Yet his absorption in art remained active and constant. In the late 1860s and through the 1870s, while moving between London, Paris and Rome, he wrote criticism for American publications. The initial reviews were those of a precocious, attention-hungry beginner: too many words, too much personality, too much hyperbole and too much look-at-me meanness. And the opinions could be off-base. His trashings of Impressionism and of James McNeill Whistler say more about his own convention-bound self than they do about the art. (Later, smarter, he rethought his take on both; he and Whistler became friends.)
More constructively, he was developing an instrumentalist approach to art and images that he could apply to his writing of narrative prose. He saw painted images not as fixed, by-the-book things, more and less well made, but as texts to be read, metaphorically, emotionally, historically. In an 1877 art review he wrote: “To be interesting, it seems to me that a picture should have some relation to life as well as to painting.†Eight years later, he added that far from being static, art “lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.†These words appeared in an essay called “The Art of Fiction.â€
And if the idea of the shapeable, nuance-intensive shadow-and-light image â€" the mysterious Aspern papers, the golden bowl, the elusive figure in the Persian carpet â€" was central to James’s fiction, so were the lives of artists and writers he knew. The Morgan show introduces us to some of them. La Farge, eight years older than James, and both mentor and friend, is one. Lastingly grateful for his influence, James incorporated facets of his personality into the young sculptor who gives the early novel “Roderick Hudson†its name.
In some cases, the art world supplied James with the germ of ready-made plot. From his Newport days, he knew Francis Boott, an amateur composer and widower, and his adult artist-daughter Elizabeth, or Lizzie. Wealthy cosmopolites, the Bootts spent most of their time in Italy â€" James stayed with them there â€" and were inseparable until the appearance of the American painter Frank Duveneck, who became Lizzie’s art teacher and, eventually, to the distress of Francis, her husband.
Variations on this story form the basis of other James novels â€" “Washington Square,†for example â€" in which an interrupted father-daughter bonding plays a crucial role. In these books, James functions as an omniscient designer-director and as an intimate portraitist, blocking out complex compositions with epic precision and pushing figures forward for expressively pitiless close-ups. The Morgan show similarly animates the lives of James’s models.
In an 1860s studio photograph, a still-young father and daughter gaze at each other like a newly betrothed couple. From the early 1880s comes a still life by Lizzie Boott, possibly done under Duveneck’s eye, and one by Duveneck himself: a flattering likeness of Francis Boott as a Titianesque grandee. In a group photograph taken after the Boott-Duveneck marriage in 1886, Lizzie hovers consolingly over her father, while her husband stands, a defiant bantam, in the background. The presence in the Morgan gallery of a bronze cast of the effigy made by Duveneck for Lizzie’s tomb â€" she died, suddenly, in 1888 â€" brings the story, told entirely through images, to a close.
Despite his deep aesthetic investment in these people, James never warmed up to the “terribly earthy and unlicked†Duveneck. He was far more comfortable with another young painter, the European-born John Singer Sargent, who, when they met in Paris in 1884, was already what James later became: a long-term expatriate who maintained Yankee roots. There were other similarities too. Both men took as their subjects the social and economic elite of their Gilded Age day. And both were gay.
For decades, biographers tiptoed around the question of their sexuality. The Morgan show addresses it in James’s case with what might be called straightforward discretion, by introducing Hendrik Christian Andersen, a young sculptor for whom the 56-year-old James fell hard. Surviving letters from James to Andersen can get pretty steamy, though those reproduced in the show focus mostly on career advice. (The catalog is far more forthcoming.)
The bond between James and Sargent seems to have been less fraught. James applauded Sargent in print; Sargent returned the favor in paint. In 1913, for the writer’s 70th birthday, a group of friends commissioned Sargent to paint his portrait. The resulting work, on loan from the National Portrait Gallery in London, is at the Morgan. And it’s both very alive, and an artifact.
James’s corpulent face, with its still-sensuous lips and coolly â€" wearily? regretfully? arrogantly? â€" appraising eyes, radiates a modern ambiguity. At the same time, his monumental bulk, starched collar, gold watch chain and jeweled papal ring present him as a patrician remnant of an overblown age that World War I would soon do its best to deflate.
He loved the portrait â€" “Sargent at his very best, and poor old H. J. not at his worst,†he wrote â€" but one viewer hated it. When the picture went on display at the Royal Academy of Art, a militant suffragist named Mary Wood attacked it with a meat cleaver, gashing it three times while shouting “Votes for Women!†Hers was one of a number of art sabotages in London at the time, by activists in the women’s movement who saw in certain images and institutions â€" in the reactionary Royal Academy; in James the cultural pooh-bah â€" evidence of oppressive male authority.
James was shaken by the attack, writing to a friend about “the vicious hag†who “got at me thrice over before the tomahawk was stayed. I naturally feel very scalped and disfigured.†He was relieved to learn that the gashes could be mended. It was probably beyond him, though, to appreciate other, more abstract but interesting things Mary Wood had done. In reading his portrait as a political metaphor, she had, indeed, connected it directly to life. And she had spoken what are surely among the least silly words the picture will ever hear.
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