Spanish Class

El Jaleo (1882), by John Singer Sargent, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, OCTOBER 2022

John Singer Sargent comes to Spain

The artist created his own synthetic Spanish vision

One of the great achievements of Spanish art is in its use of black. No other national school harnessed the dark arts to such effect. In Spanish painting, the color black might convey shadow, or the mystery of the unseen, while at the same time presenting a brooding presence, a dark mass right there on the surface.

Just look at “Las Meninas,” Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece of 1656. Now consider the subject. Is it the five-year-old infanta? Her ladies in waiting, the “Meninas” of the title? The painter portrayed at his easel? The infanta’s royal parents in the reflection of a mirror? Some unseen viewer interrupting this tableau? I might suggest that the darkness, obscuring most of the picture, surrounding and pressing on the fragments of light that barely hold this composition together, is as much a subject as anything else. The blackness draws us in, not through what it depicts, but by what it obscures.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the son of American expatriates. Born in Florence, he was educated in Paris and lived the majority of his working career in London. But he went back to black more than once, through his extensive study of Spanish painting and a lifelong fascination with Spanish culture. The underlying thesis of Sargent and Spain, a major exhibition at Washington’s National Gallery of Art — opening this October and on view to January 2023, later traveling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — is that the painter’s many passages through Spain not only gave him his subject matter but also informed his painterly style. For anyone who has wondered about Sargent’s Spanish affinities, this exhibition reconstructs those sojourns and looks to the sources of his synthetic Spanish vision.

Hispanophilia permeated the Romantic nineteenth century. Spain presented itself as a “country untroubled by modern life, with a profound sense of the austere — melancholic and sacred, timeless or at least premodern,” write Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond in the exhibition’s illuminating catalog. “Spain became a locus for this Romantic sensibility and an imagined Iberian past was, in part, created to satisfy it.”

In the industrializing culture of the West, books such as Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832); George Borrow’s Zincali, or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) and his Bible in Spain (1843); Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1845); and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845) all set the mood of this nostalgic Spanish vision. Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830) and Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) famously brought the romance of Spain to the modern stage.

But for the painters of the nineteenth century, Velázquez was their modelo ideal. A pilgrimage to study and copy his paintings in Madrid at the Prado became a must. From 1879 through 1912, Sargent made seven extended visits to Spain. The Prado was his first stop. According to the museum’s copyist register, Sargent here drew nine works by Velázquez and one by Ribera. As with Manet, who had made a similar visit to Spain some fourteen years earlier, Velázquez “exerted a lasting influence on his portraiture,” write Kilmurray and Ormond. Further influenced by his painting teachers Carolus-Duran and Léon Bonnat, both followers of the seventeenth-century Spanish master, Sargent was soon said to be “Velázquez come to life again.”

Curated by Sarah Cash, the associate curator of American and British Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, along with Kilmurray and Ormond, who authored the artist’s catalog raisonné, Sargent and Spain brings together 140 examples of the artist’s oils, watercolors, drawings and photographs, starting with the artist’s youthful dives into the Spanish darkness. In its haunting forms, his early “Spanish Dance” of 1879-82, here on loan, seems so Iberian in style that it represents one of the rare examples of a work not made by a Spaniard in the collection of New York’s Hispanic Society.

In 1882 Sargent brought together his many Spanish studies to compose his breakthrough oil “El Jaleo.” Now in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the painting of an up-lit flamenco dancer did not travel from Boston, but its many studies are here on loan from the Gardner. Due to its ambitious size and revealing subject matter, the painting proved to be the sensation of the 1882 Paris Salon. The artist became “the most talked-about painter in Paris,” according to a contemporary account on “The Salon — From an Englishman’s Point of View.”

It is remarkable to consider that this most Spanish of images was painted in Paris by an Italian-born American with a model “who was neither Spanish nor a dancer,” notes the art historian Nancy G. Heller in the catalog. “Nothing could be less spontaneous than ‘El Jaleo,’ but Sargent makes us believe that we are witnessing an actual performance.”

The painting is alive with a rhythm that extends through the very fingertips of its alluring, slanting, pose-striking dancer. It helps that Sargent was himself a supremely talented musician. As part of his international and idiosyncratic upbringing, Sargent had studied Italian folk music in Florence and could play the mandolin, guitar, banjo and piano. There’s a deep musical knowledge embedded in Sargent’s brushstrokes, which ring like sonic vibrations, plucked and strummed to virtuosic perfection on canvas.

Although its subject left few written records, Sargent and Spain reconstructs the artist’s itineraries through his extensive creative output — which ultimately totaled some 225 Spanish-themed works along with sketchbooks, notebooks and the two hundred photographs he collected (and possibly snapped himself). Over thirty years Sargent covered nearly every corner of the country — from Camprodon and Santiago de Compostela in the north to Seville and Granada in the South, and what seems like most points in between. Along the way he collected architectural images of Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, Salamanca, León, Tarragona and Granada. The exhibition curators have for the first time also identified photographs of Sargent himself working and traveling in Spain.

Sargent brought the lessons of this Spanish class even to paintings that seem far removed from the Iberian peninsula. Consider his “Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” This masterpiece of 1882, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (and regrettably absent from the current exhibition), was a commission he painted in Paris of the four daughters of a fellow expatriate artist. The subject matter says nothing of Spain, but the multi-centered composition with its dark figures in profile is a homage to “Las Meninas.” Just look to its “evocative shadows,” note Kilmurray and Ormond, “the complex relationships between artist, figures, and viewer.”

Writing in the October 1887 issue of Harper’s magazine, Henry James offers the final word on Sargent and Spain: “Mr. Sargent had spent several months in Spain, and here, even more than he had already been, the great Velázquez became the god of his idolatry… It is evident that Mr. Sargent fell on his knees, and that in this attitude he passed characteristic a considerable part of his sojourn in Spain.”

The Way of the Masks

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2022

The way of the masks

On the newly redone Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That’s clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by the leadership of the present. Nowhere has this been more evident than at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For years the institution has been on an apology tour for America and its relationship to nature and history, all the while turning the museum into a vitrine of virtue-signaling politics. Artifacts from its Hall of South American Peoples, such as the shrunken heads of the Shuar Indians of Ecuador, have been effaced from view. A diorama of “Old New York” depicting trade between the Dutch settlers and Lenape tribesmen has been graffitied over with content warnings. (“The scene offers only stereotypical representations and ignores how complex and violent colonization was for Native people.”) At the same time the museum has shown increasing contempt for its visitors, who must now queue outside for an hour or longer just to pass through a phalanx of security- and covid-theater.

Early this year this progressive onslaught reached a fever pitch as the institution jackhammered up the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the museum’s memorial rotunda that bears his name. This work by James Earle Fraser, based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, had been an integral part of John Russell Pope’s original 1928 museum design (see “A classical illness” in The New Criterion of September 2020). I am still astonished the museum went through with this act of vandalism, which was an affront to the city, not to mention an insult to our twenty-sixth president. The museum has now deprived future generations of its own history as embodied in its art and architecture. It has also shown itself to be at the beck and call of the woke mob, when even those artifacts bolted to the pavement are no longer safe from erasure. As Ellen Futter, the museum’s director of the past three decades, has just announced her retirement, one can only hope that the censorious managerial class she represents will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Against the backdrop of our own tribal politics, the study of culture, in which the American Museum of Natural History was once an unapologetic leader, can still come as particular relief. Even as it now eats itself, the institution, in its founding mission, was an ark for the world’s traditional cultures at a moment when many of them were under threat or vanishing. At no time was this more evident than under the guidance of the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Over a century ago the museum through his work preserved the customs and artifacts of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest in astonishing ways that continue to enrich us today. This preservation has been especially valuable as those tribes under Canadian jurisdiction faced a government that outlawed their rituals and destroyed their artifacts as a matter of policy for nearly a century. In 1899 Boas’s Northwest Coast Hall opened in the museum’s first wing. Today it remains the oldest exhibit on view, and in its original location. Now after a five-year renovation, the hall has reopened. The results should still remind us of the genius of Northwest Coast culture and the achievements of Boas and his colleagues in preserving it. At the same time the renovation signals troubling new directions for anthropological display.

The old Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The ten nations that make up the Northwest Coast tribes—Tlingit, Haida, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Tsimshian, Haíltzaqv, Nuxalk, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-cha-nulth, and Salish—at one time enjoyed an abundance of natural resources that allowed for the development of a richly artistic and performative culture. This abundance was celebrated through the “potlatch,” an elaborate social pageant where rank and status were conferred through the ritual sacrifice of some of these resources. As a field researcher in British Columbia, Boas did not just amass the tribal artifacts of the peoples living there. He also studied their tribal customs, in particular those around the potlatch. Working with George Hunt, an English-Tlingit guide married to a Kwakwaka’wakw native, in 1897 Boas published The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, an extensive monograph that recorded their ceremonies, songs, and language in relation to their artistic materials—in particular the transforming, animistic wooden masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw.

A map of the Northwest Coast tribes. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The complexities of these native practices, especially the ritual destruction of resources, were used as justification by the Canadian government for banning the potlatch and subsequently confiscating and destroying their artifacts, through laws that were in effect from 1884 to 1951. While motivated by the “best practices” of the age, which sought to assimilate native populations into Canadian culture, these statutes were an injustice that proved to be catastrophic for native art and custom.

It was the great ingenuity of Boas to work around Canada’s potlatch ban and complete his research. Rather than continue his field research in Canada, he arranged for Hunt and his extended family to live for seven months in 1893 in an ethnographic display as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he could study the Kwakwaka’wakw outside of Canadian jurisdiction.

When Boas’s hall opened in 1899, he carried through his deep understanding of Pacific Coast cultures while respecting their tribal specificity. Thanks to his extensive field research, he was able to exhibit their artifacts on their own terms, in separate alcoves dividing the hall that were dedicated to each nation and its social practices.

By today’s standards, Boas’s tenure at the museum was not without fault. A family of Greenland Inuits lived and died in his care at the museum in 1897. After staging a mock funeral for the benefit of the one boy, Minik Wallace, who survived, Boas in fact dissected his father’s body and placed it in the museum’s collection. Wallace dedicated his life to the return of these desecrated remains.

Boas’s approach to tribal research nevertheless revolutionized his field as he went on to found the department of anthropology at Columbia University. Zora Neale Hurston, a disciple of Boas at Barnard, applied his groundbreaking methodology to preserving the folkways of the black South. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss likewise credited Boas with inspiring his own methodology in the 1940s, leading to his 1975 book The Way of the Masks.

In some aspects of the new Northwest Coast Hall, the legacy of Boas can still be felt. The tribal alcoves have been roughly retained. The Haida dugout canoe known as the “Great Canoe,” which for decades resided in the museum’s Seventy-seventh Street entrance, has been restored to the center of the hall where it appeared when the room first opened. Extensive labels also now accompany the restored artifacts, with some one thousand objects now on display. In the Kwakwaka’wakw section, for example, these labels describe and explain the fool masks of the red-cedar-bark ceremonies and the transformation masks of the myth of Siwidi, an ancestor taken by a giant octopus to an undersea kingdom who returns transformed as a sequence of sea animals.

The “Great Canoe” in the Northwest Coast Hall. Photo courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.

The problem with the new hall, and it is a big one, is in its curatorial voice. Some ten contemporary tribal members are listed here as co- and consulting curators. The results come off as exhibition by committee and anthropology as memoir. The wall labels are almost all presented in the first person. The distinctions between science and myth, subject and object, are nowhere maintained. “The Haíltzaqv people have lived on the central coast of British Columbia in and around Wáglísla (Bella Bella) since time began,” reads one wall text. “The case lighting has been darkened at the request of Tlingit advisors to reflect the cultural sensitivity of these items,” reads another.

The leadership at the museum is now so beholden to contemporary First Nations, or at least makes such a show of being beholden to them, that the presentation drowns out the very objects of history meant for display. “We need to talk about racism!” exclaims one introductory wall label in an extra-large font. “Systemic racism has been present here since first contact with white people and persisted to this current moment and this conversation,” goes the welcome video on repeat loop. On another wall, under the label “Support native art—made by Native artists,” we are given examples of decorated skateboards, sneakers, and basketballs.

For all of the verbiage now packed into this one hall—aimed at best obliquely at the museumgoer new to this cultural content—certain names and stories are notably absent. Gone is the remarkable history surrounding the transportation of that sixty-three-foot Great Canoe, the largest dugout canoe in existence, which until recently was included with its display. Created around 1878 from a single piece of Western red cedar, the canoe was acquired by the museum and moved by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, where it was transported by rail to the Atlantic, then shipped to a Manhattan pier, then moved to the new museum by horse-drawn wagon.

Also absent is the story of Franz Boas himself. You might think that if you are telling a story of the survival of culture, you would include the role of the curator who saved it. It is unfortunate that today’s anthropology museum must scrub itself clean of its own fingerprints to create the illusion of native curatorial control. A display dedicated to the history of the hall would make for a genuinely revelatory introduction.

Instead we now learn almost exclusively of the museum’s historical mistakes. “An anthropologist working for the Museum recorded scant information about this carved house post when it was taken in 1909 from Haida territory in Alaska,” says one label. “Beginning in the latter half of the 1800s, anthropologists and other unsanctioned ‘collectors’ took the belongings and stole the actual bones of our Ancestors,” reads another. The only place Boas now appears, at least that I could find, is in the display of his remarkable 1896 model of the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Xwamdasbe’—“the earliest model of its kind still in existence,” reads the label. The text then proceeds to point out the model’s elisions and inaccuracies.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall dwells in the present at the expense of the past. Lost finally in this modern-day political potlatch is a spirit of appreciation for the ancestors of anthropology. This is a sin of omission that rests on today’s museum leadership and its misleadingly selective use of native voices, not on these voices themselves.

Five years ago, Garfield George, the head of the Raven Beaver House of Angoon, Tlingit, accompanied at the podium by his young daughter, Violet Murphy-George, gave a dedication at the museum that deserves to be remembered. Since these words appear nowhere in the new hall, I reproduce them here:

In 1882 they set our canoes on fire, set our village on fire. Our food caches. But the canoe prow was taken care of by this great institution. It was one of the only canoes to survive the bombardment and was used to gather food. Gather materials. It was the canoe that saved us. Someone asked me recently if it is hard to see these objects in this museum. The answer is yes, it is, but it survived.

Today’s Northwest Coast Hall is a testament to all of those who worked for this survival—acknowledged and otherwise.

The English baroque architecture of New York

The Critic magazine, U.K., September-October 2022

Studio: The English baroque architecture of New York

Climbing around, looking up, and zooming in: the delights of Beaux-Arts architecture in New York

Just as Augustus found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, New York’s robber barons found a city of brownstones and left it a city gilded in gold. From 1870 to 1930, between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression, this Gilded Age defined the city in ways that continue to enrich its existence today. Amidst the forest of cookie-cutter high rises that now slice through the city skyline, it can be easy to miss the great Beaux-Arts architecture that resulted from these earlier aspirations. Still, most New Yorkers live for what remains of this age of exuberance, especially compared to the International Style of the last 70 years that has brutally tried to supplant it.

The lavish 412-page book with around 300 new colour photographs in large format folio

New York would be little more than another faceless glass-and-steel city were it not for its Gilded Age buildings and institutions —from the main branch of the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal to the many forgotten remnants we delight in rediscovering and now fight to preserve. An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, written by Phillip James Dodd with photography by Jonathan Wallen, is a gilded embrace of this legacy. Produced by Images Publishing, the lavish 412-page publication with some 300 new colour photographs in large format folio takes us up close and personal with 20 of the finest examples of Beaux-Arts architecture, arranged chronologically, that continue to enliven the city today.

1 – Gould Memorial Library with its rotunda

The book reminds me of my own memorable moments of urban discovery, such as stepping up into the golden rotunda of the Gould Memorial Library [1] (Stanford White, 1899-1901) and walking in the falling snow around the mausoleums of Woodlawn Cemetery (built between 1884 and 1920). I will never forget that feeling of standing inside the small laureled chamber of the Soldiers & Sailors Monument (Charles and Arthur Stoughton, 1902) or looking up for the first time at the celestial vault of Grand Central (designed by Reed & Stem with Warren & Wetmore, 1913) after it was cleaned of decades of cigarette smoke in the 1990s. Or how about settling into a book in the main reading room of the Public Library [2] (Carrère & Hastings, 1911) or having a drink in what was originally the Samuel Tilden House (remodelled by Calvert Vaux in 1884)?

This book collects all of these Gilded Age impressions and suggests we have much more to see. Who knew about the polychromed classicism of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank (George B. Post, 1875) or the Byzantine splendour of the Cunard Building (Benjamin Wistar Morris, 1921)? Climbing around, looking up, and zooming in, Dodd and Wallen have done the job of revealing these delights, ones that might be new to those who live across the pond or even right next door.

2 -New York Public Library’s Astor Hall

Despite living just down the block from the General Grant National Museum [3] (John H. Duncan, 1897), I am ashamed to say I have never set foot inside the building, based on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus, that illustrates the book’s cover. That means I have yet to answer, with absolute certainty, Groucho Marx’s famous question from the 1950s quiz show You Bet Your Life, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Julian Fellowes supplies a foreword for the book. It is clear that Gilded Age architecture has recently been on his mind. Rather than a mere costume drama, The Gilded Age, his new television series, is more like an architectural drama, as architecture and architects are the scene stealers of the show. “In the space of 70 years the city’s population exploded from 123,000 in 1820 to over two million in 1890,” he writes in the book. Reflecting the city’s burgeoning wealth and aspiration, “the Beaux-Arts style came to the United States, and in particular to New York, at precisely the right moment”.

The General Grant National Memorial, based on the mausoleum at Halicarnassus

The architecture was lavish and drew freely from eclectic sources, from Imperial Rome and the Italian Renaissance to the French baroque and farther afield.

“Stanford White based his design for the rooftop at Madison Square Garden II on the Giralda in Seville;” Fellowes writes, “his rotunda at Gould Memorial Library emulated the Reading Room at the British Museum in London; and the façade of the Metropolitan Club was heavily influenced by the Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall.”

Fellowes’s television series reminds us how the city’s great social tension was not so much between upstairs and downstairs as between old money and new—the old downtown Knickerbockers versus the new uptown Industrialists building palaces gilded with the riches (and even the walls) of Europe. To the old guard of Livingstons and Astors, the new regime of Huntingtons and Rockefellers were parvenus building their gaudy McMansions along Fifth Avenue—or make that MacMansions, as in the case of Andrew Carnegie, the son of a poor Scottish weaver who became the richest industrialist in America.

The Alexander Hamilton US Custom House

Such rags-to-riches stories were the norm in this Gilded Age. With an essay by Richard Guy Wilson and informative descriptions by Dodd, the book is full of gilded images and observations. Born in rural Pennsylvania, Henry Clay Frick learned to mine coal, and turn it into coke. He helped found U.S. Steel, and built an art-filled mansion on Fifth Avenue (now The Frick Collection; Thomas Hastings, 1914).

Frank W. Woolworth arrived from rural New York and got the idea of his “five-and-dime” variety store while working as a stock boy, and erected the tallest building in the world on lower Broadway (The Woolworth Building; Cass Gilbert, 1913). Americans “are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance,” observed Bernard Berenson, as New Yorkers in particular saw the flowering of classical civilisation in their own lush ascendancy. As Otto Kahn famously told the architect of his own Fifth Avenue Mansion (J. Armstrong Stenhouse with C.P.H Gilbert, 1918): “It’s a sin to keep money idle.”

Just as the old guard resented such exuberance, a corporate chastity took hold of the city following the Great Depression and belted it in steel cages. As new money became old, aging industries gave way to the abstractions of high finance and the poker face of a new ahistorical style. The Gilded Age has always had its enemies. “The golden gleam of the gilded surface hides the cheapness of the metal underneath,” Mark Twain lamented way back in the 1870s. It might have been superficial, but still it proved to be New York’s Golden Age, as these twenty glistening survivors attest.