John Singer Sargent

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Although Sargent was not a modernist, the large touring exhibition catalogued here emphasizes that his sheer detachment from his subjects, dazzling surface effects and cosmopolitan themes influenced later generations of artists. Born in Florence to nomadic American parents who were ever in search of a better health spa, he in his turn landed in Paris, then London. An exile among exiles, he was temperamentally suited for a role he dislikedportrait artist. This sumptuously illustrated collection includes essays that are as psychologically subtle as Sargent's own portraits. They explore his ``dab-and-spot'' experiments with impressionism, his surprisingly dark vision of Venice, his seldom-seen pencil and charcoal drawings and virtuoso watercolors. One piece, ``Portrait of the Artist As Dorian Gray,'' argues that Sargent shared with Oscar Wilde and Henry James the belief in art as an activity for asserting one's personality and gaining mastery over experience. (October)

Library Journal

A lavishly illustrated group of scholarly essays published by the Whitney Museum as the catalog of the retrospective of this 19th-century Euro-American society painter. Hills contributes three fine studies on Sargent's style and sensibility, the late subject pictures, and draftsmanship. Other specialists cover Sargent in Venice, in Paris and London, his Impressionism, the late portraits, and the watercolors. Stanley Olson's contribution on Sargent's family is the most outstanding. Olson remarks that at his birth the artist received ``his mother's well-thumbed Baedeker , and not a silver spoon, for he began his life as he ended itas a tourist.'' Highly recommended as a complement to Carter Ratcliff's John Singer Sargent (Abbeville Pr., 1982). Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Art Department, Goucher College, Towson, Md.