re: #126 Pawn of the Oppressor

Sargent was a force of nature. There’s always been a natural gap between what the public perceives as artistic merit, vs. what artists value, and I will say as an artist that Sargent was a beast.

I think there’s some merit to the argument that Modernism and Post-Modernism has de-valued rendering skill - or rather, allowed people with deficient rendering skill to make a buck from the public (But is that really a crime? that argument could go on forever). It is also a weird world we live in where some of the absolute best artists these days are all working their asses off for movie and game studios, cranking out concept art and comics. If you follow the thread of looking for real, solid, marks-on-paper skill - seeing a scene, drawing it accurately, rendering it in a beautiful way, and catching and communicating some kind of emotion with it - Sargent is up there with the best IMO. His feeling for light and facial expression is just amazing.

This is not to say that I don’t love modern things and only worship the academic, but I do believe the modern attitude that all art is equally valid expression is puffery. Some artists ARE better than others. ;)

From traveling and being in a few art museums with my brother I have noted we have somewhat similar tastes in paintings and art. We’re both “meh” on a lot of the modern art movement, enjoy portrait work to a degree (and with a preference for older art before photography appeared to allow portrait art to go much more impressionist. And Sargent by time period bucked this trend to a certain degree.) And both like landscapes/seascapes from the period where the artists were going past clear and pin-point into being a bit more impressionist.

Though I also took a few pictures of seascapes by 17th century Dutch masters yesterday since they seemed to blend the two really well. Might simply be that the style is “right” as compared to the work being done by New England artists in the early 1800s.

There was an in-joke while going through a museum in Gloucester on whether we’d be willing to hang a given portrait in our living room. Since we’d both seen Sargent’s “Gassed” in London I mentioned it and said that one would need a bigger living room in order to display that one.

en.wikipedia.org
(For those who want to skip the link the painting is roughly 20’ x 8’ in size. And depicts a bunch of WW1 soldiers who have been blinded by a gas attack being led back to a dressing stations. NOT a subject one normally displays in one’s living room.)