Art: Tourist First Class

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Auguste Rodin called John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) the "Van Dyck of our times." Sargent was the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid obsessive court to both. He could make old money look dashing and paint the newest cotton-reel magnate as though he were descended from Bayard. Sixty years after his death, his "paughtraits" (as Sargent, who kept swearing he would give them up but never did, disparagingly called them) provoke unabashed nostalgia. In his Belle Epoque sirens, in the mild, arrogant masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved the lineaments of a world soon to be buried like Pompeii, along with Sargent's own reputation, beneath the ash and rubble of World War I. Of course, he had to be revived. In Reagan's America, you cannot keep a good courtier down. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroiding, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. And the public that liked Upstairs, Downstairs is going to like him -- a thought that may not have been too far from the Whitney Museum's calculations when it planned the retrospective of his work that opened there * earlier this month and will go to the Art Institute of Chicago in February 1987.

A word of caution is needed: Sargent's output was huge -- more than 800 portraits and innumerable sketches of people and places -- but its high points do stand out, and too many are missing here, from El Jaleo, 1882, the flamenco scene that is the masterpiece of his youth, to the Tate Gallery's portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, which, when exhibited in Paris before World War I, sent its public into raptures over ce grand diable de milord anglais. This show says little about its subject that was not put more economically by the 1979 Sargent exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts but is still well worth seeing.

It may provoke a twinge of concern. Does Sargent signal a retreat from the standards the Whitney has battled for -- the commitment to glitz that gave us the 1985 Biennial, the taste for inflated prettiness set forth in its Alex Katz retrospective, the reluctance to edit that made Eric Fischl's show such a letdown? True, Director Tom Armstrong valiantly tries to establish a link by pointing, in a catalog note, to Sargent's "highly expressive manner and his treatment of subject matter and narrative content, all of which are of great interest to contemporary artists." However, Sargent's "manner" was not that of a neoexpressionist but of a virtuoso; his drawing lacks the tenacity of an Eakins, let alone a Cezanne, yet it was drawing of a high order, heartless sometimes, but rarely less than dazzling in its fluency; and there is nothing like it in American art today. Sargent was certainly no modernist, but the fiercely competitive atelier system of figure drawing that formed his style when he studied with Carolus-Duran in Paris also underpinned the high standards of early modernist draftsmanship in Matisse, Picasso or Beckmann. Hence, though his relation to the avant-garde was nil, he is no longer to be dismissed as a flashy bore. There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious sight of an artist's guts on parade.