Logo

Logo

Lessons of a moth

No artist was more revered among young American painters during the 1880s and 1890s than James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The…

Lessons of a moth

James Whistler's Nocturne The Solent (Photo: Facebook)

No artist was more revered among young American painters during the 1880s and 1890s than James Abbot McNeill Whistler.

The Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painters Mother was canonised when it entered the Musée du Luxembourg in 1891 (and of course canned in the Mr Bean film), but by that time Whistler had already been accorded the status of an “old master” in America, even though not a single one of his paintings had yet been purchased for an American collection, public or private.

The cult of Whistler among American painters, however, owed its existence to the degree of celebrity he had attained in England and Europe. Whistler’s patriarchal status among younger American artists points to the way in which his tonal art seemed to respond to the quandaries of the historical moment.

Advertisement

As Americans confronted the most stirring problem of the late 19th century —the dilemma of belief in a spiritual realm —Whistler’s view of the individual seemed to reaffirm the existence of a finer self, purified of its gross, material aspect.

The post-Darwinian controversies provided the ideological matrix of which the Anglo-American establishment availed itself in its efforts to retain its hegemony against the perceived onslaught of “cruder” foreign people.

But Whistler’s visual strategies showed AngloAmerican artists how they might symbolically picture themselves and their civilisation at the apex of the progressive, upward spiraling trajectory of evolution. Whistler’s legacy to American painters and sculptors was a dematerialised tonal mode in which colour and line were orchestrated to approach the harmonies and rhythms of music.

As such this tonality aligned itself with music in holding out a consolatory and elevating alternative to the prevalent materialism of the industrial age that was made sacrosanct by the philosophy of scientific positivism.

Couched in terms of the Hegelian aesthetic discourse, Whistler’s dematerialising symphonic idiom seemed implicitly to reveal the object as a contiguous part of a spirit world. His project was dependent on Baudelaire, not simply in its drive to legitimise the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, but also in its participation in what Jurgen Habermas has termed Baudelaire’s search for the “promesse de bonheur via art” — a utopian project of “reconciliation with society”.

Whistler’s tendency towards musical abstraction displaced the didactic moralism and the narrative domination of the word that typically governed the art of the 1860s and 70s.

In his purified field of vision, quietism replaced action and beauty replaced moral narrative as prescriptive modes of public and private conduct.

Whistler’s paintings were offered not as a window onto the world but as a simulacrum of the world as it should be. Whether the subject was the figure of a beautiful and mysterious woman or a cityscape, the object was dematerialised through the transforming properties of a coloured atmosphere. Forms so dematerialised and veiled suggested to Americans the painter’s mystical experience of the world as essence.

Such an art form easily lent itself to an agnostic, quasi-religious usage. Worship of a mysterious and spiritualised feminine principle, embodied in the beauty of a woman, or an exquisite work of art, beckoned as a substitute creed for liberals and agnostics searching for a secular-sublime worthy of reverence.

The utopian toposof Whistler’s work, as represented in the body of a woman, and the topography of civilisation, was one in which the vision of the artist veiled, distanced, and finally evaded the male ambivalence over the feminine body and the dilemmas of the body politic.

In his White Girl, Whistler transformed Joanna Heffernan, his mistress from being an exemplar of the bad feminine sublime, as in his 1861 sketch Wapping, to being the paragon of female virtue.

After 1861 Whistler had moved away from the woman who asserted her sexual powers over man, a type favoured by Baudelaire and Gustave Courbet. The White Girl showed his ambivalence resolved in the direction of the paradoxical beauty, the woman both sensual and spiritual, whom Rossetti found so alluring.

As Algernon Charles Swinburne’s commentary made clear, the embodiment of idea in the fluid colour and movement of the brush-work provided for Whistler a visual correlative to the medium of music.

In the Tanagra, Whistler found the historical prototype for the body beautiful. Abstracted into pure rhythmic movement, the female body seemed to provide the key to this painterly musical idiom. But Whistler had trouble in drawing the human body on a large scale.

Frustrated with his inability to translate The White Symphony:Three Girlsinto a mural decoration of Leyland Prince’s Gate dining room in the early 1870s, Whistler simply gave up the attempt to draw in the classical manner of an Albert Moore.

His exploration of tonal atmosphere in the nocturnes of the 1870s resulted in his essential rediscovery of the semantic void as the key to musicality.

The semi-abstract manner of composition was directed to an elite group of artists, littérateurs and collectors whose embrace of agnostic creeds of spirituality in pure forms of art would signify not only the alienation from but also their superiority to the “vulgar” disposition of the middle class. Whistler knowingly cultivated these “lacking” qualities, using Watteau as one point of departure, and Diego Velázquez, Greek sculpture, and Japanese prints as others to reform his technique. The dualities of masculine and feminine, rationality and imagination, line and colour had emerged in Whistler’s work in the early 1860s.

A long-standing controversy in academic art circles had sustained these oppositions since Le Bruncodified Cartesian dualities in his academic system, pitting matter against spirit, sensation against intellect, and colour against line.Whistler had thought of his classicising experiments in the late 1860s as a struggle to control colour with line.

The terms he used to describe this conflict reveal the way in which gender, and thus positions of superiority and inferiority was imputed to artistic modes. “Colour… Colour is vice. Certainly it can be and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Grasped with a strong hand, controlled by her master, drawing, colour then is a splendid girl with a husband worthy of her — her lover, but her master too — the most magnificent mistress in the world, and the result is to be seen in all the lovely things produced from their union”, he wrote in a letter in 1859.

“But coupled with indecision”, he went on to add, “with a weak, timid, vicious drawing, easily satisfied, colour becomes a filthy whore making fun of ‘her little boy’ isn’t that true! And abusing him just as she pleases, taking the thing lightly so long as she has a good time, treating her unfortunate companion like a simpleton who constrains her, which is just what he does. And look at the result — a chaos of intoxication, of trickeries, regrets, unfinished things.”

Whistler here predictably ascribed to colour the cultural characteristics deemed feminine, while he attributed to drawing the intellectual discipline considered masculine. In its sensual and emotional qualities colour is affective, and the seductiveness of this wanton strumpet can, like a good woman, be converted to sublime virtue if controlled by the higher, suprasensuous principle of masculine reason. This is the line of reasoning that builds on the received bifurcation of 19th century culture into complementary masculine and feminine — rational and affective — cultures.

The historical groundwork behind Whistler’s understanding can, on the one hand, be traced to Rousseau’s social theory, in which man’s fear of woman’s seductiveness is allayed by her transformation into nurturing mother and wife. On the other hand, it is also distantly indebted to the Kantian categories of aesthetic experience, in which the beautiful and sublime were engendered with male and female attributes.

The beautiful, as a category that was innately feminine, corresponded to woman’s social function as a provider of love and pleasure. The sublime alternatively reflected the appropriate masculine sphere in its pain-inducing cogitation on truth.

After Delacroix the dominant aesthetic theory favoured music instead of poetry as an anti-sensuous ideal of sublimity and, in its abstraction and sublimation of the physical world, it is this displacement to which Whistler’s work in the 1870s is attuned.

Whistler dematerialised the beautiful body and transformed colour into a quiet, feminised sublime. Whistler’s desire to wed feminine colour to masculine design, the beautiful to the sublime was realised in his nocturnes.

By the 1870s the palpable physicality of the painted surface was thinned out and the sensuousness of colour melded with geometric structure.

Whistler abandoned the showy, opaque brushwork of the 1860s and instead devised a megilp, a homemade “sauce” of linseed oil and turpentine in which smaller amounts of pigment were mixed. The greater sense of transparency that resulted allowed his images to become increasingly incorporeal.

In the nocturnes the faces of the people elude our gaze and the disparate reality of urban existence disappears in envelopes of tonal atmosphere — expansive horizons of sky and water.

Seen through a quivering half-light of stars, misted street-lamps and firework displays all taken up by the Thames’s liquid mirror, the female forms of his Six Projects emerge as the stylistic attributes of a diaphanous city of dreadful light, where the contours of bodies are evoked by a softened, almost enervated line, that merges the figure with the atmosphere. Whistler’s nocturnes turn the night in cities into sites for the exercise of the dominantly masculine and the pliantly feminine.

As Edmund Burke wrote in his Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, “we submit to what we admire but we love what submits to us.” By investing in the gendered mode of suffused colour and ephemeral form — the fading of Japonisté and the reprising of the greys and pinks from Velazquez — Whistler risked being labelled feminised in his work, though he could still lay claim to the male prerogative of genius by virtue of the transformative artistic act.

The critic George Moore, for instance, stopped just short of calling Whistler’s nocturnes feminine when he interpreted what he called “their exasperated impotence” as a reflection of Whistler’s nervous temperament and small, frail physique.

Moore noted that Whistler’s urbanscapes were troubled by an exasperated sense of volatile colour and evanescent light.

Like the woman who stays indoors, veiled from the world of affairs by the strict bounds of domesticity, a new retiring and self-reflexive night had emerged in Whistler’s urban meditations.

Advertisement