their Own Damn Business (USA), any movie with nudity and people actually making love generates backlash. Add to the mix that genitalia (prosthetics, allegedly) are shown and that the people making love are two women, and hell hath no fury like a Puritan seeking to stamp out sexual pleasure.

You’ll probably have to find an independent cinema in a liberal town to see this one as, to be frank, the only way sex gets more vivid than what’s on the screen is if you’re actually having sex while in the theater. There is a seven-minute all-parts-bared, no-holds-barred scene between the film’s lead actresses that leaves very little to the imagination. This of course, has led to charges that the project is simply well scripted pornography–mostly leveled by those who’ve not seen it.

The basic plot is quite simple: boy meet girl, who meets girl and dumps boy. Girl eventually loses girl and spends a lot of time trying (and largely failing) to get over the loss. But it’s more than this. The film centers on Adèle (the radiant Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high school junior coming of age, confused about her sexuality, and  encouraged by her girl posse to bed down with a handsome senior guy who has been eyeing her. She does so even though she’s been having erotic dreams over a blue-haired woman she’s seen on the street. Adèle’s attempt to “go straight” does not go well. Not at all like what happens when she meets blue-haired Emma (Léa Seydoux), who turns out to be a fourth-year art school student and painter. To say that they have hot sex and that Adèle is into Emma’s body is a bit like saying that gourmands like food–a strangely appropriate analogy!

Blue is the Warmest Color is about way more than sex. Among the unstated, but clearly centered questions in the film is: What do you do when you meet the girl of your dreams and she turns out to be wildly inappropriate for you in just about every way except physically? Adèle and Emma are a gorgeous couple, but Adèle is immature, awkward, a dilettante, and spontaneous; Emma is cerebral, has been around the proverbial block, focused, and has a business plan for promoting her work. Moreover, Adèle, who longs to teach young children, is voracious in everything that interests her. When Adèle eats, cooks, reads French literature, dances, teaches, or has sex, she is laser-like in focus and a free-range animal in spirit. She also knows of no other artist than Picasso, a bit of an obstacle for Emma, who admires Egon Schiele and poses Adèle as Schiele might. And Adèle knows she’s way out of her depth when Emma’s art school friends are around and the conversation turns to anything other than food or the novels she likes. Among Adèle’s problems is that she simply can’t get her mind around things that don’t move her. Another is that she retains the spontaneity-bordering-on-recklessness that is part of the makeup of people of her age group (17-21).

Adèle grows into young adulthood and becomes a teacher, but does she yet know who she is? She has known deep heartache, but can she cope and does she have the capacity to move on? She has mastered joy, but can she navigate melancholia?

This is a very good film, though by no means a masterpiece. Kudos go to Exarchopoulos and Seydoux for bold performances that lay bare both body and soul. The buzz is that neither woman is a lesbian off-screen. If that’s true, a whole bunch of listless, unconvincing cold fish Hollywood lovers need to take passion lessons from these two. Among the possible problems, though, is that Kechiche’s voyeuristic direction invites critiques of the male gaze. I’d be tempted to give him a pass on that one, but not the film’s length. I generally appreciate the unhurried pacing of French cinema, but all complex stories elide time and a director must ultimately decide what to cut. Blue could lose almost an hour with little effort whatsoever. When we see Adèle eat spaghetti once, we know she loves it; we don’t need to see that scene repeated. Nor do we need to see her doing African dances with her pupils more than once. How long must the camera dwell on a tear-drenched face and runny nose before the audience knows the person is sad? When does an awkward moment become a drawn-out boring one? And, in the film’s last quarter, how long must we watch someone too depressed to do much before we realize she’s stuck? Blue is the Warmest Color is best when the heat is turned up; once the flames go down, it’s a bit like a sparse two-verse Delta blues song dragged out by an overlong guitar solo. --Rob Weir

Debi Smith: Songs for Shopworn and Overlooked Holidays

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DEBI SMITH

Hits & Holidays

www.DebiSmith.com

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I’m on record as supporting unilateral drone strikes on performers who make holiday records. (Dylan’s Christmas album, anyone?) I am, however, willing to give the stand-down order for Debi Smith’s foray into seasonal merriment. First of all, she has a seriously great voice; it has depth, power, clarity, and chutzpah. No wonder she’s both a beloved solo performer and a mainstay of Four Bitchin’ Babes and The Smith Sisters. If you’ve any doubt about how good she really is, listen to her out-muscle a string orchestra on “O Holy Night.” We’re talking diva territory on that one. The other thing in her favor is that she has an expansive view of holidays—not just the mauling mall litany of Christmas irritants, but a calendar’s worth of offerings. I did not know that January 23 was National Pie Day, but I’m feeling festive about that one, and I’m as giddy about Smith’s cover of Doc Watson’s “Pie” as I am of her duet with Watson on “Keep on the Sunny Side.” They’re calling that a New Year’s song and that’s good enough for me. Nor did I know that March 20 was National Proposal Day or that May 4 was Renewal Day, but I’m glad she collaborated with Tom Paxton on the tender “Marry Me Again.” Canada Day coming up? Check out Smith’s “Niagara Falls.” Need a little something extra for Mother’s Day? Smith’s “Mother’s Hands” is rightly a beloved standard. Want to go a little over the top? How about “Chevy Impala” for Collector Car Appreciation Day? Mark your calendars; it’s coming up on July 9.

Rob Weir

Is 12 Years a Slave Too Depressing to Win an Audience?

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Directed by Steve McQueen

Fox Searchlight, 134 mins. Rated R (gruesome violence, nudity)

* * * *

Question: When is a historical film too accurate? Director Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave films Solomon Northrup’s autobiography with faithful attention to the original and  no punches pulled in depicting the horrors of American slavery. No one can walk out of this film and think, as the Texas State School Board would have you believe, that slaves were actually “servants.” But the hard question progressives must ask is how many people will choose to walk into this film. The problem is that this powerful film of two hours and fourteen minutes often evokes sympathy for those who lived through past tortures by making modern audiences experience them emotionally. McQueen’s film may be too stomach turning to educate those who most need enlightenment. Put another way, the film may be a great history lesson, but lousy entertainment. (Before you jump on me for the latter term, remind me why most people go to movies.)

 When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853, slaveholders assailed it as fanciful propaganda. The release of Solomon Northrup’s 12 Years a Slave that same year added poignant verisimilitude to Stowe’s novel. McQueen’s film, recounts how Northrup, a free black family man and skilled violinist, was lured from his home in Saratoga, New York, to Washington, DC, on the pretense of joining a musical show for several weeks. In truth, his erstwhile employers were slave traders who wined Northrup until he passed out. He awoke the next morning in chains and was sold into slavery as a runaway. For the next twelve years, he was called “Platt” and worked as a field hand on various cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South. Only a happenstance encounter with an itinerant carpenter (Brad Pitt in the film) rescued Northrup from his nightmare.  

One of Stowe’s major theses was that slavery was so evil that even good people were dehumanized by it. In the film we see how Northrup (Chiwetel Elofar in what is likely to be an Oscar-winning performance) must learn to suppress his education, his eloquence, and his moral outrage, lest he end up hanging from a tree. His near hanging at the hands of brutal overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano) is among the film’s gut-wrenching segments. To survive, Northrup learns to walk a shaky tightrope between self-preservation and deeply held moral values; in short, he has to be a bit like Stowe’s Uncle Tom in both positive and negative ways.

We also see echoes of Stowe in Northrup’s masters, first Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), the prototype of the master whose good intentions are ultimately overwhelmed by his intemperate spending and personal habits, and later by Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who is even more brutal than Stowe’s Simon Legree. Epps whips slaves when their daily cotton pickings drop from the previous day, has his way with the exotic Patsey (Lupita Nyongo), and tells his wife (Sarah Paulson) he will gladly get rid of her before he ceases having sex with Patsey. His is a plantation based on fear, scarred backs, and–when he deems it necessary–black bodies abused and disposed of with less concern than a farmer butchering a hog. The beating of Patsey is more horrendous than scenes from any blood-soaked slasher film because we know it happened and we cannot retreat emotionally behind a screen of fantasy.

Academics will applaud McQueen’s boldness, his refusal to sugarcoat, and his awareness of historical scholarship. The latter includes often-ignored details such as the ways in which slavery placed Southern white women in a bind. They were supposed to be asexual moral guardians of their homes, yet they also knew that their morality held fat less sway with their husbands than the availability of lustful coerced sex with slave women–a scenario that further degraded white women’s social standing. McQueen got it right; Southern white women such as Mistress Epps often rivaled men in brutality.

But let us return to the modern dilemma. As a historian I’ve little but praise for McQueen’s film; as a film fan, though, I’d never see it again and, as a teacher, I couldn’t use it in the classroom. Ironically, the question at hand is analogous to that of slavery: What right do I possess to traumatize another human being? I certainly want people to be horrified by the very thought of slavery. On one level, I’d love to see every member of the Texas State School Board locked into a room and forced to watch this movie. But let me recount my experience in the theater. I’ve been to plenty of movies in which people cry, but very few in which they sob uncontrollably. That’s what happened at 12 Years a Slave–heaving sobs and howling wails in which viewers were left gasping for breath.

Before you conclude that’s a good thing, let me also point out that there were only about three-dozen people in the theater. The word on the street is that 12 Years a Slave is endlessly depressing and I’m afraid that’s true. I recall debates over the 1993 film Philadelphia in which Tom Hanks played a gay man with AIDS. Some people were very upset by Jonathan Demme’s PG-13 depiction of gay life and the physical horrors of AIDS; they wanted the movie to be more “realistic.” I agreed that it was saccharine, but because of the kid gloves it made over $200 million, which means lots of people saw it, including (one hopes) a lot of folks who would not have thought about gay life or the AIDS crisis in a more challenging film. As any teacher knows, education begins when you meet a student where he or she is, not where you think they should be. We shall see how McQueen’s film fares, but it’s been out for six weeks and has generated about 10% of what Philadelphia earned. My question remains: When is a film too accurate? I think 12 Years a Slave is a milestone, but does it matter if the audience is little more than the usual liberal suspects? --Rob Weir    

Trust Me I'm Lying Raises Issues about the Message and the Messenger

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. By Ryan Holiday. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-59184-628-4.

This review first appeared on the NEPCA website.

How bad are things in what has been dubbed the “lame-stream media?” If Ryan Holiday is to be believed, Fox News is indeed “fair and balanced” when compared to online sites such as Gawker, The Huffington Post, Mashable, and BNET.  Or maybe not. One of Holiday’s major points is that what’s left of the mainstream media has been so drastically pared that it relies upon bloggers for news feeds, tips, and breaking information. That’s not a good thing. Holiday insists that trolls, shills, and liars like him populate the blogosphere.

The book title invites us to distrust Holiday and you should definitely raise your skepticism shields before plowing into his book. Still, given that Holiday pioneered and profited handsomely from some of the online media’s worst tactics, he’s at least a semi-credible source. The world he describes makes the days of yellow journalism seem charmingly innocent. Forget the adage that perception is reality; the blogosphere invents and commodifies each. A slow news day is no problem for bloggers skillful enough to tailor a rack of suits from a single loose thread. Ask Toyota, which paid millions of dollars for lawsuits, retrofitting, and manufacturing redesign when blogs began humming of stuck accelerators. In nearly all cases, nothing more sinister than operator error was in play, but soon every speeding yahoo on the freeway was blaming Toyota for his actions.

How did it get this bad? Didn’t open web gurus like Jeff Jarvis promise us that the information highway and citizen journalism would democratize information and politics? Holiday argues that “process journalism”–publish immediately and allow stories to evolve organically–gave way to “iterative journalism” in which a central message is put forth and endlessly repeated, facts be damned. The latter created a culture in which hits on one’s blog are more important than truth. Buzz sells and a well-crafted, oft-repeated story becomes fact-resistant. If you think buzz hasn’t replaced time as money and truth as perception, check out Holiday’s case studies–including his efforts to convince us that the generic offerings of American Apparel are high-fashion chic, or how he made millions for ‘fratire’ peddler Max Tucker by enhancing his misogynist image through a manufactured backlash.

In essence, journalism has been hijacked by advocacy advertising with all its inherent propaganda tendencies. When forced–and that’s the right word–to issue corrections and retractions, bloggers simply bury them at the bottom of websites where few will see them. Holiday categorically states, “Corrections online are a joke” (178). Really clever bloggers reduce legal liability through judicious use of weasel words: might, according to reports, escalating buzz, possibly, we’re hearing…. (170) But make no mistake; buzz and publicity are so potentially lucrative that no one can ignore the bloggers that peddle it. Holiday identifies the blogger’s nine tactics through which they win clients and influence the public, a list that includes: “tell them what they want to hear” (49), “give them what spreads, not what’s good,” (69) “make it all about the headline,” (87), and “just make stuff up” (113). Most horrifying of all is that these are often now the people who are the original ‘source’ of stories that appear on the nightly news or on the pages of the New York Times.

Holiday tells a distressing story that will be of enormous interest to journalism scholars and those studying digital media. Alas, I wish the study was better told. Toward the end of the book Holiday warns us of the dangers of “snark” (195), but that’s largely the tone of this book. Holiday clearly dislikes several other bloggers and, denials notwithstanding, it often sounds personal. What purports to be the confessional of an individual who has had a change of heart, comes off like one rapper dissing another. Moreover, Holiday’s conversion experience seems (note my weasel word!) to have occurred when he found himself and his clients on the attack end of the blog culture he helped create. His writing is both sophomoric and soporific. We should pay serious attention to the issues Ryan Holiday raises, but one longs for a more articulate reform advocate with a less ambiguous moral core.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

John Singer Sargent Watercolors Dazzle with the Light of a Man at Ease

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John Singer Sargent Watercolors

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Through January 20, 2014

Corfu Cottage

This review was originally published on the UMass History Department blog.

I know someone who teaches at a private school because it supports his folk music career, a yoga teacher who used to pay the bills through editing, and a landscape painter whose paychecks come from illustration work. As songwriter Charlie King once put it, “Our lives are more than our work/And our work is more than our jobs.” Keep that in mind when you venture to Boston to see John Singer Sargent’s watercolors.

And venture forth you should–there are nearly 100 works he produced between 1902-11 and there’s not a dud in the lot. These images are John Singer Sargent as few of us think of him. Sargent (1856-1925) was renowned as the portrait artist of choice for the Gilded Age elite, and small wonder–few artists of his day matched his eye or technique in oil and few in all of art history had his mastery of painting white on white or black on black. So good was Sargent that our mental images of late 19^th century upper crust Boston are largely conjured from paintings hung upon the walls of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

As sublime as the oils are, the MFA’s watercolor show is a breath of fresh air. Several forces collided that led Sargent away from formal portraiture and freed him to produce the bold gouaches, washes, and watercolors on display. First, as in our time, he who is in fashion one season is bound to be out the next. As Gilded Age society waned at the fin de siècle, so too did demand for Sargent’s services. He was, in short, yesterday’s painter. But a painter he remained–one who mastered the craft of the past and was vitally interested in the new. His oils occasionally showed familiarity with Impressionism, but his watercolors embody his love of the form. With fewer commissions that he had to paint, Sargent produced things that were personally meaningful.

Second, and more importantly, Sargent was as bored with society as it had become with him. He moved easily among American elites, but he was trained in Europe and was, in many ways, more continental than Back Bay Boston. The official story is that he was a bachelor, but he was probably gay. He certainly spent a lot of time abroad and was rumored to let his hair down considerably when outside of Victorian parlors. We see only echoes of Sargent’s audacious side in America–notably his scandalous Madame X  (1889), but most of the offerings in the MFA come from his overseas sojourns: the watery blues of Venice, the stark contrasts of Palestine, the blinding sunlight of Corfu, muscled quarry workers in Italy, the lush mountains of Switzerland….

Portuguese Boats

Call it reverse Madame X in that what he produced in Europe is only occasionally controlled. In a superb video at the end of the exhibition, painter Monika de Vries seeks to reproduce Sargent’s Portuguese Boats and argues that he worked quickly and impressionistically, as if he were a man freeing his hand and his soul. Forget the dignified drawing rooms of his oils; here we see louche gondoliers lounging in their boats, bold Bedouins glaring full-face frontward, carefree males plopped lazily outside a government building, and stone cutters smoking and enjoying their lunch. We get the idea that Sargent was probably more comfortable with this lot than the business class of Beacon Hill.

Above all there is the riot of color. Forget white dresses against a white background. In his watercolors Sargent gives us white laundry drying above a green lawn–except that lawn is splashed with pinks, yellows, browns, blues, purples, and mauves. There is a magnificent sun-dappled whitewashed cottage from Corfu in which the spidery shadows are just about every color except white.

Toward the end of his life Sargent had a last Boston hurrah–the stunning murals painted for the Boston Public Library. These too are better known than his watercolors, but once you see those, you’re likely to conclude that the happiest period of Sargent’s life was the one in which he was out of the public limelight and free to follow his muses rather than his commissions.

Rob Weir