How to Look at John
Singer Sargent & Ansel Adams
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The famous society portraitist is actually a
master of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. In addition, he carries on the
Anglo-American portrait tradition.
The veritable imprecision of his landscapes
and city pictures resolves at a distance into a solidity that may be read back
at close hand for its brushwork, and the rest. He follows a line from
Rembrandt, not Vermeer. So you may have the distinguishing point from Homer.
The narrow-minded prejudice that would not
see in American pictures anything at all is mistaken.
Stieglitz found a perspective that would
move the world, like a lever. To this Adams applies a countinghouse discretion
in his chiaroscuro, and a thirst for clarity. So he places the camera
correctly, dissolves obstacles by burning and dodging with a painter’s
hand, and it emerges, the picture, with a definitive and pristine expression.
The obliging Calder mobiles in the
reflecting pool at the County Museum don’t dance like the great George
Rickey on the plaza, they recombine into fresh pictures, or quiver like models.
Sargent and Italy suffered in the Robert O. Anderson Building from not
having enough distance to look at the pictures properly. Ansel Adams at 100
finally brought photography home to the County Museum, which has not understood
it at all, any more than it understands contemporary art. Such attainments were
at one time within its easy grasp, but that was before the remodeling and the
new guards, etc.
What’s left of the Pereira design,
vastly superior to any of the additions, is a tender sight at dusk.