Word: whistler
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AFTER BENJAMIN WEST IN THE 18th century, James McNeill Whistler was the first American artist to become really famous across the Atlantic: not only in London, like West, but in Paris as well. Since America loves to see its children imposing themselves on the world's culture--a less common sight 100 years ago than now--this perpetual expatriate, with his viperish tongue, large ego and delicately nuanced paintings, has long been an American favorite...
...Though Whistler never went to Japan, he was seen as a bridge between East and West, the voracious collector of blue-and-white porcelain who brought a Japanese aesthetic of hints and nuances into late 19th century painting. His abhorrence of narrative, his preference for the exquisitely designed moment over the slice of life, was new; it epitomized the idea of Art for Art's Sake. It was provocative, in 1871, to call a portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. It implied that the hallowed sentimentality about motherhood in Victorian England was cultural baggage, that the aesthetic...
Today how good does he look? A large retrospective jointly organized by London's Tate Gallery, Paris' Musee d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington (where it is on view through Aug. 20) offers the evidence. Whistler was an artist whose legend as wit, dandy and aesthetic kamikaze--for what was his libel suit against the critic John Ruskin but a suicide mission, compelled by his own claims to "Southern honor"?--continued after his death and became a barrier to appraisal of his work. One would prefer to think that Whistler the artist flies free of Whistler...
...absurd to class him with Degas or Manet. He didn't have the range, the formal toughness or the breadth of human curiosity for that. Yet sometimes he approached them, as in his finest portrait, his 1872-73 study of the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle. When he sat for Whistler, Carlyle was 78 and heavy with fame, depression and guilt. All this is conveyed in the disturbed but massive black profile of the coat and in the tenderness of Whistler's treatment of the face...
Rothko's "Untitled (Blue, Green)," Whistler's "Nocturne in Blue and Silver, No. 1," and Feininger's "Bird Cloud" are tucked in a pristine white oasis at the heart of the exhibition. They are presented like a stage set depicting display techniques in a modern museum. The paintings, all modern and somewhat abstract in tones of blue, crystallize the value of Cultures and Contexts. They are presented on white walls without the helpful explanations, without accompanying cultural artifacts, yet carry themselves with the solitary dignity of true masterpieces. There is a rising debate in American museums about the validity...