Word: whistler
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...enough piece about a broad of scandalous foreigners who descend on the placid New England scene. The Bostonians is visually reminiscent of the earlier film, but looks even more gorgeous. Shot around Beacon Hill, Harvard, and Martha's Vineyard, it is so consistently picturesque you almost expect to see Whistler's name in the credits. The main problem with Ivory's Europeans were the Europeans themselves, who were about as scandalous as an invasion of nannies. The Bostonians, thankfully, sheds the genteel anemia of its precursor. Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay, and the memorable cast--Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Reeve, Linda Hunt...
Among the thousands of nasty quips and barbed conceits that James Abbott McNeill Whistler sped at the world, the only one that everyone knows is perhaps apocryphal. Oscar Wilde, in admiration of some Whistlerian mot: "Jimmy, I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." In all his long career Whistler produced only one painting that enjoyed the same permanent celebrity as this riposte, and it, of course, is Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, 1872, one of the half-dozen most famous pictures of the 19th century...
There was, of course, much more to Whistler, as both man and artist, than this. He has never faded from view, yet he remains poised for rediscovery; and 1984, which marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, is the right year for it. The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow has put 79 of its Whistler oils on view until November. In the U.S. the main Whistlerian event, which opened last month at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., and will run until December, is a display of paintings, drawings and notes, more than 300 in all, curated by Art Historian David...
...boom railroad years of the late 19th century, was an impassioned Orientalist, a disciple of the "Boston bonzes," chiefly of Ernest Fenollosa. As Bernard Berenson fanned the ardor of the American rich for the Italian Renaissance, so Fenollosa was busy shaping American taste for Oriental art. He adored Whistler's work, calling him "the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter of East to West." Freer concurred, and in the 1890s he became Whistler's chief patron - not always an easy role, since Whistler could go for the hand that fed him like an amphetamine-crazed Doberman. Freer also consulted...
...last years of his life (he died in 1903, just outliving Beardsley and Wilde, who owed so much to his ideas and style), Whistler was seen as an honored veteran and not an avant-garde figure; his paintings had lost whatever experimental look they once had, and were surpassed by impressionism. Curiously, his biggest influence was on writing. Poets Stéphane Mallarmé found their own cult of the indeterminate, the penumbra of experience, confirmed in his work. The Whistlerian landscape of Thames kept turning up in English poetry for another generation-not least in The Waste Land, with...