Tourist First Class

By ROBERT HUGHES

Auguste Rodin called John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) the "Van Dyck of our times." Sargent was the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid obsessive court to both. He could make old money look dashing and paint the newest cotton-reel magnate as though he were descended from Bayard. Sixty years after his death, his "paughtraits" (as Sargent, who kept swearing he would give them up but never did, disparagingly called them) provoke unabashed nostalgia. In his Belle Epoque sirens, in the mild, arrogant masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved the lineaments of a world soon to be buried like Pompeii, along with Sargent's own reputation, beneath the ash and rubble of World War I. Of course, he had to be revived. In Reagan's America, you cannot keep a good courtier down. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroiding, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. And the public that liked Upstairs, Downstairs is going to like him -- a thought that may not have been too far from the Whitney Museum's calculations when it planned the retrospective of his work that opened there * earlier this month and will go to the Art Institute of Chicago in February 1987.

A word of caution is needed: Sargent's output was huge -- more than 800 portraits and innumerable sketches of people and places -- but its high points do stand out, and too many are missing here, from El Jaleo, 1882, the flamenco scene that is the masterpiece of his youth, to the Tate Gallery's portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, which, when exhibited in Paris before World War I, sent its public into raptures over ce grand diable de milord anglais. This show says little about its subject that was not put more economically by the 1979 Sargent exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts but is still well worth seeing.

It may provoke a twinge of concern. Does Sargent signal a retreat from the standards the Whitney has battled for -- the commitment to glitz that gave us the 1985 Biennial, the taste for inflated prettiness set forth in its Alex Katz retrospective, the reluctance to edit that made Eric Fischl's show such a letdown? True, Director Tom Armstrong valiantly tries to establish a link by pointing, in a catalog note, to Sargent's "highly expressive manner and his treatment of subject matter and narrative content, all of which are of great interest to contemporary artists." However, Sargent's "manner" was not that of a neoexpressionist but of a virtuoso; his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist, but the fiercely competitive atelier system of figure drawing that formed his style when he studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris also underpinned the high standards of early modernist draftsmanship in Matisse, Picasso or Beckmann. Hence, though his relation to the avant-garde was nil, he is no longer to be dismissed as a flashy bore. There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious sight of an artist's guts on parade.

With James McNeill Whistler and Henry James, Sargent was the most vivid American presence on the Anglo-European cultural stage at the end of the 19th century. But though he kept his twang, he was only notionally American. He had been born in Florence to expatriate parents -- his father an introverted doctor from Philadelphia, his mother a perpetual tourist who only wanted to escape the crude continent of her birth and used a succession of illnesses (some feigned) and pregnancies (all real) to stave off recrossing the Atlantic. Their son grew up at home everywhere and belonging nowhere, dragged (as Art Historian Stanley Olson puts it in a sharp, sad and witty catalog essay on Sargent's nationality problems) through the "purposeless shifting expatriate life glorified by Hawthorne and James": Paris, Munich, London, Rome, spring in the Tyrol, summer on the Rhine, winter in Nice, years of hotel rooms, rented villas and rentier chitchat. It bred in Sargent a case-hardened adaptability, a compliance with wherever he happened to be and a precocious sophistication that, refracted through his large pictorial talent, made him the stylist he was.

But he was a stylist without a natural subject, unlike such Americans as Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins whose work was rooted in unmistakably American values and experiences. He spent most of his adult life in England but never gave up his American passport, even though Edward VII offered him a knighthood. Neither American nor English nor European, he was bored by politics, took little heed of current events, and (like James) seems never to have had a real love affair: his sexual neutrality was a standing joke among his friends. Perhaps he was impotent, like Degas, or perhaps a deeply repressed homosexual. His real enthusiasms were work and social climbing.

If Sargent was the painter of his age, it was also because his talent suited a changed climate in England in the late 19th century -- one in which John Ruskin's passionate social moralizing had dropped out of fashion, to be replaced by Matthew Arnold's exhortations to detach art from politics, the seed of "art for art's sake." An unreflective spectator, he saw the world as a string of motifs and rendered its surface with sparkling bravura. The best of his watercolors, which constitute the travel diary of his life, make a virtue of this; the ease and accuracy of judgment with which he could do the facade of the Salute in Venice or toss off an effect of sunlight on the terrace of the Villa di Marlia in Lucca would be hard to beat, though they project no special intensity of feeling. Cezanne's remark on Monet applies even better to Sargent: "Nothing but an eye, but, my God, what an eye!"

He was trained as a tonal painter, in a studio system whose guiding star was Velasquez. In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879, is an uncanny performance for a 23-year-old, with its suffusion of mauve twilight, its seamless recession of * tones and the run of staccato red touches -- flowerbeds, a patch on the promenading woman's fan, the end of her companion's cigarette -- that stitches its way across the center. By 1880, when he headed for Venice, he had a prodigy's technique. Venetian Glass Workers, circa 1882, with its shadowy figures in a dark bottega sorting fans of glass rods, rests on one stunning visual trope: each sheaf of glass is done with a single swipe of the brush, so that each bristle mark defines a separate rod.

His fame as a social portraitist and his passage from France into the English upper crust that would reward him for it began at the Paris Salon of 1884 with the scandalous Madame X. This portrait of Virginie Gautreau, a huntress from New Orleans who had married a banker and become a monstrously affected social locomotive, cost Sargent some struggle, but in the end her strained, arrogant pose, plus her pale skin ("uniform lavender or blotting- paper color all over," Sargent wrote) rising like an arsenical lily from the low-cut black dress, caused a sensation. Madame X, and her author too, seemed to epitomize what the French disliked about Americans: their pushiness, their refusal to play themselves down as foreigners should. Worse still, the painting was associated with another bravura Sargent portrait: Dr. Pozzi, a society gynecologist resplendent in a red dressing gown, who was believed to be Mme. Gautreau's lover. Confounded by the scandal, Sargent ducked and ran for London. His timing was impeccable. England had not had a first-rate society painter since Romney died. A new English plutocracy, mercantile and determined to outface the landed gentry, was on the rise. It sniffed suspiciously at the American, hesitated and then gobbled him up.

Over the years to come Sargent's social and celebrity portraits became an indispensable record of their time and class, from Henry James ("I . . . am all large and luscious rotundity," the master remarked on viewing his image after ten sittings) to Eleonora Duse, who favored Sargent with her somberly direct gaze for 55 minutes and then abruptly left. But some of the greatest images are of people whose notability was merely social. At best, as in Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, circa 1892-93, he could be as good as Van Dyck. He brought such excitement to his scrutiny of light and shade on a knotted lilac sash, of skin gleaming through voile, and of delicate flesh so strongly modeled as to convince you that nothing else was more worth looking at. There is a perfect match between the decorous luxuriance of Lady Agnew's pose, the creaminess of the paint and the shadow of tension on her face. For that, one can forgive a lot of routine work. Sargent was the last of what had passed, not the first of what was to come; but he still looks impressive, and one realizes that his sense of decorum went deeper than the mere desire to curate the vanity of the rich.