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Mr. Whistler's gallery: the art of displaying art
Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Kenneth John Myers
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
He must have completed a significant body of new work by late October 1883, when he contacted the Fine Art Society to suggest a spring show. The society turned him down, but by January 1884 he had reached an understanding with the Dowdeswells. (22) Ten or so of the small oils and at least one of the watercolors were taken from a series of about thirty oils and watercolors completed in the Cornwall fishing village of Saint Ives in late December 1883 and January 1884 (see Pl. X). (23) Letters Whistler wrote from Saint Ives show both his excitement with his new work and a preoccupation with scale. He repeatedly emphasizes the small size of the oils, describing them as "little beauties," "little things," and "little games." (24) He does not discuss new watercolors in these letters, so it seems likely that his decision to include watercolors in his spring 1884 show was made after he got back to London.
The turn to watercolors was a new departure for Whistler, who rarely used the medium before 1881, and had never previously exhibited a substantial group of them. (25) The exhibition included one or two watercolors completed in Saint Ives; several watercolor seascapes, most of which had been completed on short summer trips from London in the early 1880s; three watercolors of London scenes; and four important Amsterdam nocturnes (see Pl. XI). But the largest group of watercolors in the show, and the group that attracted the most critical attention, was a series of drawings of young female models, most of them probably dating to the winter of 1884 (see Pls. VIII and IX).
As winter turned to spring, Whistler moved outside to paint shops and streetscapes in his Chelsea neighborhood. In early May, he wrote Menpes, who was helping to frame works for the approaching show, to suggest that if Menpes could get to Chelsea early in the morning, he should "pass by the [Thames] Embankment, if quite early, I shall be at the `shop' game." At about the same time he warned Charles William Dowdeswell not to look for him in the studio if he came by the next day, as "I shall be on the Embankment painting away for dear life." These letters suggest that many of the eight Chelsea subjects in the exhibition, including Chelsea Shops (Pl. XII), date from the spring of 1884. (26)
Whistler aspired to create works of art that resisted interpretation so as to provoke purely aesthetic appreciation. As his use of musical terms in his titles was meant to suggest, he wanted his paintings to be experienced as arrangements of color and line. This way of appreciating works of art is not unusual in the early twenty-first century, but it was still rare in late nineteenth-century London and Paris. Like all aesthetic pioneers, Whistler had to help uncomprehending reviewers and art lovers learn the mental skills they needed to appreciate his work. The installations he created for his one-man exhibitions were unusually effective teaching tools because it was in them that he most fully freed himself from the demands of representation. As a painter and printmaker, he never gave up his need for a subject, but as a designer he did. Unlike his paintings, drawings, and etchings, Whistler's installation designs are purely formal arrangements of color and line.
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