Strapless

Table of Contents

 

 

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. New York

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Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin
a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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First trade paperback edition 2004

Copyright © 2003 by Deborah Davis

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not
be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

A list of credits and other information for the color
reproductions can be found at the back of the book.

 

 

Davis, Deborah, date.
Strapless : John Singer Sargent and the fall of
Madame X/Deborah Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-440-62818-4

 

 

T
he story of this book, like that of the painting
Madame X,
begins with a stunning black dress. Desperate for something new to wear to a Hollywood awards ceremony, I asked the designer Nino Cerruti if I could borrow one of his creations. His staff came up with a black evening gown with a revealing bodice, a discreet train, and slender metal shoulder straps that looked jeweled in the light. The instant I put it on, my posture changed, almost as if I were assuming a pose. The dress reminded me of something, and I soon realized that it was John Singer Sargent’s painting
Madame X,
famous for its depiction of a voluptuous, pale-skinned woman wearing a very similar black gown. I knew the image, but I knew nothing about the story behind it.

Curiosity prompted me to read about the portrait.
Madame X,
I discovered, is more than an artful depiction of a nineteenth-century woman. It is a record of a brilliant and misunderstood artist’s collaboration with his extraordinary model. Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the striking French Creole woman who posed for the painting, was not conventionally attractive. Yet even with her unusual pallor and her exaggerated features, she was a celebrated beauty: Paris’s hottest “it girl.” Sargent, an ambitious young artist at the time he painted her, was never considered a passionate or romantic man, but clearly he was obsessed with his model when he portrayed her with one strap of her chic black dress falling suggestively off her shoulder. Surprisingly, it was that fallen strap that caused a huge scandal in Paris when the painting made its debut in 1884.

These contradictions convinced me that there was a remarkable story behind this famous canvas, and questions begging to be explored. Who was Gautreau, and how did she become famous? Why was Sargent infatuated with her? Did he want this woman whom he could never possess? Was the painting, with the scandal it generated, the deliberate machination of a sexually conflicted man?

I set out to find the answers to these questions—a potentially frustrating project, given that
Madame X
was painted more than a hundred years ago and that I had a great appreciation for, but no formal schooling in, art history. In New Orleans, where Gautreau was born, I met her descendants, the Avegnos and the Parlanges, and saw firsthand how her legend has been maintained by family and fans, some of whom are almost cultish in their devotion. In Brittany, I found that the physical world that Gautreau and Sargent inhabited is still very much alive. At Les Chênes, the estate where
Madame X
was painted, I touched the antique oak banister that seemed to hold traces of the artist and his model, and stood in the drawing room that once echoed with the sounds of Gautreau’s piano, her favorite possession. I persuaded a city official to take me to Gautreau’s grave, where I saw her cracked headstone, which until only shortly before lay buried beneath inches of dirt. In Paris, I found the residences Gautreau and Sargent occupied, ate at restaurants where they dined, and combed the city for vestiges of their everyday lives.

There were no easy answers to my questions.
Madame X
was aptly titled, for Gautreau had become a sphinx: a woman who today no longer had a name, let alone a biography. Sargent, while the subject of hundreds of books and articles, was equally enigmatic when it came to his personal life. I probed my way deeper into the inner sanctums of the art world, where, in the back rooms and basements of museums and galleries, I questioned experts who knew everything about Sargent’s work. They were helpful, but they knew only a handful of “facts” about Gautreau, most of them, it turned out, untrue. It was not until I started digging through old newspapers, legal documents, and forgotten memoirs and memorabilia scattered on two continents that the story behind the painting slowly emerged. An item in a nineteenth-century gossip column linked Sargent to Gautreau years before the artist started painting her portrait. A musty journal from the 1870s inadvertently exposed Gautreau’s best-kept beauty secret. A calling card buried in an archive commemorated her scheduled teatime visit with a married man. Every discovery added detail, dimension, even drama, to the story.

With these facts came revelations. One memorable experience occurred at Adelson Galleries in New York City, where, in the company of esteemed Sargent experts, I identified the author of a letter they had purchased at auction. The letter was signed “Amélie Gautreau,” but they did not know who that was. I shared with them a thrilling discovery I had made in various libraries in Paris: All her life, Gautreau called herself not Virginie but Amélie, her middle name.

The content of the letter was even more significant. Written by Gautreau and Sargent, on opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, and addressed to a friend of both, this document revealed for the first time Gautreau’s true feelings about her portrait. She called it a masterpiece—evidence against the traditional assumption that Gautreau despised the painting.

Sargent and Gautreau were not the only characters in this behind-the-canvas tale of art, celebrity, infatuation, and betrayal. They were surrounded by individuals with stories as vivid and compelling as their own: Dr. Samuel Pozzi, a dashing and sexually adventurous gynecologist who was reputed to be Gautreau’s lover; Judith Gautier, an unashamed art groupie, and one of Sargent’s subjects and crushes; and Albert de Belleroche, a young and flirtatious artist who may have been the love of Sargent’s life. More than just an image,
Madame X
is a window into a rich and provocative world; it allows us to experience directly the brilliance, the decadence, the spectacle of Belle Époque Paris.

Strapless
is the anatomy of a masterpiece, revealing the often surprising, always vivid drama of Sargent, Gautreau, and the painting that made them immortal. Every painting, even one that becomes a masterpiece, starts with its subject. The legendary “Madame X” entered the world as Virginie Amélie Avegno, and her story began in a setting as decadent and brilliant as the Paris she would later rule: New Orleans at the height of its antebellum splendor.

E
ighteen fifty-seven was a good year for Anatole Avegno and a great year for New Orleans. Early that year, a group of enterprising locals had decided to revive and reinvent the age-old custom of Mardi Gras. The tradition had been imported to Louisiana earlier in the century by homesick French settlers who staged parades to remind themselves of the festivities they had enjoyed in their native land. During the three days preceding Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, masked men would march in fantastic costumes and throw candy and confetti to the happy crowds who came to watch their antics. It was all very playful and innocent—until the spectators started throwing things back. At first, the hecklers tossed flour, so that the streets looked as if they had been hit by a snowstorm. When flour became expensive, they used dust and mud. Eventually, a few reckless and mean-spirited sorts spoiled the festivities by tossing lime and bricks, injuring innocent people. Mardi Gras deteriorated into such a wild and dangerous event that decent citizens stayed home, closed their shutters and locked their doors; a writer for the
Daily Crescent
in 1849 admitted that he hoped to “have seen the last of Mardi Gras.”

In early 1857, Avegno and some of his friends met secretly to plan an event that would, they hoped, bring the citizens of New Orleans back into the streets for Mardi Gras. They founded the city’s first mystic order, a men’s club dedicated to the celebration. Calling themselves the “Krewe of Comus,” the men dressed in elaborate costumes and, on February 24, staged a surprise parade and a tableau entitled “The Demon Actors in Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
” They marched through the streets late into the night, carrying torches and playing music, arriving eventually at the Gaiety theater. There they entertained the elite of Louisiana at a lavish costume ball that attracted the city’s most beautiful young women. The event was a great success; one participant insisted that it had been better than festivities in Paris. The Krewe of Comus resolved to make their version of Mardi Gras an annual event, thereby launching the spectacular Carnival that is the heart and soul of New Orleans today.

“The city care forgot,” New Orleans in the nineteenth century was considered by many the best place in America to have a good time. It was the counterpart of Paris, “the most glamorous and the most decadent city” in the United States, the first city in the rough and tough New World to have its own opera season, the number-one destination for business travelers, European tourists, gamblers, and grifters. There were two renowned hotels in town to accommodate visitors, the St. Charles and the St. Louis, immense pleasure palaces built for two distinct segments of the community. The St. Charles attracted travelers and local men and women who thought of themselves as Americans. They spoke English and distanced themselves from the Old World. The European-style St. Louis, spanning an entire block in the Vieux Carré, or Old Quarter, was the opulent center of Creole society.

French Creoles, among them Anatole Avegno, were direct descendants of French settlers who immigrated to Louisiana. Proud of their heritage and determined to maintain their French identity despite their American birth, they lived in a tightly knit community and refused to speak English.

Both the St. Charles and the St. Louis had impressive restaurants with book-length menus. They hosted numerous fancy-dress and costume balls—so many that the social season, at its height during the winter, left participants exhausted the rest of the year. Until the mid-1860s, the hotels’ vast rotundas also housed daily slave auctions.