The Importance of Being Synthetic

...To the best of my knowledge, Victorian Outsider is the fifth new book on Whistler to be published since 1950, not to mention three important catalogues and a heavily revised edition of James Laver's pioneer biography of 1930...

...Nor can he be credited with a leading role in a revolt comparable to those of the Impressionists or Postimpressionists...

...There was, above all, the man's character...

...He allows the biography "to become, at what seemed appropriate points, a description and an evaluation of Whistler's work...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...Witty and flamboyant, they are remembered most of all for being—as Wilde said of himself with a great deal of truth after his downfall—symbolic of their age...

...This thought, of course, comes from Oscar Wilde, his one-time friend and later enemy, and it is possible that somewhere Whistler-as he usually did with Wilde's ideas —claimed original paternity for it...

...And yet he not only created a dozen paintings and as many etchings that refuse to be forgotten, he was one of the handful of wandering Americans who between 1850 and 1930 fascinated and helped to shape the literary-artistic world of England and, peripherally, continental Europe...

...He had the second-rate artist's "ability to scent a trend," and he exploited it thoroughly, borrowing more than a wife from the house-designer E. W. Godwin, even while resenting Wilde's borrowings from him...

...On the contrary, I would suggest that Whistler, realizing his artistic limitations, actually fulfilled what promise he had, and then turned his energies to becoming, as McMullen puts it, "one of the taste-makers of his period...

...He accurately detects that the man—at least as he displayed himself—and the painter were often quite different, and he perceptively points out, "The function of the stage Whistler, the aggressive Whistler, and the caddish Whistler was to shield an inner Whistler who was as sensitive and soft as the young girls he loved to paint...

...As an isolated innovator he was uninteresting, except for his celebrated Nocturnes, and even here one cannot avoid a sneaking sympathy for John Ruskin's outburst against him...

...This minor disagreement notwithstanding, I commend McMullen for assigning Whistler to his proper place in history: "His effect in the visual arts of the period was on the whole less noticeable than his prominence as a legendary synthetic personality and his ability to resonate with contemporary poetical-musical minds...

...He was not a great natural painter like his hero Velazquez or his contemporaries and acquaintances Degas and Courbet...

...The inner Whistler, however, is not the one who left a mark...

...But he judiciously and cautiously restricts himself to telling us something of the intent and methods evident in the examples he cites, and to describing briefly what the paintings look like without diverting undue energy to critical evaluation...

...Though he failed to influence the actual craft of painting, and though his oeuvre is fractional in comparison with such great modernist artists as Cezanne and Picasso, Whistler remains a figure who demands, and is receiving, attention...

...Such a treatment is in keeping with Whistler's painterly achievement, and it leaves the author free to devote most of his attention to the essential task of discovering how the artist transformed himself from an inferior West Point cadet into the waspish butterfly whom history remembers...

...It is a sign of McMullen's biographical skill that he begins quietly, almost dully, and builds up his rhetoric as Whistler develops his persona...

...The word "figure" is important...

...Nor does history remember him as he would have wished—for being the major painter he so often at heart doubted that he was—but instead for the masks he elaborately perfected...

...At this point I would take issue with the implication running throughout Victorian Outsider that Whistler did not fulfill his promise and allowed himself to be sidetracked onto secondary lines of activity...

...after all, Turner had done the same kind of atmospheric painting much more evocatively and grandly...

...In other words, Whistler was a precursor of that curiously contemporary being, the multimedia artist...

...His most recent biographer, Roy McMullen, notes that Whistler lacked "the draftsmanship, the compositional skill, the inventiveness" expected of artists in the Victorian era...

...Both came in from the outside to provoke and stir up the complacent English artistic world, producing a few masterpieces among many rather meretricious works...

...For despite his ambitious harmonies of tints and tones, and the haunting faces that—in contrast to the feet—he rendered extraordinarily well, we do not place Whistler among those first-rate artists who are dull as people because their genius is absorbed in their work...

...author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour" If success can be defined as the ability to take advantage of one's limitations, James Abbott McNeill Whistler must be counted as remarkably successful...

...rather, we are conscious of him as one of those fascinating second-raters whose imperfect genius is projected in their lives...

...Indeed, it is all too easy to slash away at Whistler's career as he himself slashed away at the hundreds of canvases that failed to satisfy him: There are the portraits whose feet he could never get to look like more than cobblers' lasts, the pretentious decorator's vulgarities like the Peacock Room, the appalling facetiousnesses of his attempts to prove he was a writer as well as a painter...

...Primarily concerned with his subject's life, McMullen has very sensibly avoided the ungrateful task of taking him unnecessarily seriously as a painter...

...The notion certainly applied to him as much as to Wilde, since in an astonishing number of ways the two men were spiritual siblings...