Word: whistler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These are just a few of the many alternatives to taxpayer funding. Let's pursue them. Our nation has thrived for most of its existence without federal intrusion into the arts and humanities. That tradition has produced a formidable cultural heritage--Mark Twain, Eugene O'Neill, George Gershwin, James Whistler, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, to name but a few. It is time to restore that tradition. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself...
...Whistler's Mother remains his most famous painting--up there in the peculiar grab bag of images that for one reason or another, usually unconnected with their quality as art, everyone knows, like the Mona Lisa and Grant Wood's American Gothic. The picture that made his reputation was earlier, and better. Painted in 1862, it is a portrait of his Irish lover, Jo Hiffernan, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Shown in London first and then in Paris, it provoked a buzz of irrelevant interpretation. The expressionless young woman in virginal white, standing on a wolfskin with...
Shrewdly, Whistler kept just enough American quirks to make him look exotic to Europeans--while speaking to other Americans in a Franco-British accent. He liked buckwheat cakes and green corn, sweet potatoes and American cocktails; he had a flat American straw hat and a specimen of American invention, a horn gramophone, on which he would play Fourth of July orations to mystified French guests...
...artistically, he was entirely a European. None of the American preoccupations with national landscape found the smallest echo in his work--not the sublime rhetoric of Frederick Church, not the tight-surfaced stillness of the Luminists and certainly not the blunt factuality of Winslow Homer. Whistler was a superb topographical etcher, as his scenes of London, Amsterdam and Venice show; but he cared nothing for realism when aesthetics pointed away from...
...most beautiful of his Thames nocturnes of the 1870s, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in a luminous blue twilight, appearance is sliding off into illegibility under the aegis of Japanese prints; Hokusai, one of Whistler's favorite artists, had done a similar scene of fireworks at night behind a tall wooden bridge. The real Battersea Bridge was too stumpy for Whistler, so he made it into a tall Orientalized dream, with the falling rocket fire spangling the dusk like gold flakes on Japanese maki-e enamel. If he could choose where he was born, he could certainly decide what country...