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Sargent show highlights intimate sideExhibit of legendary portrait painter's Italian works
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Although he gained lasting fame -- and made a sizable fortune -- as a society portrait painter in London, John Singer Sargent returned regularly to Italy to create some of his most personal paintings. Born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents, Sargent started sketching in Italy when he was 12. He returned throughout his life, casting an artist's eye on sensual street scenes and architectural details in Venice and Tuscany, and detailing fellow artists at work and the rocky face of the Alps. Famous for his oils, Sargent turned to watercolors to capture the dazzling light and lush palette of Mediterranean gardens and the countryside. Seventy-five of Sargent's Italian paintings have been collected for the first time in a major exhibition that continues through May 11 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, before moving to the Denver Art Museum from June 28 to September 21. "Sargent and Italy" comes to the United States after a three-month debut at Italy's Palazzo dei Diamanti, which co-produced the show with LACMA. For Sargent fans who know only his more elegant portraits, the show is an opportunity to see a relaxed side of a man curator Bruce Robertson calls "technically, the most accomplished American artist ever." Purposely avoiding traditional tourist vistas, Sargent's Italy is a mix of classic art and everyday pleasures. "He's channeling Italy much in the way we experience it today," Robertson said. "Half of it is the art; the other half is the sensuality, the food, the wine." 'He found a great release'
Richard Ormond, a Sargent scholar and the artist's great-grandnephew, said Sargent escaped to Italy seeking a break from the pressures of his commissions and his upper-crust customers in London, Boston and New York. "He found a great release in landscape painting," Ormond said from his home in London. "He would drop the murals and the portraits and take two or three months to get out of London." But for Sargent, who seldom stopped painting, the trips were more than vacations. "These were painting campaigns," Ormond said. "The fact that he also enjoyed himself in other ways was a byproduct." In Italy, Sargent posed friends, family members and fellow artists in outdoor settings, sometimes draping them in cashmere or dressing them in harem costumes. In "Group With Parasols," from 1905, Sargent's friends snooze in dappled afternoon light looking sensual but not sexual. Sargent found Italy's beauty in its details -- the doorway of a Venetian palace, women stringing beads in a shop, a fragment of a fountain in Bologna. "He was never after the grand sweep," Robertson said. "In Venice, he sees the details of the tourist scenes -- the doorways and alleys. In the Alps, he paints the rocky details of the mountains. He doesn't look back at the view." Sargent did not entirely leave portraiture behind in Italy. The show includes a number of his signature works, including one of the first showings of "Mrs. Ralph Curtis," a stunning life-size painting of a wealthy heiress who married Sargent's cousin in 1898. He posed the painter Ambrogio Raffaele in the Alps and painted an exiled priest in his modest quarters in Giomein, a village near the Matterhorn. 'Uninhibited and easy'
Sargent's earliest works in Italy, as a young painter just developing his technique, focused on everyday Italians -- a dark-skinned beauty in Capri, or a slightly drunken woman, her chair tilted back against a wall, watching her male companion strike a match. Shy and tongue-tied in large public gatherings, Sargent was drawn to the easy sensuality he saw in the Italian people, Ormond said. "The simplicity of the ordinary Italians touched him. They were so uninhibited and easy. That drew out something from him." Italy also was the land of Sargent's childhood, where he lived a nomadic existence with his parents, moving from hotels to rented quarters, supported by his mother's private income. Sargent started painting young, and art became the anchor of his life. He never married, and is not known to have had any romantic attachments. Largely self-educated, he was an expert on classical music and read voraciously, but he always seemed to be viewing life through the brush in his hand, Robertson said. For a man who lived most of his life in Europe, and spoke German, French and Italian fluently, Sargent was at his core an American, and his Italian paintings reflect the eye of an outsider, Ormond said. In that way, he was like other artists and writers of his day, including Henry James and Edith Wharton, modern figures who looked for inspiration in the old world. "He's an exile, always slightly on the outside," Ormond said. "That's what gives him the sharpness of observation that is so evident in these paintings." Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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