Strapless (19 page)

There was little else of note in the gallery—a few portraits, some landscapes and religious paintings, by artists whose hopes of fame would not be realized. Yet even if there had been another interesting work there, few would have noticed. Anybody who entered Salle 31 had a single purpose: to see the Sargent—or the Gautreau, as they would have called it, for she was more famous than he.

Midway up one wall, Amélie’s image was almost life-size, and although she faced sideways, looking off to her left, she appeared quite real; she could have been standing in the room. Her hair was arranged in a chignon, with a few tendrils escaping at the nape of her swan neck. The rosy ear and carmine lips were the only spots of color on the canvas. Amélie’s nose was large, as in life, but strangely refined. Her chiseled profile recalled a cameo or an ancient coin. A small, indistinct table supported her right arm. A dark background, devoid of detail, made her flesh look even whiter and made her even more dominant within the frame.

Amélie’s shoulders and arms were firm and sculpted, her bosom high and full under the heart-shaped bodice of her form-fitting gown. A jeweled shoulder strap held the left side of her dress in place, while the other strap had fallen precariously, threatening to release one breast from a plunging décolletage. Amélie’s narrow waist offset the sensual roundness of her bosom and hips. Her sleek and simple gown looks elegant to us today, but its close fit would have suggested to late-nineteenth-century viewers that Amélie was not wearing her petticoat, a crucial piece of underwear that any proper young woman would have worn religiously. Although many society portraits at the time fairly dripped with ostentatious displays of family jewelry, there was little here: a diamond crescent in Amélie’s hair, a subtly glinting wedding ring. There was little in the way of decorative touches to distract from Amélie’s magnificent figure. The lines of her body were so visible, especially in the vicinity of her strapless shoulder, that she might as well have been naked—not nude.

The public’s judgment was loud, quick, and definite. What a horror, people exclaimed. She looked monstrous and decomposed, some said. The painting was indecent. Amélie’s exposed white shoulders and décolletage—without a breast in sight—disgusted them. And that fallen strap! Was it a prelude to, or the aftermath of, sex? The fact that she was looking away from her audience made her appear blithely indifferent to her shocking dishabille and called attention to her shamelessness. Women were particularly vocal in their disapproval, as if to assert their moral superiority and disparage Paris’s famous beauty.

Sargent and Curtis heard the death knell firsthand. Word of the scandal in Salle 31 traveled fast, and the two heard comments of people elsewhere in the Palais. Long before they were even close to Salle 31, many spectators had formed an opinion.

A few artists challenged the mob, calling out compliments—
“superbe”
and
“magnifique”
—and praising Sargent’s style and audacity. But the prevailing response was extreme disapproval, even repugnance. The American visitor previously cited was not swayed by any loyalty for his countryman. “Don’t like it,” he observed beside the entry for
Madame X.

Even in Sargent’s darkest and most insecure moments, he had never imagined a reaction so overwhelmingly negative. Amélie was shocked as well by the reaction to the portrait—perhaps more than Sargent, because while he was somewhat apprehensive about public reaction, she had been so sure of a positive response from her fans. The hecklers attacked artist and subject with equal passion, claiming Sargent was inept and Amélie repulsive.

Madeleine Zillhardt, a friend of Marie Bashkirtseff, was an eyewitness to Amélie’s despair on that terrible day. “As for the model, slumped in a corner,” Zillhardt wrote, “she cried real tears despite her enamel over her offended beauty.” Bashkirtseff commented in her journal that “the beautiful Mme—is horrible in daylight. . . . Chalky paint gives to the shoulders the tone of a corpse.”

The exhibition had found its storm center. A constant uproar emanated that morning from Salle 31, as more and more people rushed to see the painting that was the source of so much derision. After a few hours the crowds began to disperse. Sargent and Curtis left the exhibit to join friends at Ledoyen for the annual Varnishing Day lunch.

At the restaurant they found more crowds, other people who had come from the Salon; a resourceful maître d’ auctioned off tables. Even Carolus-Duran, a longtime Salon celebrity, had to fight his way into the restaurant. The choice tables were outside, and diners determined to see and be seen willingly endured the sun. Diners who were not sheltered by canopies or parasols made themselves hats out of newspapers and napkins—an avalanche,
L’Événement
reported, “of improvised chef’s hats.”

 

 

Sargent and Curtis sat down to Ledoyen’s traditional Vernissage menu of salmon in green sauce, followed by the house specialty,
rosbif à l’anglaise,
roast beef served in the classic English style, with Yorkshire pudding. But one wonders whether Sargent demonstrated his characteristic appetite or joined in the gaiety of the crowd. Impassioned conversations were taking place all around him, as people voiced their opinions about their favorite—and least favorite—Salon paintings. There was high praise for Cormon’s cavemen, Chaplin’s socialites, Bouguereau’s revelers. But for Sargent’s Amélie . . .

Ralph Curtis tried to console his cousin, predicting that the afternoon audiences would be kinder. They returned to the Palais after lunch, and Sargent did hear more noncommittal observations, such as “Strangely amazing!” from people who stood before the painting. But he also saw gentlemen idling near the portrait, waiting for young women to enter so they could watch the flush of embarrassment on their innocent faces when they saw the shocking image. Evidently, if
Madame X
was going to be a success, it would be a
succès de scandale,
like Manet’s
Olympia.

Sargent and Curtis left the Palais in the late afternoon, as the Salon was about to close. The artist wanted to pay a call on his friends and patrons the Boits, who, he thought, would be sympathetic to his experiences. Curtis went to Sargent’s studio—not such a wise decision, for soon after, a distraught Amélie and her enraged mother appeared at the door. Amélie was “bathed in tears,” and Marie Virginie sputtered with fury. She had invested far too much in her daughter to have her reputation destroyed with the strokes of a paintbrush. She had to speak to Sargent immediately.

Curtis convinced her that he was alone at the studio and sent them away. But the indomitable Madame Avegno returned a few hours later to confront Sargent, and demanded that he withdraw the portrait from the Salon. “My daughter is ruined and all Paris mocks her,” she told him. “My people will be forced to fight.” Members of the Gautreau family would be expected by custom to initiate a duel if someone directed an insult toward one of their own. At the time, duels were not an uncommon way to resolve disagreements; they were often reported in the press. Marie Virginie’s next words were meant to carry the greatest weight. If Sargent did not remove the painting from the Salon at once, she claimed, her daughter would “die of grief.”

Sargent refused to entertain either accusations or pleas. He had come to dislike Marie Virginie; he had communicated that feeling clearly in an unflattering sketch of her in a letter to a friend. Moreover, he knew that her hatred of the painting was based solely on the negative public reaction that day; previously, she, like her daughter, had expressed nothing but approval of Sargent’s portrait. She had been a witness to much of the protracted process of sketching and painting, and had never spoken a disapproving word.

Now that Amélie faced ridicule, everything had changed. When others condemned the portrait, daughter and mother felt compelled to do the same. Amélie had not expected the negative reaction, and she had to act swiftly and carefully to repair the damage. The easiest solution would be for the painting to disappear.

Sargent had definite ideas about the matter and did not hesitate to express them to Amélie’s mother. When he had painted her daughter, he said, he painted exactly what he saw. “Nothing could be said of the canvas worse than had been said in print of her appearance,” Sargent insisted.
Madame X,
with its subject’s artificial pallor and stylized pose, was an accurate reflection of the real woman. Sargent was intractable, and Marie Virginie left the studio dissatisfied and angry.

Sargent and Curtis stayed up through the night talking. While on the surface Sargent had been unmoved by Madame Avegno’s accusations, he told Curtis, her words had wounded his artistic pride. Further, he told his cousin, he wished he could leave Paris for a while. But flight was possibly unnecessary, Curtis replied. Reviews would appear in the newspapers the next day, and there was still hope that his painting had a future.

On Thursday, May 1, Sargent woke up to his first bad review. The critic for
L’Événement
wasted no time in lambasting
Madame X
: “Mr. Sargent made a mistake if he thinks he expressed the shattering beauty of his model. . . . Even recognizing certain qualities that the painting has, we are shocked by the spineless expression and the vulgar character of the figure.” Criticisms like “spineless” and “vulgar” were distressing to Sargent, who was accustomed to hearing words like “exquisite” and “brilliant” describe his work.

Further bad reviews followed. Louis de Fourcaud, who before the Salon had written favorably about Sargent in
Le Gaulois,
now said that he could fill ten pages with the angry epithets of viewers in front of the painting. “Detestable!” “Boring!” “Monstrous!” were just a few examples he offered. Sargent’s situation was instantly less secure. While his painterly talents—his masterly use of light, his virtuoso brushstrokes—had always been singled out for praise, critics now turned on him. Henri Houssaye, who had been enthusiastic about Sargent’s work in the past, complained that
Madame X
lacked technique. He accused the artist of making fundamental mistakes that would have been unacceptable if committed by a student, let alone a prizewinning professional. “The profile is pointed,” Houssaye wrote, “the eye microscopic, the mouth imperceptible, the color pallid, the neck sinewy, the right arm lacks articulation, the hand is deboned. The décolletage of the bodice doesn’t make contact with the bust—it seems to flee any contact with the flesh.”
Art Amateur
’s critic expressed a similar contempt for Sargent’s skills as an artist: “This portrait is simply offensive in its insolent ugliness and defiance of every rule of art. It is impossible to believe that it would ever have been accepted by the jury of admission had the artist’s previous successes not made him independent of their examination.”

The most surprising and most damaging criticism reprimanded Sargent for failing to create a flattering portrait of his subject. Most reviewers agreed that there was a great discrepancy between Amélie’s real-life beauty and the unattractive way she came across on canvas, although Sargent maintained that he had painted exactly what he saw. A portrait that was perceived as uncomplimentary was the kiss of death to new business, imperiling an artist’s income as well as his reputation. Why, critics asked, would any prospective client risk looking monstrous or detestable in Sargent’s hands, when portraitists such as Charles Chaplin could guarantee an attractive and pleasing likeness? “[Chaplin] is the painter sought out by pretty women,”
Le Petit Journal de Paris
observed. “We are sorry that we can’t say the same this year about . . . Sargent.” Because he complimented his subjects with his paints, some critics deemed Chaplin, who was ordinary on his best day, the better artist.

One critic identified excessive ambition as the weakness that had led Sargent to such disappointing work. While Claude Phillips did not actually compare
Madame X
with
Olympia
in his review, he implied a parallel between the two paintings. “A
succès de scandale
has been attained by Mr. Sargent’s much-discussed [portrait]. The intention, no doubt, was to produce a work of absolutely novel effect—one calculated to excite, by its chic and daring, the admiration of the ateliers and the astonishment of the public; and in this the painter has probably succeeded beyond his desire.”

In one publication after another, the critics continued with their negative notices. Sargent, surprised and discouraged by the rampant antipathy, considered withdrawing the painting from the Salon. As a first step, he appealed to Bouguereau, one of the elder statesmen of the jury, for permission to remove the portrait so he could retouch it and thereby make it more acceptable to Salon audiences. He wanted to raise the fallen strap, the detail most viewers seemed to have fixated on as the worst offense. But Bouguereau, whose painting of nude Romans frolicking with Bacchus had offended no one, and was indeed earning raves, was outraged by the very suggestion. A Salon entry could not be removed from its wall or altered in any way. He sternly warned Sargent that challenging the rules would have dire consequences; it would compromise the very integrity of the Salon. It simply wasn’t done.
Madame X
would stay where it was, untouched and in full view, until the Salon closed.