James McNeill Whistler was one of the most misinterpreted creative talents of his age. While devoted to the expression of the beautiful, he was among the first to recognize that popularized arts and commercialized leisure were complex, interrelated phenomena that made urban life "modern". Whistler's showmanship had far greater impact than countless imitations of his "The White Girl" and "Portrait of the Painter's Mother" might suggest. His purposeful use of past art; his intermingling of private and public spaces; his ability to tailor his work to the realities of the Victorian marketplace; his understanding and exploitation of shifting economic, class and gender roles; and his use of fashion and decoration all lead us to a richer understanding of "modernism" and a broader assessment of his contribution to it. Whistler's emphatically aesthetic pictures, made the more inscrutable by purposefully confusing titles, remain uneasy pieces at the start of the 21st century. Probing some of these tensions, Dr Curry explores the intersection of Whistler's determined aestheticism with the commercial art world. Key examples of Whistler's paintings, drawings and prints are set against related images from both fine art and popular culture drawn from the 19th and 20th centuries.
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In this remarkably wide-ranging and imaginatively illustrated study, Whistler scholar David Park Curry quotes a querulous contemporary critic who complained, "A gallery does not suffice for Mr. Whistler. He needs a stage." Indeed he did, and Curry ably demonstrates the ways in which the painter--who was briefly an actor—seized center stage for himself, and startled the art world with a noisy injection of theatrical ideas. Curry proves that Whistler's drive to abstraction wasn't his only modern aspect: he was an Abominable Showman who shook up installation practice, courted fame via scandal, and knew art for art’s sake could also be, as he said of his epochal 1883 Arrangement in White and Yellow show, a "great Shebang." Curry doesn't just reproduce Whistler's sensitive Venice etchings and Ruskin-enraging paintings, he describes their influences and impact. It's illuminating to see Whistler's Rembrandtesque self-portrait next to his depictions by William Merritt Chase and Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley's portrait of him as Pan alongside Mapplethorpe's scarily similar Self-Portrait with Horns. Curry’s eight essays are eye-opening, the 382 illustrations eye-delighting. And the Punch cartoon showing pre-Whistler art patrons zooming around a gallery clad in "Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing" made me laugh out loud. --Tim Appelo
Review
"From his first publication on the American master, a catalogue of the paintings, pastels, watercolours and drawings in the Freer Gallery of Art, David Park Curry has challenged accepted opinions and opened new avenues for the understanding of Whistler's art.... As always, a fresh approach is evident.
(Print Quarterly ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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