Friday, April 04, 2008

An absence of presence ...

... Debbie and I recently visited the Cecilia Beaux Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Beaux was very a good painter and a very good portraitist as the show amply demonstrates. But both Debbie and I felt there was something missing. I think it was evident in one detail of the show, where a tiny reproduction of a painting Sargent did of one of Beaux's subjects sparkles more than anything else on the gallery walls. Beaux captures her subjects so well in large measure because she was so like them. Unfortunately, that also means she lacked a certain detachment from them - something Sargent seems to have had in abundance. So one really does enter Beaux's Mainline Philadelphia milieu - and feels as ill-at-ease there as one probably would in reality. One thing that struck me again and again was the look in her subjects' eyes. Most of them seemed lonely and afraid in a world where they had it made. I'm sure they laughed from time to time, but I wonder if any of them ever felt joy. Their world - and Beaux's - was simply too earnest to sparkle much. The one painting that does sparkle - New England Woman - is probably the best in the show. What makes it so good is the uncharacteristic (for Beaux) dazzle of the light on white contrasted with the all-too-characteristic melancholy look of the sitter.

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