Art Review: At Colby College Museum of Art, a happy exploration of an American great
November 1, 2015 | In the PressFrom Portland Press Herald (http://www.pressherald.com/2015/11/01/at-colby-college-museum-of-art-a-happy-exploration-of-an-american-great/ (opens in a new window))
In his review of Whistler’s 1885 book “Ten O’Clock Lecture,” Oscar Wilde opined that Whistler “is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.”
By the end of the 19th century, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) had become one of the most famous artists in the world. His 1871 “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” – more commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother” – is now an icon to the point of almost universal recognition. And “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” which in 1874 read like an abstraction 40 years before abstraction’s time, sparked Whistler’s notorious lawsuit against the critic John Ruskin and now represents the very model of infamous art.
Whistler, in other words, is well known and recognizable. But understanding Whistler’s work, particularly in the context of the second half of the 19th century, is a far more complicated undertaking. Fortunately, a pair of interesting exhibitions at the Colby College Museum of Art brings this into easy reach for Mainers. And due to the generosity of Peter and Paula Lunder, Colby has one of the leading Whistler collections in the world, with more than 300 works.
Accompanied by a gorgeous catalog, “Whistler and the World” is a jaw-dropping showcase of the Whistlers from the Lunder Collection. “Aesthetic Harmonies: Whistler in Context” draws from Colby’s deep collection to consider Whistler next to friends and colleagues like Henri Fantin-Latour as well as contemporary artists, like Alex Katz and Paul Winstanley, who proudly announce the ripples of Whistler’s influence continue to run deep and ever clear.
Looking closely at Whistler’s work is a pleasure: His tonal paintings seek harmony above all else, and his draftsmanship soars in his drawings, pastels and prints. Two years after joining it, Whistler was elected president of the Society of British Artists. Whistler has even been compared – with good reason – to Rembrandt as a printmaker. That’s not bad for an American working at a time when all the world essentially saw the American art scene as Europe’s poorer, lamer, country-bumpkin cousin.
Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and attended West Point, but he spent much of his young life in Russia, where he learned French. He was completely fluent when he arrived in Paris to study art in 1855 in the studio of Charles Gleyre, with whom Monet and Renoir would later study.
Whistler’s first exhibited work – in other words, his first major painting – “La Mere Gerard” of 1858, is one of the many prizes in the Lunder Collection.
It is a work of realism, rendered with the heavily glazed luminescence typically associated with Rembrandt but common enough among Whistler’s friends, such as Alphonse Legros. The model’s black dress is lost in the dark background behind the dazzling impasto of her white headscarf and the gloriously textured details of her wizened (and rather grim) face.
“La Mere” is notable for many reasons, but primarily in this context for so solidly anchoring Whistler’s initial footing in Gustave Courbet’s brand of realism. In time, Whistler leans hard away from this type of literal realism and moves toward the more nuanced ideas of the Aesthetic Movement, which looked to artistry, sophisticated taste, poetic allusion and qualities such as decorative surfaces, flattened compositional design and concerted tonality of hue and value – in short, an elegant array of visual qualities that became known as formalism.
Whistler, in fact, came to be seen as the champion of the Aesthetic Movement’s catchphrase: “Art for art’s sake.” While most Americans associate this with “ars gratia artis,” seen circling a roaring lion’s emblem before Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films, the Latin version is a fake classical reference based on the 19th-century French phrase “l’art pour l’art.” The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version is intended to convey that art has no political or societal obligations. While this free pass on morality (which has continued to this day to be a subject of controversy regarding the content of movies) is related to the driving force behind “art for art’s sake,” it misrepresents the revolutionary goal of the Aesthetic Movement, which was to unfetter painterly content from the binds that held it to the didactic narratives of settled institutionalized conventions.
While the thinking behind the Aesthetic Movement is easy enough to describe, it is difficult for us – particularly Americans with our “anything goes” take on culture – to understand the insistent resistance to such radical cultural change at the time. Art needed to be freed from the viewing assumption that it reinforced society’s established moral boundaries (consider the centuries of Church rule, Hogarth, Napoleon, the academies, etc.).
It is easy enough for us to imagine why Whistler and his contemporaries wanted away from Victorian sentimentality, especially now that Whistler’s formalist focus on the internal logic of the work became the American gold standard of art with the ascension of Abstract Expressionism. But we still don’t often credit the Aesthetic Movement for such cultural accomplishments. We may see that John Alexander’s 1898 “Woman in Green with Blue and White Bowl,” for example, is one of the most beautiful paintings in Maine, but it’s harder to understand the radical shift of mentality that allowed the artist to rely on Whistler for the painting’s internal logic content.
Answering why he titled his works musical names, Whistler said that “Nocturne… does so poetically say all that I want to say and no more than I wish!” (To give an idea of the desirability of Colby’s collection, one of Whistler’s “Nocturne” prints – of which there are two in the show – sold at auction in 2010 for $282,000.) Whistler’s titling practice echoed a critic calling one of his paintings a “symphony in white” – an idea that pushes the internal structures of music, which, in turn, helps us imagine Whistler’s opening a door that eventually led to abstract painting.
A particular strength of Colby’s exhibitions lies with Whistler’s etching views of Venice. His sense of draftsmanship, outline, silhouette, texture and decorative adornment are extraordinary. Within the series we find an almost spiritualist obsession with doorways that leads to scenes inside scenes inside of scenes, such as his 1879-80 “The Garden,” in which a boy sits silhouetted (echoing the viewer who is looking into a similarly shaped work of art) in a large doorway looking to another doorway. With transcendental power equaling its erudite elegance, “The Garden” could be matched to Mark Rothko’s abstractions just as easily as to Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.”
Whistler was one of America’s most important and influential artists. While his infinitely nuanced works and influence can be difficult to discuss, Colby’s pair of exhibitions make America’s first master of the here-and-now easy to enjoy.