Strapless (26 page)

In 1918, during World War I, Britain’s Ministry of Information invited Sargent to visit the front in Boulogne as an official war artist. He was interested in observing the fighting firsthand, and confessed that he hoped to “have the chance of being well-scared.” But Sargent’s enthusiasm was tempered by his need to surround himself with his creature comforts. He traveled to the front with painting supplies, a camp stool, and a full wardrobe, and is rumored to have asked a military official if the war would be suspended on Sundays. Here was a man who had spent most of his life in a world built on proper routines and schedules; war was chaotic, unfamiliar.

And yet his experience at the front brought him to create a memorable war painting. He had seen a group of soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, waiting in line at an infirmary for medical treatment. Back in London, Sargent rendered a nightmarish vision of the young victims in a large canvas entitled
Gassed.
With this painting he defied expectations regarding his ability: he could paint not only the socialite but also the soldier, and both in powerful, revelatory detail.

After the war, Sargent divided his time between London and Boston, where, having completed his
Triumph of Religion
murals for the Boston Public Library, he commenced work on decorative murals for the rotunda of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Though in his late sixties, Sargent insisted on personally handling every detail involving his art, just as he had as a young man. He maintained his own studio, crated his own artwork, and even helped carry it to the street when necessary.

In mid-April 1925, disregarding the advice of concerned friends, Sargent engaged in this kind of physical activity as he prepared mural decorations for transport from London to Boston. On April 15, he died of heart failure; he was sixty-nine. His death, like his life, was peaceful, even comfortable: he was reading Voltaire in bed when he passed away. His memorial service, held at Westminster Abbey and attended by royalty, celebrities, and prominent figures from the artistic community, was an imposing affair, the first service of its magnitude to honor a modern artist.

In the days and weeks after his death, Sargent was paid the highest compliments in eulogies, obituaries, and newspaper and magazine articles summarizing his many accomplishments. He was so well-known that his passing was reported extensively by a variety of publications. “The man, indeed, was a master,” said London’s
Daily Telegraph,
“of whom no unworthy saying or action is recorded.” The
New York Herald Tribune
called him a giant, “a figure in modern art comparable only to the great leaders in the old historic periods.” Personal reminiscences about him filled the newspapers. A story circulated that when an artist friend of Sargent’s died prematurely, leaving a number of unfinished canvases, Sargent quietly completed the works himself, claiming no credit or reward. No one seemed to have anything bad to say about Sargent; in one interview, his manservant, Nicola d’Inverno, who worked for him for twenty years, attending to household and studio duties and posing for nude studies, spoke respectfully of his former employer.

Over the next few years, Sargent’s reputation continued to flourish. Already some three months after his death, 237 of his paintings and drawings were sold at auction for £170,000, an unprecedented sum, representing some $8.28 million today. Unlike portraitist Charles Chaplin, famous in life but unknown or even ridiculed later, or van Gogh, who struggled throughout life and was acclaimed a genius only after death, Sargent attained a constant celebrity. He was fully appreciated during his life and then, at least for a period, after his death.

By the 1930s, after forty years of preeminence in England and America, Sargent was falling out of favor. Many critics and collectors had grown tired of the representational art that had been around since the previous century—especially formal portraiture—and were drawn, instead, to more radical and provocative avant-garde movements. New talents like Picasso were using their art to express the chaotic nature of modern life. Many artists were more interested in painting concepts than people: sometimes their figures were barely recognizable as human. They prided themselves on interpreting reality rather than slavishly reproducing it, and their revolutionary works appealed to art lovers who wanted to be on the cutting edge. Critics who often built their own reputations by identifying and promoting the new and the different, summarily rejected Sargent’s portraits as old-fashioned and irrelevant. Roger Fry, who had praised
Madame X
when it was shown at the Carfax Gallery in 1905, now changed his tune: “That Sargent was taken for an artist will perhaps seem incredible to the rising generation,” he wrote; Sargent was little more than an “upper-class tourist.”

Marginalized by such important commentators, Sargent and his reputation faded; he became a relic of the past. And his friends—all those brilliant creatures—lost their luster over time as well. Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a man at the height of his sexual and intellectual powers when Sargent painted him, enjoyed a long life, but weakened as he got older. His affair with Amélie must have been short-lived: after the early 1880s, there were no blind items about them in the society pages, just rumors that the still-nominally-married playboy maintained a bachelor’s apartment on the Boulevard St.-Germain. While continuing to battle his mother-in-law for his wife’s affections, Pozzi entertained a variety of women and consorted with writers and artists such as Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola.

Searching for excuses to stay away from Paris, Pozzi traveled constantly, attending medical conventions, visiting friends, and shopping for antiquities. An avid collector of coins and antique sculpture, Pozzi was elected president of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in 1888. He entered politics and won a senatorial seat in the Dordogne, the area where he was born. Even with this demanding schedule of work and play, Pozzi found time to write poetry and exchange ample correspondence with Montesquiou, the early feminist writer Augustine Bulteau, and other friends.

In 1896, Pozzi and Thérèse suspended their ongoing marital war long enough to have another child, their third. Jacques Pozzi was a beautiful baby who charmed everyone with his sweet disposition and playfulness. But as he got older, he developed emotional and mental handicaps, perhaps related to his mother’s advanced age at the time of his birth. Because of his unpredictable and sometimes violent behavior, Jacques was institutionalized when still a child.

In 1900, the family moved to a new residence on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. The house featured separate entrances for Pozzi and Thérèse—with Pozzi’s on the right, Thérèse’s on the left—to ensure that they would not encounter each other. Pozzi considered his unhappy marriage and the sad fate of his youngest child the biggest disappointments of his life. Conversely, he had great success with many women and his medical career was a catalogue of accomplishments. While his personal life was deteriorating, Pozzi was considered one of the leading gynecologists, surgeons, and diagnosticians in Paris. He introduced hygienic procedures in the operating room and campaigned for cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing hospitals, at a time when such institutions were filthy and dangerous, and for public services for syphilitic women, who were generally shunned by society. Pozzi held a pioneering belief that the patient’s state of mind was as important as physical well-being, and he decorated the walls of his medical office with original works by contemporary artists to distract patients from their problems and inspire them to think of more pleasant subjects.

Still charismatic in middle age, Pozzi had earned the reputation of “doctor to the stars” because he counted people like Sarah Bernhardt and Alfred Dreyfus among his patients. A 1909 caricature shows him in a tuxedo, standing in the midst of voluptuous opera singers and actresses who call him “Dr. Love.” But Pozzi’s pursuit of sex grew more desperate as he aged. He founded a private club, the Cercle des Amis de la Rose, to promote sexual adventures. This “Circle of the Friends of the Rose,” or “League of the Rose,” counted among its members fin-de-siècle swingers who used their intellectual curiosity as an excuse to explore their wildest sexual fantasies. The circle had very strict rules. Married members had to come without their spouses, so that they would feel free to say and do anything without censure or guilt. Participants would play an orgiastic version of Truth or Dare, describing their fantasies and then acting them out for the group.

The League of the Rose was secretive about its membership and its practices. The use of “Rose” in the club’s name suggested a connection to the Rosicrucian order, a sect that claimed origins in ancient Egypt and that was promoted in nineteenth-century France by, among others, one Joséphin Péladan. Calling himself “Sâr Merodac” (he had already changed his name from Joseph to Joséphin), Péladan hosted artistic and cultural gatherings for order members. In 1892 he sponsored a first Rosicrucian salon for the art world. The Salon de la Rose-Croix exhibited spiritually themed paintings, many of them symbolist works, which rejected realism in favor of myth, dream, and sensation. The artists who participated in the six annual salons were all men: one of the order’s bylaws prevented women from showing their works.

Mystic orders such as the Rosicrucians were popular in the nineteenth century because they introduced elements of drama and ritual into lives that were ordinary in other respects. Yet many of those who joined were more interested in sex than in mysticism. The fact that Pozzi, famous for having been a great lover, had to resort to organizing sexual encounters among aging intellectuals indicates that his erotic heyday was firmly behind him.

Back in 1886, Pozzi had treated fifteen-year-old Marcel Proust, a family friend, to his first dinner at the Ritz, the meeting place for fashionable Parisians. Years later, Proust used Pozzi as the source for the character Dr. Cottard in
Remembrance of Things Past.
Pozzi, whom Proust had seen change from a virile lothario to a man past his prime (and who had politely refused to issue Proust a note to excuse him from military duty), was depicted as a pompous physician who turned up at every dinner party, desperate for attention.

Pozzi’s death was nothing short of sensational. In 1916, he operated on the penis of a man named Maurice Machu. The patient was unhappy with the results of the surgery and believed that Pozzi had made him impotent. He requested a second operation, but Pozzi refused. On the afternoon of June 13, 1918, Machu rushed into Pozzi’s office, shot the doctor, and then turned his gun on himself. Pozzi struggled to stay alive. He managed a few words of advice and encouragement to the doctors who tried to save him on the operating table. He died of his wounds a few hours after being shot, and made the front page of the newspapers.

After his death, Pozzi’s family expressed their ambivalence about him by putting up for auction all his belongings, including Sargent’s portrait of him. At the last minute, however, his son Jean withdrew the painting, and he kept it for the next fifty-one years, until his death. The entrepreneur and art collector Armand Hammer purchased it for his museum in Los Angeles—a fitting resting place for Dr. Love, celebrity physician.

The other Sargent painting in Pozzi’s collection was
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast,
which Sargent had completed while working on
Madame X.
Somehow the painting had passed from Marie Virginie’s possession to Pozzi’s. Did Amélie ask her mother to give it to her lover? Did Pozzi buy it as a souvenir of their affair? This memorial to a young woman at the height of her beauty would have been a magnificent trophy for a man who collected women.

Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased
Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast
at auction after Pozzi’s death. She brought it to Boston, where it now hangs in the Gardner Museum. The museum boasts several other important Sargents, including
El Jaleo.
But it is this valentine to Amélie that adorns the museum’s café menu.

Louise Burckhardt, the subject of
Lady with the Rose
and
Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise,
found the husband she wanted, marrying an Englishman in 1889. Louise died shortly after traveling through Europe with her husband on an extended honeymoon. She had no chance to enjoy the long and happy marriage she had imagined for herself after years of spinsterhood.

Although their relationship had not developed further than a platonic friendship, the story of Louise and Sargent continued even after her death. In the 1920s, her sister Valerie, who had inherited
Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise
from her mother, asked Sargent to remove Louise from the portrait; she thought her sister’s presence ruined the composition. To illustrate her point, Valerie sent him a photograph of the painting that had been altered to show an empty space where Louise had stood. Sargent was adamant about the artistic integrity of his painting. He refused Valerie’s request, telling her that “I cannot consent to do that any more than I would wear my hat in a drawing room or eat peas with a knife.” Today,
Lady with the Rose
hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one painting over from
Madame X.
The unretouched
Mrs. Edward Burckhardt and Her Daughter Louise
hangs in a private collection.

Judith Gautier liked to be surrounded by her portraits. She kept all of them on prominent display, including
A Gust of Wind,
Sargent’s romantic and most flattering vision of her. For years after the deaths of Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, Gautier clung to her role as high priestess of the arts in Paris. She continued to dine out on her association with Wagner and other luminaries, and in 1910 she was the first woman to be elected to the prestigious Académie Goncourt, the board responsible for selecting the winner of the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s highest literary awards.

Gautier, the ultimate fan, ended her life in thrall to the attentions of her own obsessive groupie. Suzanne Meyer-Zundel was a colorless young woman from a wealthy bourgeois Alsatian family. She had only one talent, and it was both very strange and very specific: she had developed a reputation in Paris for modeling exotic flowers out of bread crumbs. During a trip to Brittany in 1904, she met Gautier at Le Pré des Oiseaux; she made it her business to never leave her side after that.