Word: whistler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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West Point Esthete. "I do not choose to be born at Lowell," said Massachusetts' James Whistler in later life, but he was, on July 10, 1834. The boy's father, a West Point engineer, shortly obliged him with a surrogate birthplace (St. Petersburg) by accepting Czar Nicholas I's commission to build a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad. When the elder Whistler died in a cholera epidemic, James was old enough to enter West Point. In a chemistry exam, Cadet Whistler identified silicon as a gas, and West Point decided to do without him. "If silicon...
Nursing a bruised ego and a gift for sketching, the 21-year-old Whistler embarked for Paris and the studio of French Painter Gustave Courbet. From Courbet he acquired his early brush strokes, his first model-mistress, Eloise, and a point of view: "Beauty is truth." This creed spurred the art-for-art's-sake movement with which an entire generation of painters and writers thwacked at the Victorian taste for the didactic, the sentimental and the morally elevating. From London (where he moved in 1859), Whistler deployed his canvases like troops in this avant-garde campaign. The fury...
Under One Roof. With his monocle, his grey, lavender-tinted gloves, his white forelock setting off Italianate good looks, Whistler cultivated an exotic showmanship to mask self-doubts about his craft. The company he kept added a satanic touch by being mad, neurasthenic, and sexually deviate or profligate. The most colorful of the odd lot was Charles Augustus Howell. One of his exploits was to dig up the coffin of Elizabeth Rossetti by moonlight to retrieve a manuscript her grieving husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had buried with the body. Howell housed his wife, a bevy of artistically inclined mistresses...
Against such a background, Artist Whistler deserves more credit than he usually gets, Author Gregory believes. He sees Whistler as a proto-impressionist, as an early Western exponent of Japanese and Chinese techniques, and as the experimental godfather of modern nonobjective painting. Less debatably, Author Gregory ranks Whistler as a culture hero who refused to play drawing-room jester to Victorian philistines and who always regarded art as a basic necessity, not a superficial luxury of civilized life...
Post-Office Immortal. In his last years, Whistler was racked by debts, and fought a losing battle of telegraphic wits with Oscar Wilde. Whistler's best was the telegram he sent to the church where Wilde held his wedding: FEAR I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO REACH YOU IN TIME FOR THE CEREMONY. DON'T WAIT. Had he lived to his centenary (he died in 1903), the aristocratic Whistler would have been crushed by something far smaller than a telegram. His Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, as Whistler titled the portrait...