Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

By ROBERT HUGHES

Two eras--and two distinct views of social portraiture

The Edwardian era, which lasted from 1901 to 1914, was the last great age of the society portrait in Europe--"great" not in artistic merit but in the large expectations that people had of portraiture as a form. For us, that appeal has largely vanished: artists like Munch, Kirchner and Giacometti have taught us to expect anything but social ease and confident display from the human head. The social portrait seems exhausted now, a cultural irrelevance. This fall has brought two exhibitions by American artists that underline the demise by recalling portraiture's vanished glories and suggesting its dubious status today. One is a retrospective of John Singer Sargent at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The other is a review of Andy Warhol's portraits, which opened last week at the Whitney Museum in New York City.

For the Edwardians, photography was still a minor art. Journalistic celebrity, except for actors and the high-society whores delicately known as "les grandes horizontals," was something to shun at all costs. It was the portrait that condensed fame and status, and to do so it needed to be painted by one of the lions of the medium, those astonishingly facile and brisk painters who plied their trade in the upper reaches of a society through which they moved on almost equal terms with their clients--Paul-Cesar Helleu, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Anders Zorn. In England and America, the most successful of all these virtuosos was John Singer Sargent, who became to the British Empire what Velasquez had been to the Habsburg court of Madrid or Sir Anthony van Dyck to Charles I: the official portraitist par excellence, the unrivaled chronicler of male power and female beauty at the top of the social heap. Sargent paid the penalty of success after he died in 1925. Reputations like his were exactly what the English defenders of modernism, starting with Roger Fry, felt most obliged to destroy.

Nothing could have been less congenial to the spirit of modernism than Sargent's work, with its showcase view of human character. By the '30s, few writers were ready to endorse the social attitudes that his paintings reflect--the belief in a natural ruling class, a government above politics, that was bitterly expressed in Hilaire Belloc's epigram on an English general election:

The accursed power which stands on Privilege (And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge) Broke--and Democracy resumed her reign:

(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Could Sargent be revived? Fifteen years ago, the very question would have seemed absurd. But as the Edwardians recede from us, curiosity about their now remote era grows, and now--fortunately, as it turns out--we have a Sargent retrospective. Organized by Art Historians James Lomax, Richard Ormond and Nancy Rivard, it was seen in England during the spring and summer of 1979, and opened last month in Detroit.

It would be pointless to look in Sargent's work for what a late Rembrandt self-portrait has to offer. There was very little inwardness to Sargent. His images are all external, a form of conventional display by the sitter enacting a public role. But Sargent had tremendous panache, and no other artist in Europe could deal better with the material props of social standing--the cascading velvet and flowing lace, the nervous shimmer of voile over silk, the glitter of ormolu or the subdued crinkle of light on the instep of a Lobb riding boot. One would be wrong to think that this was a routine response to the opulence of his sitters' lives. Sargent had a very exact eye. His idol, when he was a student in Paris in the 1870s, had been Velasquez; and from incessant study of his paintings, he had learned a great deal about the subtleties and difficulties of pure tonal description. He could summon up form and material in a few strokes, every granule of pigment falling into the place demanded by illusion, as though breathed onto the surface: it was this that gave his "stunners," like the pearl, silver and lilac portrait of Lady Agnew (1892-93), their apparitional air. Naturally, there were limits to this sort of rhetoric. Sargent's presentation of Sir Frank Swettenham, one of the proconsuls of the Empire in the Far East, as an overwhelming power object--frosty glare, glittering medal, a pile of imperial spoils and tributes--is pitched to a Rubenesque grandiosity that would crush any modern administrator; it must have seemed a little overdone even 75 years ago. The faces of Sargent's men rarely have the power to haunt you, as Rembrandt's sacramental potato of a nose does. They tend to be pink, brusque, ineffably confident masks; the sense of the official role comes before any question of revealed character. Sargent was better with women. His portrait of the daughters of his chief patron, Asher Wertheimer, must be the canonical image of the Jewish princess. Zaftig, bursting with vitality and chatter, they sway into the frame like a pair of inexorable swans.

In its power of theatrical illusion, its triumphant evocation both of a type and of two very tangible and different girls, this portrait did what no photograph could do. After Sargent's death, no painter could do it either. Sociable confidence was not the business of modernism.

It is sometimes said that Andy Warhol, whose exhibition "Portraits of the '70s" opened last week in Manhattan, is the Sargent of our times. Certainly no modern painter with an equivalent reputation--deserved or not--has spent so much time on celebrity portraiture: Warhol's show is an anthology of famous faces from show biz, art and fashion, an album of discoland and the Concorde set.

Whether these images will look as interesting after 50 years as Sargent's do is another question. Certainly they do not today. What they lack is Sargent's ability to realize and construct a painting. Warhol's admirers, who include David Whitney, the show's organizer, are given to claiming that Warhol has "revived" the social portrait as a form. It would be nearer the truth to say that he has zipped its corpse into a Halston, painted its eyelids and propped it in the back of a limo, where it moves but cannot speak.

Warhol began doing shoe illustratations in the '50s and enjoyed a brief period, between 1962 and 1966, when his soup cans and other baleful icons of American glut and repetition could be taken quite seriously as art. Since then his work has regressed to its origins in advertising, while his career has moved just as steadily forward in an aura of publicity and social toadying. Portraiture has been the mainstay of his career for the past ten years, for he was astute enough to realize that no other star "names" of current art were doing it and that the clientele he homed on were not going to get tired of the sight of their own faces.

The procedure was simple. Since the social portrait was largely killed by photography, Warhol used photos: all problems of depiction were thus telescoped into a simple act of choosing an image, rather than making it. The snapshot of the subject was silk-screened and the enlarged image printed on canvas over a mix of decorator colors. The image thus acts as a rubber stamp and seldom bears any discernible relationship to the pistachio-and-strawberry glop on which it sits. This casualness is part of the point since, although true irony is the enemy of narcissism, Warhol's indifference is very much its friend. Now and then he adds a little handwork, in the form of some wobbly drawing along the edge of an arm or a cheek. Perhaps it is meant to reassure his clients that despite his well-known claim in the '60s that he wanted to be come a machine, he has not yet done so.

This facetious decor can look pleasant, one canvas at a time, in the salons for which it is destined. Multiplied to 150 or so examples and thrust into a neutral museum space, it looks coarse and repetitious. It can hardly be said to exist with in the sphere of aesthetic debate. And although the catalogue essay compares this autistic cake icing to the work of Ma net and the Byzantine mosaicists, as well as that of his former self, Warhol has clearly become something less interesting than any of these. He is the LeRoy Neiman of the Olympic Tower.

The Whitney Museum has something to gain from the promotional effort it is making with this show: it needs money, and Warhol is so well known that any exhibition of his work can be relied on to bring crowds. But though Whitney Direc tor Tom Armstrong announces in the catalogue that "I have never wavered from the mark with Monsieur Warhola . . .

when the last lifeboat is launched I want old Blondie at the oars," there are others who may not want to join him in the shallows on this particular raft of the Me dusa, crowded as it is with the glittery, the raucous, the beady-eyed and the badly painted.

--Robert Hughes

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