Sargent and Fashion: Tate Britain's new show 'spectacular' but 'myopic'

John Singer Sargent was an artist who "clearly loved clothes", said Francesca Peacock in Prospect. His world "was one of lavish haute couture and costumed dress": an in-demand painter of society portraits, Sargent (1856-1925) specialised in likenesses "of society beauties in miles of silk" and "serious canvases of serious men" – themselves often no less lavishly attired. He played with the costumes in which he depicted his subjects, changing colours of garments to better suit a picture, and conjuring outfits from his imagination when models "only had rolls of fabric to pose with". Indeed, after altering the colour of a sitter's dress in one portrait, he proclaimed himself both "painter and dressmaker".

This new show at Tate Britain explores the artist's "interest in and skill with fashion", bringing together dozens of Sargent's best-known paintings to show how he used clothes "as a way of telling a story". Presented alongside many of these portraits are some of the actual garments worn by his sitters, and these lend a "material, fabric-y delight" to proceedings. It adds up to a "spectacular" exhibition.

Born in 1856 in Florence to American parents, Sargent was "cosmopolitan, ironic and sophisticated", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Like his friend Henry James, he was "a great artist of identity, fascinated with the nature of social being", a painter of works that were "startling" and "modern".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

There are some wonderful pictures here: his "fascinating" portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, is "a positively Sadean image of an aristocrat in top hat, black coat and boots, holding a riding crop he might be about to use on a horse or housemaid", while his Aline de Rothschild introduces us to a personality "full of life and wit".

Yet focusing on Sargent's relationship with fashion seems shallow and "myopic": the works here are "wretchedly displayed" and the garments add little to our understanding of his art, which can't be reduced to facts about hats, dresses and opera gowns. "This is a horrible exhibition."

The show "could have done with an edit", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Some of the likenesses seem "interchangeable". And by "concentrating so fiercely on the clothes", Sargent often appears to have chosen to focus on surface over "depth" and "inner life".

And indeed his "most celebrated" and, at the time, most scandalous work – "Portrait of Madame X", showing a society lady in a revealing dress – is somewhat superficially "captivating". She's "90% fashion plate, 10% real person". Yet this exhibition is a wonderful exploration of Sargent as "an artistic impresario, an ambitious creator of looks and events". His work feels familiar in the age of social media. "Vacuous celebrities, absurdly expensive clothes, nobodies posing as somebodies – Sargent's world strikes a chord today because we recognise it so easily as our world."