Sargent and Fashion is an awful title. I went to the exhibition with a feeling of dread: women sitters as clothes-horses and John Singer Sargent reduced, as he so often is, to celebrity portraitist. And yes, there are dresses and fans and feathers, but they enhance, not detract from, the paintings. The real reason to go, is to see a wonderful collection of Sargent's portraits, many of them from the United States, some of them never seen before in the UK. Fashion is something of a fashion at the moment: the Ashmolean recently linked art, objects and clothes in its Colour Revolution show and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is currently exhibiting dresses alongside its Pre-Raphaelites. Personally, I can take it or leave it: dresses are no different from other 'ephemera' which gets included in exhibitions as context. Like photographs or letters, or the rococo furnishings which Dulwich included in the exhibition last year to elucidate their claims about Berthe Morisot's 18th century influences, clothes can be helpful. But for me it remains all about the art.
Sargent is too often and too easily dismissed as a portraitist and whilst this exhibition sticks firmly to his representations of people, it is obvious, even from the first couple of rooms, that he isn't 'just' a painter of portraits. Equally, he is an artist who overlaps with Impressionism, both chronologically and personally - there is a lovely anecdote about his dismay in visiting Monet and finding no black paint in the house - yet is most emphatically not an Impressionist. In the context of innovation-obsessed art history, this makes him seem like a fuddy-duddy throwback, churning out Grand Manner portraits whilst the modern world moves on around him. Yet there is nothing staid about Sargent, or, one suspects, despite their corsets, about his sitters.
Sargent's female subjects are anything but clothes-horses. Many were personal friends, many he painted more than once, and the closeness shows. He is a master at finding the telling detail, the revealing tic. Madame X, so often seen as a cypher for unobtainable sexual allure because of that infamous drooping strap, in reality betrays a brittleness. You see it in that sharply profiled, retrousse nose and the thumb tensed on the polished wood table. Vernon Lee sparkles with vitality, like electricity crackling: the reflection on her glasses, the sheen on the end of her nose, the moist, mid-conversation lips and the random dashes of white above her eyebrows, under her chin. You are desperate to hear what she has to say. Mrs Edward L Davis strides out of the canvas with her mouth set and her hand on her hip, her skirts smothering her sailor-suited son whose hand she holds iron-fast. You fear for his future wife - she's never going to let him go.
The clothes are just as important. Not fashion, not decoration, but integral to the character of their wearers. They give Mrs Edward Darley Boit her engaging energy - all polka-dots and swirls with a flame-like feather rising from her head. She's straight out of Henry James, the life and soul of every dinner party and, boy, does she go to a lot. They define the differences between sisters Betty and Ena Wertheimer: the quiet, pretty one, and the character who'll go on to play act for Sargent in borrowed robes. And of course, Sargent the artist uses clothes for his own purpose, pleasure and challenge. Black on black, white against white, dramatic colour contrasts, texture and pattern. Is fashion the right word for all this creativity with cloth?
If the curators get the title wrong, then they also over-egg their labelling with dressy details. I don't feel the need to have a written description, even if it is from a contemporary source, of an outfit which is literally next to it, either on canvas or in a vitrine. They have also succumbed to the fashion for eccentric wall colouring: here including a particularly nasty orange. A major gripe is the room which looks at Sargent's performativity and fluid representation of gender. Again, these are buzz themes which are easily overcooked and what the three 'masculinities' on display really show is the painter's ability to render character. Waif-like in his attenuated pallour, Graham Robertson is a 19th century Timothée Chalamet, so elegantly fragile he seems held vertical only by the tight rigidity of his coat. In Dr Pozzi at Home, the surgeon's fingers pluck delicately at the fabric of his floor-length red dressing gown, giving him an edgy femininity which the clothes alone do not. Between them, Henry Lee Higginson lounges in self-confident tweed, chin up, holding our gaze with a sense of impatience. Performance seems a superficial dismissal of these careful, subtle character studies.
What the curators get wonderfully right, however, is the expansive range of Sargent's work. They cover his idiosyncratic portraits of children, and of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife; his theatricality including the masterly Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth; his dabbles in aestheticism, not just Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose but the ethereal Cashmere, paint as soft as the fabric itself. The small, late landscapes where strangely posed figures are swallowed up by verdant vegetation have a unique, abstracted mood. Fashion and character are not the issue here, you sense the impatience of an artist who just wants to experiment with paint, with form. Fabrics become watery pools, dappled with sunlight, clefted with shadow. Features blur into nothingness.
Sargent and Fashion might be an awful title, but it's clever marketing, and the exhibition is bound to be a success, attracting art lovers, clothes lovers and those for whom rooms full of elegance (male and female) have its own appeal. If the curatorial argument seems weak, then the paintings simply speak for themselves. Ultimately, Sargent is about so much more than fashion.
