Preview,
Whistler Centenary at the Hunterian Art Gallery
Whistler
James Abott McNeill Whistler was born in 1834 in the cotton-spinning
town of Lowell, Massachussets, son of a successful railway engineer.
He was, in his own words, a “painter, Gentleman and critic”
and in the words of others, a poseur, a flâneur, a dandy, and
a wit. He spent his adult life challenging the artistic establishments
of London and Paris, and producing iconic works which defy categorisation.
He died one hundred years ago, and this week sees the launch of the
world’s largest Whistler centenary celebration at the Hunterian
Art Gallery and other venues across Glasgow.
Whistler was part Scottish, and so was his wife Beatrix: this meant
a lot to the artist and although he visited Scotland only once, he
exhibited and sold here frequently, forming strong relationships with
dealer Alexander Reid and collector William Burrell. The Glasgow Boys
called him “The Master”, and as a result of their lobbying,
Glasgow City became the first public body to buy a work by Whistler
(his portrait of Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle,
currently at the McLellan Galleries).
Whistler is most famous today for the near-abstract portrait of his
mother (see panel) and for his Nocturnes, those misty, flat apparitions
of bridges and piers where pin-prick orange lights haunt the muted
waters. A friend of Manet and Degas, he was closely associated with
the Impressionists, but he was also strongly affected first by Courbet’s
uncompromising realism, and then by Ingres’s attention to the
more formal qualities of line and colour.
“Whistler is in many ways a standalone figure whose art challenged
established conventions of what a painting is, in terms of its finish
or its subject matter,” says Pamela Robertson, Senior Curator
at the Hunterian. “He felt that in its purest form painting was
an arrangement of colour and tone on a surface and it didn’t
have to show the preacher’s wife feeding her children, or something
taken from history painting. He was progressive and it has rightly
been said that he started the move towards abstraction.”
Such a move would inevitably meet with strong resistance, and on top
of frequent rejection from the Royal Academy and the Salon, Whistler’s
reputation plunged when in 1877 the critic John Ruskin wrote of Nocturne
in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, “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 sued, and in court he answered
accusations of charging such a fee for only two days work with the
defence, “No, I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”
The artist won a derisory farthing in damages, leaving him with legal
fees which were to bankrupt him.
Whistler, however, had media savvy. He turned his notoriety to advantage,
waging wars of words in the letters pages, and as Robin Spencer has
put it, “By the late 1880s anything connected with Whistler quickly
became international ‘copy’, and was automatically syndicated
by the world’s press.” His reputation for bon mots matched
Oscar Wilde’s, and indeed when Wilde once said to him “I
wish I had said that,” Whistler is reputed to have replied, “You
will, Oscar, you will.”
Because of his celebrated wit, Whistler’s more private side is
less well-known, but from tomorrow (Monday 16th) the world will get
to see it for the first time, as Glasgow University’s Centre
for Whistler Studies publishes the first tranche of its collection
of 13,000 Whistler letters on the internet. Professor Nigel Thorp,
the Centre’s Director, believes that this will open up a whole
new aspect of the artist’s character: “Despite this very
carefully contrived public figure, he comes across in his private
correspondence as a very honest and straightforward person looking
through a great deal of doubt and a great deal of hesitation and striving
for an artistic ideal. For the people who knew Whistler only as a
kind of flamboyant poseur this would be a revelation.”
Whistler’s Mother
Whistler’s Mother (Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1,1871) does
not leave her home at the Musée d’Orsay very often, and
her arrival in Glasgow this Wednesday will be her first time in Scotland
since her visit to the Kelvingrove in 1951. “It is exceptional
for the painting to be lent,” says Pamela Robertson, Senior Curator
at the Hunterian. “It’s been absolutely key for us because
it’s an iconic image. The Art Institute of Chicago was very keen
to have the painting after us but Paris did not agree to that, so
it is a great gesture by them to acknowledge the Whistler centenery
and also the importance of the collections here.”
Anna Matilda McNeill was of Scottish descent, and a stern protestant.
“She was very manipulative, and she was a great nag,” according
to Georgia Toutziari, Editor of Whistler’s mother’s letters,
and curator of Anna Whistler – A Life. “She was very domestic,
very religious, very traditional and very ordinary for the time. She
believed that women had to stay in the arena of the homefront –
stay in the house and be good wives and good Christian mothers. But
at the same time she was quite assertive and quite dynamic in her
own way, but it didn’t really help with Whistler!”
“Whistler was always an eccentric, a disobedient person especially
when he was a teenager. When he decided that he wanted to become an
artist his mother tried to get him various jobs, but he went to Paris.
He did not see his mother for some eight years and then she decided
that she had to join him in London and so before Whistler knew, he
was living with his mother again!”
Anna did make herself useful, selling her son’s work to her American
friends, befriending his patron’s wives and acting as intermediary
when rows broke out. Robertson points out that Whistler “always
seemed to have a loyal loving woman whether it was his long term mistresses
or his wife or his mother to bring that sort of necessary emotional
and practical support.”
The iconic painting, which millions flocked to view when it was shown
in America in 1934, was actually an accident of fate: “It was
just a chance moment in his studio,” says Robertson. “A
model had failed to turn up and so he chose to paint his mother. He
wasn’t really an artist who was particularly engaged with old
age – he did favour beautiful young women so it was rather unplanned.
She was originally standing up, but it was just too exhausting for
her, so again it was external factors that led to it rather than any
grand plan.”
Catrìona
Black, Sunday Herald 15.06.03