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She’s back.
After two years of traveling, “Madame X” — the iconic 1884 portrait by John Singer Sargent — has returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it’s the star of a new exhibit ,”Sargent and Paris,” which runs through Aug. 3.
The painting of a striking young woman in an alluring black dress has long been one of the Met’s biggest attractions.
“People get upset when it’s not on view,” said Stephanie L. Herdrich, curator of American painting and drawing at the Met. “I’ve even seen people with [Madame X] tattooed on their bodies.”
In its day, the painting wasn’t nearly so highly regarded.
It was branded “immodest,” “indecent” and “vulgar” when it debuted. One critic deemed it “the worst, most ridiculous, and most insulting portrait of the year.” Another called it “simply offensive in its insolent ugliness.” Cartoonists mocked it for months.
The new exhibit examines the scandal surrounding the piece, which Sargent painted when he was 28 after spending a decade in the City of Light.
The madame who posed for him, Virginie Amélie Gautreau (nee Avegno), was a 25-year-old socialite whose reputation was forever changed by associating with Sargent.
Like Sargent, Amélie was American. She hailed from a wealthy French Creole family in New Orleans. After her father died in the Civil War — he was a major in the Confederate Army — her mother took 8-year-old Amélie to Paris, in hopes of finding her a rich husband.
With her distinctive looks and bold fashion sense, she became the toast of Paris. At 19, Amélie married Pierre Gautreau, a wealthy businessman 20 years her senior, and had a daughter, but that didn’t stop her exhibitionism.
“She was a professional beauty … what we would call an influencer today,” Herdrich said. “She wore glamorous, often low-cut dresses, dyed her hair, rouged her ears.”
The newspapers — in France and the US — reported where she shopped, where she got her hair done and how she achieved her artificial, lavender-tinged pallor. She attended parties and dinners accompanied by men who were not her husband, which set tongues wagging.
The only thing Amélie needed to cement her role as the most celebrated woman in France was a portrait, a really sensational one.
Sargent was a rising star in the art world. He had arrived in Paris in 1874, and attracted attention for his captivating portraits. In 1881, he painted one of Amélie’s rumored lovers, the gynecologist and notorious ladies’ man Samuel Jean de Pozzi, in a louche scarlet silk robe.
He and Amélie began planning in 1882, going through her wardrobe and picking out a form-fitting, strapless black dress with a deep sweetheart neckline. She would wear no jewelry, save for her wedding band and a diamond crescent in her hair, an allusion to Diana, goddess of the hunt.
Sargent labored over the portrait. “He had the feeling that he needed to outdo himself,” Herdrich said.
He had hoped to finish it in time for the 1883 Paris Salon — the town’s biggest art event — but it wasn’t ready.
Amélie quickly grew bored of the whole process. “I am struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Mme. G,” Sargent complained to a friend.
When he was finished in 1884, Amélie dubbed it “a masterpiece.” Sargent submitted it to the 1884 Salon with the title “Madame ***” — though everyone in Paris knew the subject’s identity.
All of Paris went to the opening, and they were aghast. “But she’s not wearing a chemise [undergarment],” they shouted amid boos and jeers. Most shocking was that Amélie had posed with her shoulder strap falling off. Nevermind that the Salon boasted plenty of nudes: Those were all historical paintings, or nymphs and other fantastical creatures.
Later that evening, Amélie’s mother stormed into Sargent’s studio and demanded that Sargent remove the painting from the Salon or her humiliated daughter would “die of despair.” Sargent defended the work, saying he had painted her “exactly as she was dressed.” But when the Salon was over, he installed the unsold portrait in his studio and repainted the strap upright. (That’s how it’s remained.)
Afterward, Sargent had trouble getting commissions. “Women are afraid of him lest he should make them too eccentric looking,” wrote his friend Vernon Lee. He moved to London, and his portraits there — and in the U.S. — helped restore his reputation. Still, he would not show “Madame ***” for another 20 years.
Gautreau recovered and was back out on the town weeks later.
“She almost embraced the controversy,” Herdrich said.
She went on to pose for more artists, separate from her husband and, eventually be consumed by her own vanity.
According to the book “Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X” by Deborah David, a 50-something Amélie’s had all the mirrors in her home removed after overhearing a woman say that her “physical splendor had totally disappeared.” She stopped leaving the house and died in 1915 at the age of 56.
The next year, Sargent sold her portrait to The Met, asking the museum to retitle it “Madame X.”
“I suppose it’s the best thing I’ve done,” he later wrote.
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