THE RETURN OF MR. WHISTLER

...Those who might react in this fashion would leave out the fact that Whistler never did empty a pot of paint on the canvas, as some of our contemporaries have learned to do...

...He has edited a number of art books, and his articles have appeared in Commentary, The American Scholar, and Arts...

...We must look for the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of a work...

...His sharp intelligence triumphed over his slow-witted patrons, but he frightened away potential buyers...

...Following his natural bent by concentrating on art, he led the kind of dissolute life in London and Paris for which he would have been ostracized in his native Lowell...

...His arrogant manner cloaked a deep insecurity—"Why drag in Velasquez...

...He was a poet whose subtle, low-keyed painting has survived, and will continue to survive, most of the raw stuff purported to be art...

...Above and beyond this effect, Whistler captured superbly the uniquely the dreamy tranquility of old people, interrupted by neither gesture nor loud word...

...More than any other painter, Whistler learned from the Japanese to be rigorously selective, to eliminate unnecessary details, and to rearrange nature freely for the sake of firm, rhythmically balanced design...

...There is little to "see" in the oil (now in Detroit's Institute of Art) that drew Ruskin's anger: a curve of yellow and reddish dots (indicative of the fireworks) pierces subtle variations of black, dark green, and dark blue...

...rather than "How true...

...Two years later, twenty-eight of his oils, watercolors, and pastels were shown at New York's Metropolitan Museum, along with works by two other American expatriates, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt...

...Both those who love the picture (now in the Louvre) because it appeals to their sentimental concept of motherhood, and those who reject it as banal have failed to live up to the artist's intentions...

...In the United States, The Return of Mr...

...We, who have learned to expect from the draftsman or painter no more than hints and suggestions on which to construct a vision in our imagination, are willing to go along with the master where he warns that "a picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared...

...He retorted, indignantly: "Do...

...However, even his most zealous defenders will not deny that throughout his life, he was a querulous person who found it difficult to make friends, and even more difficult to keep them...

...As a young man in Paris, he was under the spell of Courbet, champion of realism, whom he emulated to the point of making the same frequent use of palette knife and thick impasto...

...Unlike the Impressionists, he did not start sketching on the spot, but would let the impression be filtered by the fine screen of his retentive memory so that, in most cases, there was a long interval between observation and execution...

...His behavior was that of an individual who had been hurt deeply and frequently...

...The more discerning among his contemporaries—such as Pissarro and Degas—knew that, apart from being a brilliant conversationalist, controversialist, and showman, Whistler was also an important master whose oils, watercolors, and etchings were of far greater significance than all his wit...

...For decades after his death in 1903 he was remembered mainly for his splendid repartee in court, and for other displays of his dauntless wit...

...He had servants and drank costly champagne even when he owned nothing but debts...

...To attract attention, he dressed like a music-hall artist, and from the more conservative Degas he elicited this remark: "If you were not a genius, you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris...

...People forgot that he was a serious and an important artist...

...To them, his "Nocturnes" and his portraits looked sketchy and unfinished...

...Wandering through the exhibition at the Knoedler Galleries, young American artists to whom Whistler had been merely a name must have become fond of him and even proclaimed him as one of the earliest martyrs of abstract art...

...From his windows in Chelsea, or on long walks he took along the Thames with one of the few devoted friends and pupils he had, he loved to watch the luminosity of the fleeting river, the mysterious movements of heavily laden barges guided by the silhouetted figures of pilots...

...As a private individual, he might engage in impudent talk...

...As a citizen, Whistler may not always have appeared to be the master of his fate...

...Ruskin regarded the verdict as a defeat and, in fury, resigned from his Oxford professorship...

...His was the not unusual dilemma of an imaginative artist, filled with creative energy and plagued by an insatiable perfectionism, in a milieu hostile to independent, unfettered spirits...

...Art should "stand alone and appeal to the artistic sense of eye without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as de...

...To which Whistler proudly retorted: "No—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime...

...Petersburg, Russia, where he lived as a child, as his place of birth, had not his ego been often and severely lacerated during his youth in America...

...In particular, it is absurd to condemn Whistler for his professed cynicism...

...But the "victor" suffered heavily from the trial's consequences...

...It was only in the last decade that critics, dealers, and collectors became aware that they had been unjust to one of the most remarkable talents of the Nineteenth Century...

...His work in all media is characterized by delicacy, even reticence, that one would associate with a hypersensitive individual (which, beneath his brashness, he was...

...Some of the trial's details became widely known, especially when Whistler later incorporated a comprehensive description into his astounding and amusing volume of reminiscence and vin-dictiveness called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies...

...when asked to stop attacking old John Ruskin, who had one leg in the grave, Whistler quipped, "It's the other leg I'm after...

...He needed love, but he had only fleeting relationships with women who served him as models, mis-ti esses, housekeepers, business managers, and the mothers of his children...

...he did not have the overpowering religious conviction of a Rouault...

...Asked by the attorney general whether he could make him see the "peculiar beauty" of Falling Rocket, Whistler haughtily replied: "I fear it would be as hopeless as for the musician to pour his notes ALFRED WERNER, a leading art critic, has written and lectured widely In the United States and Europe...

...For the important achievement is Whistler's evocation of an enigmatical effect created through the juxtaposition of the black ( the old lady's dress) and the gray of the wall...

...Why, I should refuse to associate with people who could talk of such things at dinner...

...Had not the judge at the trial pronounced his works incomprehensible...

...was his rejoinder to an admirer who had compared him to the Spanish master...

...His work, based on respect for the Old Masters (Velasquez, in particular), was thoroughly controlled...

...At any rate, he hardly ever allowed this fiercely assertive trait of his personality to enter his work...

...By calling his pictures "Symphonies," "Harmonies," "Arrangements," he emphasized form organization versus the casualness of nature...

...but what can or ought the public care about the identity of the portrait...

...Whistler by Alfred Werner the low ebb was reached in the 1930's when social realism almost completely drove out the art for art's sake concept usually associated with Whistler, Wilde, and other Victorian individualists...

...The change in evaluation was underlined in 1952 by Hesketh Pearson's book, The Man Whistler, which pointed out that Whistler could not have painted the first-rate works of art he did had not a great nobility of soul been concealed beneath his atrocious behavior...

...Purposely, he titled the portrait of his mother Arrangement in Gray and Black...

...This trial, known to every student of Victorian civilization, hurt Whistler and his work even posthumously...

...He differed from most of his contemporaries by insisting that the artist must do more than just imitate the visual world: "If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer...

...Luckily, he arrived in Paris in time to be infected by Japonisme, an excitement for everything imported from Japan that intoxicated the French capital...

...His work is devoid of the maniacal fervor of a Van Gogh...

...in an age of depression and reformatory zeal there was little tolerance for what seemed to be a mere combination of virtuosity, snobbery, and frivolity...

...Through his work, so utterly different from the anecdotal pictures favored in the 1860's and 1870's, he succeeded in educating the more sensitive among those he taught that art should be an evocation rather than a statement...

...Whistler was neither charming nor delightful to his teachers at West Point...

...into the ear of a deaf man...

...Those who remember only the clever anecdotes circulated about Whistler as a Bohemian, or the triumphantly witty things he said, or is supposed to have said, will be surprised to learn that he was a tragic figure, a frustrated, unhappy man...

...This "Nocturne in Black and Gold," as the picture, a night scene illuminated by fireworks, was subtitled, provoked him to rash words: "I have seen and heard much 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...

...Upon admitting that it had taken him only two days to "knock off" the libeled Nocturne, he was challenged: "And that was the labor for which you asked two hundred guineas...

...For Whistler, who deliberately chose musical titles for his pictures (he called them Nocturnes, Harmonies, or Symphonies), picked his colors and tones "as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony...

...One not acquainted with his biography, and especially his sharp bon mots, would never guess that Whistler had been the eccentric and "monster" he appeared...

...that a picture was not nature because it was art, and must not compete with, or try to be mistaken for, reality...

...The artist, American-born James Abbott McNeil Whistler, thereupon sued the critic, none other than John Ruskin, for libel...

...Had he met with more understanding during his years of struggle, he might have been less aggressive and cynical...

...Whistler's way of looking at people and things is, of course, not the only legitimate one, but it is an intriguing one...

...He was a contemporary anr* friend of many of the Impressionists, but he walked alone...

...Do not the things described in his Nocturnes have so little resemblance to natural objects that a good many of these pictures might be considered "abstract...

...Asked why he was so unpleasant to so many people, he made the characteristic reply: "Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming, and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death...

...But as an artist he was triumphantly able to hold up freedom within self-chosen order...

...It is easy to understand why men of Ruskiri's generation could not bear Whistler's work...

...Once, when he could not give the date of the battle of Buena Vista, the teacher good-naturedly asked him what he would do at a dinner table were he asked the same question...

...In November, 1960, New Yorkers saw at the distinguished Knoedler Galleries the most important Whistler show in the United States since Boston's Memorial Exhibition of 1904, with more than a hundred pictures, among them the "Nocturne in Gold and Black" that had led to the scandal in 1878...

...Yet the mystery of the scene—its poetry or, to use the term Whistler would have preferred, its music—is superbly presented...

...He would not have said that, nor would he have given St...

...Had he not been accused of having flung a pot of paint in the public's face...

...Sophisticated Londoners applauded, and the jury could not avoid finding Ruskin guilty...

...votion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like...

...Why, die...

...He was a great innovator who, though remaining within the realm of representation, anticipated certain aspects of abstract art by fifty or sixty years...

...and that a person, looking at a picture, should be moved to exclaim, "How beautiful...

...For a long time, nobody cared to buy his Nocturnes, nor did any British socialite dare to commission a portrait, since the artist and his unorthodox productions had become the butt of merciless jokes...

...Damages were assessed at the ridiculous sum of one farthing, while Whistler had to pay the substantial court costs...

...Art should be independent of clap-trap," he once explained...

...When he was greeted in a London restaurant by an American who informed him that he, too, had been born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the artist angrily raised his monocle and remarked in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, "I do not choose to be born at Lowell...

...On the other hand, it is a relief to turn from the story-telling works of the Nineteenth Century academy professors and gold medalists to what Whistler's friend, George Moore, called the "music of perfect accomplishment...

...He would never have said, as does the Californian, Sam Francis, "The value of a painting lies in the realm of the unintentional," or, as did the late Jackson Pollock, "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing...

...In his Thames river scenes, in particular, Whistler does what Verlaine did in poetry— giving, in faint color (or, in his etchings, in subtle outlines) the twilight aspects of things...

...it lacks the sympathy with suffering humanity that is characteristic of Dau-mier or Kaethe Kollwitz...

...But it is unfair to expect all of this from an aesthetic man who wilfully subordinated the purely human aspects to purely aesthetic considerations...

...He explained: "To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother...

...It is wrong to condemn Whistler— as has been done until recently—for not possessing certain qualities others have had...

...Or there is his reply to an unsympathetic critic who asked what critics who found themselves in disagreement with the master's principles should do: "Do, my dear ar...

...If he were alive today, he would repudiate the lack of control and form of many modern artists with as much anger as he rejected the cold academism of his day...

...Pyrrhic victories like these caused him to flunk out of West Point, and subsequently to lose his job as a draftsman in the United States Coast Guard...

...The forty-four-year-old Whistler was made bankrupt by the trial...

...With his search for an entirely aesthetic beauty, his method of refining and simplifying color and line, Whistler anticipated Gauguin, Vuillard, and even some of the abstract artists who were born years after he had died...

...At fifty-four he finally married, but his wife soon after died of cancer...

...He wrote and spoke daringly and lucidly about the aims of art...

...He meant to say: "The subject matter is immaterial, and exact representation of actuality has nothing to do with painting...

...he neither adopted their special technique nor wanted to limit himself, as they did, to recording the ephemeral "impression" of a scene...

...When a letter addressed to him at the Royal Academy was forwarded to his home with the notation, "Not known at the Royal Academy," he mailed the envelope to the press and attached a note, indicative of his profound anger and dissatisfaction: "It is my rare good fortune to be able to send you an unsolicited official and final certificate of character...