Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

ART/ARCHITECTURE

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Sargent's Muses: Was Madame X Actually a Mister?

WHILE ''Whistler, Women and Fashion,'' a new exhibit at the Frick Collection, explores the central role of clothes in 19th-century portraiture, the most interesting -- and scandalous -- dress in the history of American art can be found 12 blocks uptown at the Metropolitan Museum.

John Singer Sargent's ''Madame X,'' one of the most beloved works in the museum's permanent collection (and now on view in the ''Manet/Velázquez'' show, through June 8), offers a view of fashion and art that is startlingly different from the one presented at the Frick. In sharp contrast to Whistler's conventionally feminine women in romantic clothes, ''Madame X'' epitomizes a highly stylized elegance that was way ahead of its time. Painted in 1884, the portrait is prophetic not only of modern chic (have you ever been to a formal event where someone wasn't wearing a black dress held up with sparkly straps?) but also of high camp. Tantalizing evidence, overlooked by scholars until recently, suggests that the portrait's strange power derives from Sargent's infatuation with a young man who resembled Gautreau so closely he could have been her twin.

Sargent met Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the model for ''Madame X,'' in the early 1880's, and as soon as he saw her he knew he wanted to paint her. Born in New Orleans, she moved to Paris with her mother and sister after her father was killed during the Civil War. She grew up to be exotically beautiful and was rumored to have had many affairs. Her reputation for dangerous liaisons, and her passion for self-display, including an outrageous toilette, made her a frequent focus of the scandal sheets, even after her marriage to a French banker and the birth of a daughter.

Though Sargent's paintings had been well received at the Paris Salon since he had first exhibited there in 1877, anti-American prejudice had hindered his efforts to win French commissions. He wanted to produce a masterpiece that would have every woman in Paris panting to have him paint her portrait. He saw Madame Gautreau -- with her glorious figure, her icy pallor and daring fashion sense -- as his ticket to the top, and he persuaded her to sit for him.

But instead of admiring his achievement, the public and the critics were appalled by it. Gautreau's shocking attire is the chief reason the portrait caused a furor when it was exhibited at the 1884 Salon, dashing Sargent's hopes of a Paris career and causing him to move to London. ''It's unique,'' said Aileen Ribeiro, head of the history of dress section at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. ''I can't think of anything else like it in painting at that time. The dress is so scandalous even an actress would have thought twice about wearing it for a portrait.''

Though Sargent never actually designed clothes for his sitters, as Whistler did, he was ''intensely interested in what his sitters wore and rearranged dresses and accessories, including jewelry, to suit his vision,'' said Richard Ormond, Sargent's great-nephew and, with Elaine Kilmurray, the author of his catalogue raisonné.

In contrast to the flounced and bedecked extravaganzas coming out of the mainstream couturiers of the era, Gautreau's dress is remarkably simple and bare. It is not known who designed it, though Gautreau was seen wearing clothes by Félix Poussineau, a former hairdresser to the Empress Eugénie. Most likely it was two pieces, a black velvet cuirass, or bodice, worn over a slim black satin skirt, with most of its fabric gathered at the back. Heavily boned, the cuirass had a plunging neckline and came to a deep, sharp point over the crotch. ''Though the cuirass would have had some kind of lining to soak up sweat, the model would not have been wearing any underwear,'' said Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and that would have been scandalous.

Sargent originally painted Gautreau's dress with the right strap off the shoulder, suggesting that she was about to disrobe. The only jewelry she wears is a gold wedding band and, in her hair, a diamond crescent, the symbol of Diana, goddess of the hunt -- a fitting ornament for a sexy woman on the prowl.

No sooner had the doors of the Palais de l'Industrie in the Champs-Élysées opened on May 1, 1884, than a crowd gathered in front of ''Madame X.'' People hooted and pointed the tips of their umbrellas and canes at the painting. ''Look! She forgot her chemise!'' was heard over and over again. The critics were no kinder. ''Of all the undressed women at the Salon this year, the most interesting is Madame Gautreau . . . because of the indecency of her dress that looks like it is about to fall off,'' wrote a critic for L'Artist.

Gautreau achieved her affected, highly artificial look with hennaed hair, heavily penciled brows, rouged ears and powdered skin. She was rumored to mix her powder with mauve tint and to ingest arsenic wafers to make her skin more translucent, giving it even more of a bluish-purple tint. One critic of ''Madame X'' referred to the subject's ''cadaverish'' color. A friend of Sargent's commented, ''She looks decomposed.''

In this way, the portrait can be read as decadent, as sharing elements with the fin de siècle artistic movement marked by spiritual and sexual ambivalence. ''Madame X'' is ''almost a parody of woman,'' said Ms. Ribeiro of the Courtauld. ''The small waist, that pneumatic bosom. And the face with its strong profile. It's a quasi-masculine face.''

A few of Sargent's sketches suggest a reason. An unidentified graphite drawing in a Sargent sketchbook at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Mass., has long been assumed by scholars to be Gautreau. It appears on the recto of a page containing a drawing that is identified as Gautreau. But a slight heaviness in the jaw line, the larger proportions at the base of the nose, the hint of a mustache on the upper lip and wisps of short cropped hair on the forehead suggest that the drawing is of Albert de Belleroche, an aspiring artist whom Sargent was sketching and painting at the same time he was sketching and painting Gautreau. ''The resemblance between Virginie Gautreau and Albert is so striking that I am sure Sargent used the two as interchangeable models,'' said the art historian Dorothy Moss, who wrote about the subject in Burlington Magazine.

Belleroche, who was 18 to Sargent's 26 when they met in 1882, was a student of Sargent's teacher, Carolus-Duran. Belleroche was extraordinarily handsome, with a long, sinewy neck, a slim figure and delicately carved features. Sargent and Belleroche became instant friends and developed a ''romantic friendship,'' one of those deeply emotional but often chaste unions that were common in the 19th century but have been lost in our sex-saturated age. Sargent called Belleroche ''baby'' and wrote him teasing, affectionate letters when they were apart. He made four oil portraits of Belleroche, one of which hung in Sargent's London dining room. The two men remained lifelong friends. Belleroche went on to marry and have a family. Sargent stayed single, and little is known of his private life.

Belleroche told his son that he had sat for Sargent in between Madame Gautreau's sittings and that Sargent had made more preliminary sketches of him and Gautreau than he did of any other sitters. Scholars have long been baffled by the eerie similarity in pose and facial features between a pen-and-ink drawing of Belleroche at the Yale Art Gallery and Sargent's oil sketch, ''Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast,'' at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

That Sargent might have seen a man he had a crush on in the beautiful woman he was painting goes far to explain the androgynous elements and erotic charge of ''Madame X.'' The painting is the most frankly sensual of all his portraits, including his only female nude, ''Study From Life, 1891,'' at the Art Institute of Chicago.

''Madame X'' doesn't look much like the real Virginie Gautreau, as at least one critic noted when the painting was first exhibited. In the only known adult photograph of her, which appears to be a study for a painting by the French artist Lucie Chatillon, she looks softer and rounder than the woman in Sargent's portrait. Indeed, many aspects of her profile, particularly the curve of the lips and the angle of the head, more closely resemble Sargent's images of Belleroche.

Nevertheless, the picture is so alive it looks as if the subject is about to step from the canvas and walk across the room. That is the genius of the painting and why it continues to dazzle. As Sargent wrote in 1916 to Edward Robinson, then head of the Metropolitan Museum, which was about to acquire ''Madame X'': ''I suppose it is the best thing I have done.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 2, Page 30 of the National edition with the headline: ART/ARCHITECTURE; Sargent's Muses: Was Madame X Actually a Mister?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT