Monday, Feb. 11, 1974
Mother's Boy
WHISTLER: A BIOGRAPHY
by STANLEY WEINTRAUB
498 pages. Weybright & Talley. $12.50.
"Why are you so unpleasant?" a female admirer once asked James McNeill Whistler. "My dear, I will tell you a secret," the cocky 5-ft. 4-in. American painter replied. "Early in life I made the discovery that if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death."
There was rarely any danger of boredom in Whistler's vicinity. He spent most of his 69 years as an expatriate in England and France working as hard on his bon mots as on his canvases and copper plates. It was entirely fitting that when his collected correspondence was published in 1890, it was entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Whistler was one of the most vengeful litigants since Shylock. "When I pay you six-and-eightpence, I pay you six-and-eightpence for law, not justice," he once told his solicitor, who had dared suggest that his client be fair.
A number of good reasons for Whistler's waspishness are suggested in this sturdy biography by Professor Stanley Weintraub, who has also written books about Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw. Whistler was sensitive about his size, uncertain about his talents and resentful toward an art establishment that refused to recognize him. Though he liked to see himself as a descendant of American Southern gentlemen, Whistler was born in Lowell, Mass., in 1834, the son of a West Point-trained engineering officer and a mother who, despite her North Carolina heritage, was a prototypical God-fearing Yankee.
He followed his father to West Point, but was dismissed for flunking chemistry. "Had silicon been a gas," he later quipped, "I would have been a major general." Even as a cadet Whistler devoted his serious efforts only to drawing. After leaving the Academy, he worked briefly at the U.S. Coast Survey in Washington where, to the exasperation of the director, he embellished his otherwise excellent map etchings with sea serpents and gulls.
In 1855 he packed a flashy cape, white duck suit and wide-brimmed hat and sailed for Europe, never to return. In France Whistler began groping toward an impressionistic style that eventually matured in a series of nightscapes he called "Nocturnes." It was just such a painting that got Whistler into trouble with British Critic John Ruskin in 1875. "I have seen, and heard, much of the cockney impudence before now," Ruskin told a gallery director, "but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for slinging a pot of paint in the public's face." At a celebrated libel trial, during which the painting (The Falling Rocket) was exhibited upside down, the 44-year-old Whistler argued that his asking price was for the knowledge of a lifetime. Whistler won the case--and was granted one farthing in damages.
He lived a good deal of his life in London, in part to sponge off his rich brother-in-law but also because the English academic art circles seemed to provide the kind of middle-class disapproval that he found so bracing to his belligerent nature. The Victorians thought his paintings were too slapdash to be the result of hard work. The facts were quite the opposite. Whistler drove himself mercilessly until all evidences of his technique were submerged in the appearance of effortlessness. Even in his portraits, Whistler was interested in the effect of mass and tone rather than detail. The most celebrated, if not the most felicitous example, is a portrait of his mother that he called Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. When a friend facetiously remarked, "Who would have thought of you having a mother, Jimmy?", Whistler replied, "Yes, indeed --and a very pretty bit of color she is."
Such quips were carefully honed. They had to be, for Whistler ran with a crowd of Pre-Raphaelites that included the Rosetti brothers and the kinky, alcoholic poet Algernon Swinburne. One by one, old friendships -- the most notorious with Oscar Wilde -- were corroded by Whistler's malicious tongue. Whistler suggested "The Bugger's Opera" as the title of a new Wilde drama. "Mister Whistler always spelt art with a capital 'I,'"" retorted Wilde.
Paintings that he originally sold to collectors for a few pounds were eventually resold late in his lifetime for thousands. Perhaps that was fate's way of paying him back for his indomitable sassing. Before he died in 1903, Whistler saw what was still to come. When a rich speculating American swept around the studio asking how much for the lot, Whistler replied bitterly, "Five million . . . Those are my post humous prices."
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