Word: whistlerisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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James McNeill Whistler was really two people. He was a pugnacious little dandy in a wide-brimmed, flat hat, who sported a tuft of beard under his lip and tugged at it gently when he was thinking up malicious dodges to discomfit his enemies. Whistler fought the world from the day he was kicked out of West Point for flunking chemistry. ("Had silicon been a gas,'' he is reported to have said, "I would have been a major general.") Between rounds, Whistler became instead an immensely solemn, self-absorbed artist, who turned his friends and the London...
James McNeill Whistler's stock was going up. Bought from a Manhattan dealer by the Detroit Institute of Arts was the waspish Victorian dandy's famed Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket-the splattery nightscape that moved John Ruskin to a crack about "a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." (Bad Boy Whistler sued Ruskin for libel, won a farthing's damages.) Asking price for Nocturne that year (1875) was $1,000. Price reportedly paid by Detroit...
...Macloud was impatient, but at 80, having bossed the Macloud household for 50-odd years, she knew a trick or two. That evening in St. Louis, while waiting for her eldest, son to call, she wore her grey silk dress and looked as calm as Whistler's mother. The lamp over her chair was lit, but her eyes were closed and her head was tilted back, "as if some beneficent rays were reaching her from the 60-watt bulb...
...star of the Metropolitan's show was Hiroshige, who was born 37 years after Hokusai. His work ended the golden age of Japanese prints and started a new era in Western art. His prints, frequently used in wrapping tea for export to Europe, exerted an influence on Manet, Whistler, Degas, and Van Gogh...
...hate, modern art, gets both barrels: "You don't need a guide to explain Sargent's portrait of Marquand or Whistler's Mother. . . . But what do you need beginning with Manet's Olympia through Nude Descending the Staircase ... to the present-day Portrait of a Vacuum Cleaner having its Tonsils removed or Salad Bowl full of Left Ears? I feel that you need the Yale Bowl to be sick...