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With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeill Whistler, 1890-1903. - book reviews
Art Journal, Winter, 1996 by Carol Troyen
The wealth of literature that has appeared about James McNeill Whistler in the last few years belies the harsh words that have been hurled at the artist, both in his own time and in the present day. Lucien Pissarro intimated that Whistler was a plagiarist who appropriated his highly touted exhibition schemes from French innovations. George Moore saw him as insufficiently vigorous, and insufficiently French. John Ruskin's accusations, that Whistler's art was ignoble, poorly crafted, and overpriced, are well known. More recently, Whistler has been charged with egomania, moral laxity, and - worst of all - a deficiency of talent that his entire self-publicizing scheme was designed to camouflage. In many ways, the criticisms applied to this admittedly difficult artist stem from his multinational career (and from Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell's enduring characterization of him as the supreme outsider),(1) as well as from the fact that, in the twentieth century as in his own day, "Whistler's fame has rested largely on his notoriety."(2) And because Whistler's work has so often been measured against the achievements of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, he has been dismissed as "an important peripheral figure in advanced French painting."(3) But peripheral, and French, are precisely what Whistler was not, as many of the new studies of his art make clear.
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James McNeill Whistler, the catalogue of the exhibition organized for 1994-95 by the Tare Gallery, the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., meets the issue of Whistler's outsider status head on. The essays in this excellent catalogue examine the three cultures that lay claim to Whistler, and the impact of those cultures on him. The authors - Richard Dorment, Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. (with Charles Brock), Genevieve Lacambre, and Margaret F. MacDonald - maintain a consistent image of Whistler throughout. Declining to be seduced by Whistler the bohemian, Whistler the dandy, Whistler the provocateur, they focus on the figure who, from his youth, is thoroughly absorbed by art, disciplined and omnivorous in his pursuit of artistic knowledge, and serious about its practice, even during his days at West Point. Whistler's student years in France (1855-58) were strongly affected by the mid-century etching revival, and especially by the debate between the vigorous realism espoused by Gustave Courbet and the art-for-art's-sake theories of Theophile Gautier and others. He struggled to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory perspectives, producing The Coast of Brittany (1861, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford) and The White Girl (1862, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) within a year of each other. As Dorment persuasively proposes, during the late 1850s and early 1860s, when Whistler divides his time between France and England, he becomes a conduit between the French avant-garde and British painting. And he becomes a consummate synthesizer, adept at bringing together disparate influences to forge a new style. Thus, in Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864, Tate Gallery, London), French painterly values are married to the British devotion to narration; the Six Projects are the beginnings of Whistler's creative merger of Japonisme, English classicism, and Western perspective, and so on.
From the beginning, Whistler sought the main stage. He aspired to the standards of the Salon and the Royal Academy, exhibiting pictures at each institution before he was thirty. He also learned to use his rejections to his advantage, profiting from The White Girl's "distinction of being utterly misunderstood on both sides of the Channel" (Dorment, p. 15). Yet throughout his career Whistler considered his relationship to the arts establishments of both France and England very carefully. He submitted paintings to the Salon through the 1860s, and from 1881 until his death, and agreed to allow the Musee Luxembourg to buy Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother (1871, Musee d'Orsay, Paris) quite cheaply to insure his presence in the French national collection. His relationship with the Royal Academy broke down over the display of Arrangement in Grey and Black, and he refused to show paintings there after 1872, but during his presidency (1886-88) of the rival Society of British Artists, he worked hard to secure the organization a Royal Charter.
Whistler's debts to Japanese and to French art are frequently described; Dorment's essay in particular makes clear the extent to which Whistler is best understood as a British painter. The National Portrait Exhibitions of the late 1860s were formative experiences for Whistler, inspiring him to recast himself as a portraitist. He moved away from realism, from plein-air naturalism, from the painterly interests of the French avant-garde to a style that was both more British and more original. Dorment credits Whistler with no less than "the revitalization of the grand manner of British painting" (p. 23), and finds the roots of his dashing portrait style and his subtle method of staining and glazing in eighteenth-century painting, particularly that of Thomas Gainsborough. Whistler's use of oil pigment thinned to the consistency of watercolor - which the avowed Francophile Walter Sickert called "the vice of English painting"(4) - enabled him to work quickly and to achieve a tonal harmony and uniform degree of finish that was essential to his aesthetic. The evocative images that resulted were his bid to find a place for himself in the English art world distinct from the Victorian photographs in paint admired by Ruskin. And despite the disaster of the Ruskin trial (1878), after which Whistler repudiated any connection with the British school, he announced his return from fourteen months' exile in Venice with a series of ambitious exhibitions at London's Fine Art Society in which he once again sought the approbation of the British arts establishment. The 1883 display, which Whistler called his Arrangement in Yellow and White, caused a sensation, and forever changed exhibition design in England and elsewhere.
