Whistler's legacy

Today celebrities at vast expense hire armies of consultants, agents, and public relations experts to create their public image--frequently one that has nothing to do with who they really are. In earlier times celebrities like James McNeill Whistler did the job themselves. To some of his contemporaries Whistler was a brilliant spin doctor, and to others, including his great patron Charles Lang Freer, the artist's legendary petulant and idiosyncratic behavior was part of a facade he constructed to hide his true self. Whistler's interest in designing everything, including the frames for his pictures, the colors of the walls on which they hung, and their arrangement in an exhibition, was considered by some to be an outlandish eccentricity, while others regarded it as a manifestation of his desire to create a total work of art. As a result, some reviewers and critics misread or made light of his aesthetic intent and failed to understand his highly cerebral approach to art. Freer understood this when he wrote to a fellow collector in August 1903, one month after Whistler's death: "Still, the world at large may some day see the truth more clearly and perhaps that would be well." As Freer had hoped, the world does now understand Whistler's art more clearly and celebrates him as one of the most innovative artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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One of the several exhibitions organized for the centenary of the artist's death investigates this aspect of Whistler's legacy. Entitled American Attitude: Whistler and His Followers, it was organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it was on view late last year. It may be seen at the Detroit Institute of Arts from March 14 through June 6. The exhibition presents thirteen works by Whistler and fifty by artists who absorbed much of his aesthetic philosophy. The set pieces of the show are two of Whistler's most famous works: Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother of 1871, (commonly known as Whistler's Mother), which rarely travels from its permanent home at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (illustrated below), which is the canvas that ignited the spectacular libel suit between the artist and John Ruskin. Among the artists represented in the show who investigated Whistler's art and aesthetic approach in their own work are John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Hermann Dudley Murphy, Childe Hassam, Alfred Henry Maurer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Robert Henri, Cecilia Beaux, and Julian Alden Weir.

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Some of these artists, Chase among them, knew Whistler quite well (although their friendship ended acrimoniously), while others were strong admirers. Chase and Whistler painted portraits of each other, and Chase was the leading advocate of Whistler's art in this country. In 1880 several American artists who were members of the group known as the Duveneck Boys (after Frank Duveneck) were active in Venice, where Whistler was working on one of his famous series of prints. In 1898 the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies taught at the Academie Carmen, a school Whistler ran in Paris. Among the visitors to the academy was Robert Henri.

By the 1890s Whistler's fame in the United States was assured, and American collectors were among his most staunch supporters. As illustrated by the painting by Sargent shown on this page, American artists were drawn to painting the dramatic effects of light in night skies, taking their cue from Whistler's nocturnes. Whistler's fame was at its height at the time an enormous memorial exhibition was mounted in 1904 at the Copley Society in Boston comprising no fewer than five hundred works in all mediums (drawings, etchings, lithographs, drypoints, pastels, and oils). Whistler's aesthetic approach was so well understood by the organizers (who were mostly art collectors) that the staging of the exhibition itself paid homage to the artist: the walls of the various interiors were painted in a range of Whistlerian tones, and important works were hung at carefully calculated vantage points. The exhibition drew more than forty-one thousand people and was reviewed in newspapers and journals across the country. Critical reactions were mixed. One writer confessed: "The more I study the product as here displayed, the more my feelings are moved and my admiration increases." Yet, he also lamented that "some of it is difficult enough to tax the mentality of the most experienced critic of art." Other large memorial exhibitions followed in London and Paris in 1905.

The excellent exhibition catalogue, from which this write-up is largely drawn, is entitled After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting. It contains contributions by a number of scholars: Robyn Asleson, Lee Glazer, Lacey Taylor Jordan, John Siewert, Marc Simpson, Sylvia Yount, and Linda Merrill, who is also the book's editor. It is published by the High Museum of Art and Yale University Press, and may be obtained from the Detroit Institute of Arts by telephoning 313-833-7944.

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