Whistler at the Freer

The blog's new title image (at the top), Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket (1875), provoked John Ruskin to write: "The ill-educated conceit of the artist ... approached the aspect of willful imposture,  . . . I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler, always looking for a scrape, took Ruskin to court. We'll hear more about this famous trial later in the semester.

Early Reminder: Class on Friday, April 12, meets at the front steps of the Freer Gallery of Art (12th & Independence, SW) at 1:30 pm. We will enter the museum together and wind our way back to the famous Peacock Room.

In some respects, it's instructive to think of James Whistler's relation to the 19th century in the same way we think of Andy Warhol's to the 20th century. Both of them crossed traditional genres, both were shameless and successful self-promoters, and both understood the crucial role of language in the public sphere. Both were reviled before they were championed.

The Freer has teamed up with Wayne State University in Detroit on a new interactive Whistler website: Peacock Room. It is amazing that this Victorian London interior is now in Washington DC. On the afternoon of April 18, the shutters will be open and natural light will flood the room. Trust me, this will be worth the return visit. We will see (and feel) details on the 18th that won't be present under museum lighting on the 12th.

Here are links to the first editions of two of Whistler's best-known books. A lecture first delivered in 1885 and published in 1888 by Chatto and Windus as Mr Whistler's 10 O'Clock; and a best-selling collection of his writings published in 1890 by Heinemann, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

The famous drawing from GAME representing Whistler's "victory" over Ruskin in the 1878 libel case (right) shows Whistler's characteristic humor, always caustic and aggressive, and always fully in control.

You will, I hope, hear echoes of Pater in Whistler's Ten O'Clock. Read in its entirety this short text for class on the 12th, and imagine it as a lecture, delivered at the late hour of 10 pm.

It is not required that you read The Gentle Art, but do find time to browse through it. If I were forced to choose my favorite book of the 19th century, I would choose The Gentle Art. Whistler understood the dynamics of page layout in ways that Wm Morris couldn't even imagine. It's really not a fair comparison; they were both doing vastly different things. Whistler's layouts, the deployment of his butterfly glyph, and the radical dynamism of his use of negative space, show him to be harbinger of modernity. Compared to a Kelmscott page, we don't see an attempt to imitate 15th century design, but we do see an awareness of tradition, in the form of medieval palimpsest, but the idiom is entirely modern. Nothing about Whistler seems imitative.

I can fully understand arguments proposing Whistler's work as genuinely avant-garde. I will never understand arguments proposing William Holman Hunt's work as avant-garde. Whistler changed painting: the genre, the discourse, the expectations, the confrontations, and so on. In many respects he reminds me of Blake and Turner. All three of them are hard to compare to their contemporaries.