Exhibit of the week: John Singer Sargent Watercolors

Brooklyn Museum

Through July 28

Now this is John Singer Sargent at his best, said Lance Esplund in Bloomberg.com. The American painter is, of course, best known for his buttery, layered oil portraits of British and American gentry. Sometime in the early 1900s, however, Sargent (1856–1925) decided he’d had enough. He journeyed eastward, capturing Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East in breezy plein-air watercolors. In the 93 examples now on display at the Brooklyn Museum, his brushstrokes “transform foliage into storm surges,” classical sculptures into “dreamy, cursory gestures,” and Venetian canals into “rippling pearls.” Every image projects “defiant self-liberation,” an impulse notably absent elsewhere in Sargent’s oeuvre.

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Certainly the show provides ample evidence of Sargent’s technical mastery of a finicky medium, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Seeking to illuminate how Sargent achieved his bold effects, the museum has dotted the exhibit with small video displays in which artists demonstrate watercolor techniques. But a knottier question than how he painted also comes to mind: Does this show’s impressive array of uncharacteristically free work mark Sargent as a modern artist? The answer, it seems, is yes and no. Like his friend Monet, Sargent was happy to make the techniques of painting visible. In White Ships, Sargent’s 1908 depiction of a Spanish harbor, “each mark and stain retains its distinctly material identity.” But in terms of his work’s content, Sargent remained squarely old guard. The artist may have been eager to escape the portrait studio and paint in natural light, “but he showed no urge to liberate himself from the social mores of his upper-crust class.”

Sargent has long been criticized for his conservative outlook, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Reviewing a posthumous retrospective of Sargent’s work in 1926, writer Roger Fry sneered that the artist’s perspective is “exactly what the upper-class tourist sees. Everything is as striking as it is obvious.” But the bulk of the work here belies that put-down. We’re in the company of an artist who’s constantly seeking out “odd angles and bracing asymmetries, often observing his lolling subjects from above or below rather than finding their most flattering pose.” Sometimes, he even transforms real-world imagery into pleasing abstraction. “Only in his pictures of veiled and turbaned bedouins in the Holy Land does he go wrong, slipping into trite exotica and biblical cliché.” Everywhere else, his inventive compositions and sure hand powerfully evoke the coming eclipse of the old order as well as something far more cheering: the mind of an artist “giddy to have escaped from the gulag of tasteful parlors into the consoling sun.”