Sargent and Fashion review – tragicomic travesty is a frock horror

Tate Britain, London
Sargent’s gloriously rich and subtle paintings can’t be reduced to dreary facts about hats, dresses and opera gowns. Sadly, that’s just what’s happened

This is a horrible exhibition. The American painter John Singer Sargent is a great artist of identity, fascinated with the nature of social being. He paints people not in isolation but as players in a social world in a way that is startling, modern and so truthful it hurts. Trained in 19th-century Paris, he brought brushwork tinted by Manet and Monet to portraying late Victorian and Edwardian British society, and was especially drawn to those who didn’t fit the old order – such as the young Jewish women joyously proclaiming their individuality in Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer. But was he, above all, a painter of fashion, as this show claims? No way – what on earth are they talking about?

This daring artist of modern life is turned into a stuffed shirt by a show that puts the dress before the face, the hat before the head and the crinoline before the soul in an obsessive, myopic argument. A painter with much to say to us becomes, here, a relic with no relevance.