PORTRAITS OF AN ARTIST JOHN SINGER SARGENT EXHIBITION MIXES HIS SIGNATURE WORK WITH LESSER-KNOWN MURALS AND LANDSCAPES.

Byline: Linda Hutchinson Staff Writer

Like an actor who gets typecast, painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) often has been placed in the artistic sorting bin under ``portrait painter.''

Nearly synonymous with the very word ``portraiture,'' the association is actually made for good reason. His iconoclastic ``Madame X'' (1884), a dramatic, provocative portrait (labeled ``eccentric and erotic'' at the time) emerged as the first in a series of paintings where Sargent excelled - and subsequently where he earned his stripes - as a painter.

Over the years, he painted such noted figures as author Robert Louis Stevenson and, in 1903, the official White House portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt.

But portraiture wasn't all Sargent was capable of, and by the late 1890s he started to turn his attention to murals and landscapes.

``Sargent in Italy,'' a display of more than 75 oil and watercolor paintings by Sargent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, shows this lesser-seen side of the artist, who was born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents. While Sargent is considered an American painter, he spent many of his formative years in Italy and much of his life in Europe.

``The exhibition is really an exploration of what Italy meant to him on all sorts of levels and how it continued to inspire his brush and fill his imagination,'' says Richard Ormond, grand nephew of Sargent and curator of the show along with LACMA chief curator of American art Bruce Robertson and Elaine Kilmurray. ``And there are pictures (in the exhibit) that are very little known, so we have, I think, opened up a new perspective on the artist.''

LACMA's Robertson agreed that this particular cross-section of Sargent's works is a ``chance to see him, sort of, off duty.''

``Those who visit the show will learn that Sargent could paint anything,'' says Robertson. `(Visitors) will learn in this show that Sargent could invest - in the least bit of rock, or in a fragment of a building - the same kinds of personality or interest as a portrait. He is the most amazingly technically sophisticated artist of his generation.''

While many think of Monet as a great genius of light and color and Degas as the painter most able to capture human activity and form, ``Sargent actually does both, and he did just as well. ... People will come away stunned at the bravura lusciousness of Sargent, which comes out in him in Italy, because Italy is a country that's all about the beauty of physical sensation,'' says Robertson.

It is a feeling that Robertson believes Southern Californians can relate to.

``There's a real and direct connection between the way we experience Southern California,'' because we also live in an environment of sun, warmth and abundant vegetation, he says.

One of more difficult tasks was arranging the works. The first section of the gallery displays Sargent's paintings from his first professional trip to Italy in 1878. He stayed until 1882. The palette of these paintings is muted and dark. His well-known ``Head of a Capri Girl'' and ``A Capriote'' are among the works. Other paintings reveal an interest in the street life of Venice.

The center section of the gallery is devoted to selected texts and textile displays. It also holds several environmental paintings as well as the experimental ``Alpine Series,'' in which Sargent pairs figures in Asian costume with a Northern Italian mountain setting. This section, says Robertson, ``is to prepare people for the next section that literally flows downhill from the Alps, where Sargent would begin his visit to Italy.''

Paintings depict scenes from the Italian Alps and make their way, canvas by canvas, to the streets of Venice and alluring gardens. These are paintings from his second visit in 1897, after the acclaim, when Sargent was firmly established as an artist.

``When he comes back (after a span of 15 or more years), his art was completely different,'' says Robertson. ``It was color-saturated, more full of light.''

Throughout this time, Sargent continued to do portraits. The following year he returned to Venice, where he painted Mrs. Ralph Curtis, the wife of a wealthy cousin. It is the only full-length formal portrait Sargent painted in Italy.

A final room displays a number of portraits that reflect Sargent's own inner circle: paintings done of friends and fellow painters, and portraits painted as gifts to people close to him. And while in the preceding rooms we see paintings that feature common people from the streets of Venice or marble cutters laboring in the mountain quarries, these portraits reveal the upper-middle-class strata in which Sargent himself navigated.

After being born in Italy, growing up in several points around Europe including Italy, France and Germany, an art education in Paris and not stepping a foot in America until he was 22 and living out his adult life in England, how can Sargent be categorized as an American painter?

``Because he considered himself an American artist,'' says Robertson, who described Sargent as a man of many continents.

Sargent was, after all, born to expatriate American parents in 1856, claimed American citizenship in 1878, and made frequent visits to the United States throughout his life.

``We often think of American artists as plain and simple, and direct. But Americans never give themselves enough credit,'' says Robertson. ``A hundred years after the birth of the United States, someone like Sargent is a leader, or a vivid exponent, of the point at which American culture comes of age.''

With an exhibition of Ansel Adams photography also at the museum, Robertson says there is an interesting chance to see how photos and paintings juxtapose, and he pointed out that from the moment Sargent started painting to the moment Ansel Adams stopped photographing, there is a span of roughly 100 years.

``In a funny kind of way, Ansel Adams is the romantic and Sargent is the realist,'' says Robertson. ``While these Italy paintings may show the private side of Sargent, he focuses on things that are close.''

Sargent's up-close perspective is in contrast to Adams' all-encompassing, more romantic view. But Sargent certainly had an unapologetic eye for beauty.

``Sargent was a very private man,'' says Ormond. The artist would have never explicitly verbalized his thoughts on beauty. But he certainly conveys it in every unapologetic stroke of the brush on the canvas.

``He was, above all, a visual artist. He was trained to paint what he saw, and he makes the natural world real and palpable, infusing it with his own passion and sensibility,'' says Ormond.

``(Sargent) once said that no one credited him with 'insides.' Well, there is plenty of 'inside' and imagination in his art: It is rooted in what is visible, real and tangible.''

SARGENT IN ITALY

What: The West Coast's first comprehensive exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent.

Where: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through May 11.

Tickets: Adults $10 to $12; children under 17 free. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) ``MRS. RALPH CURTIS,'' 1898

(2 -- color) ``SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO''

(3 -- 4 -- color) ABOVE: ``PADRE SEBASTIANO,'' 1904-1906; AT LEFT: ``A STREET IN VENICE''

(5) ``VILLA DI MARLIA, LUCCA''