Pleasures of the Iron Butterfly

By ROBERT HUGHES

On his 150th anniversary, fresh views of Whistler

Among the thousands of nasty quips and barbed conceits that James Abbott McNeill Whistler sped at the world, the only one that everyone knows is perhaps apocryphal. Oscar Wilde, in admiration of some Whistlerian mot: "Jimmy, I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." In all his long career Whistler produced only one painting that enjoyed the same permanent celebrity as this riposte, and it, of course, is Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, 1872, one of the half-dozen most famous pictures of the 19th century. The reasons for its fame are obscure and debatable, but the results are plain to see: "Whistler's Mother" swamped the rest of his output, turning him (at least in the eyes of the public after his death) into a one-painting man. A quip and a portrait of an old lady from North Carolina: on such thin pedestals do legends rest.

There was, of course, much more to Whistler, as both man and artist, than this. He has never faded from view, yet he remains poised for rediscovery; and 1984, which marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, is the right year for it. The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow has put 79 of its Whistler oils on view until November. In the U.S. the main Whistlerian event, which opened last month at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., and will run until December, is a display of paintings, drawings and notes, more than 300 in all, curated by Art Historian David Park Curry and assembled from the Freer's own collection, the world's largest source of Whistler material.

The Freer exhibition is a fascinating show, for its context as well as its contents. Charles Lang Freer, who made his millions in rolling stock in the boom railroad years of the late 19th century, was an impassioned Orientalist, a disciple of the "Boston bonzes," chiefly of Ernest Fenollosa. As Bernard Berenson fanned the ardor of the American rich for the Italian Renaissance, so Fenollosa was busy shaping American taste for Oriental art. He adored Whistler's work, calling him "the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter of East to West." Freer concurred, and in the 1890s he became Whistler's chief patron -- not always an easy role, since Whistler could go for the hand that fed him like an amphetamine-crazed Doberman. Freer also consulted Whistler about his Oriental purchases, so that in Washington one can see some highly informative parallels between Whistler's work and his taste in other art. There are, for instance, two majestic Satsuma-ware sake flasks, with a glaze the color and texture of old, cracked ivory, adorned with faint blue landscape paintings by Tangen, whose ghostly suggestiveness, mere scribbles wreathing out of the whiteness as though through fog, is exactly like Whistler's own images of twilit landscape.

Best of all, the Freer Gallery has the only interior by Whistler that survives: the Peacock Room, 1876-77, done in collaboration with the architect Thomas Jeckyll for the London house of the shipping baron Frederick Leyland. This stupendous decorative work, done in gold, silver and platinum on a turquoise ground--which was itself painted over ancient paneling of cordovan leather, reputedly salvaged from the Spanish Armada--caused a bitter crackup between Leyland and Whistler and provoked a ferocious letter from the patron: "Your vanity has completely blinded you to all the usages of civilized life, and your swaggering self-assertion has made you an unbearable nuisance to everyone who comes in contact with you ... [You have] degenerated into nothing but an artistic Barnum." But the Peacock Room has few if any rivals as the greatest decorated chamber of the late 19th century. All the irritable whiplash elegance of art nouveau is latent in its plutocratic birds. No wonder Freer had to save it and bring it across the Atlantic.

Leyland was not altogether wrong about Whistler. The man was an egomaniac, a fop and a publicity-crazed liar --traits which perhaps should, but actually do not, prevent people from being serious artists. He lived most of his life as a string of fictions and adjustments. Born in Lowell, Mass., the son of a former military engineer whom he hated with Oedipal intensity, Whistler "reconstructed" his childhood to focus on his Southern mother. "I shall be born when and where I want," he piped in his high, waspish voice, "and I do not choose to be born in Lowell." Instead he became a self-made tidewater gentleman, a Southern cavalier who left it to others to figure out why when the Civil War came he did not fight in it. His military career consisted of a few years at West Point, from which he was expelled for academic incompetence.

Though a virulent racist, Whistler did not confine his obloquies to blacks and Jews. He was litigious, a penchant that contributed to his bankruptcy when he sued John Ruskin for libel, won token damages of a farthing but had to pay heavy legal costs, losing his house, his studio contents and his famous collection of blue-and-white porcelain. "There's a combative artist named Whistler," ran a limerick by his Pre-Raphaelite friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

Who is, like his own

hog's-hair a bristler:

A tube of white lead And a punch on the head

Offer varied attractions

to Whistler.

He was fixated on his mother and did not marry until he was 54 and she was dead. His mannerisms were effeminate, and when excited he pranced about like a peahen on hot bricks. "Whistler," Degas once cried as the American sailed into a Paris restaurant, "you've forgotten your muff!" At 60 he had become a darting little creature of surfaces, more like a basilisk than the butterfly he used as his emblem. It took one dandy to see into another, and the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of A Rebours, picked out the practical, fussy American perched within the Whistlerian shell: "W. is always eating pickled cucumbers and butter. He is nice -- almost simple in his highfalutin manner . . . there is something of a meticulous old maid about him."

Quite the Grandma Moses, in fact; yet he seems to have had no homosexual life. A stream of cocottes, demireps and actresses passed through his London and Paris studios, leaving their traces -- pert, sly, lascivious -- in images like Red and Pink: La Petite Mephisto, circa 1880, with its wanton froth of tulle gleaming like a nocturnal peony from the sullen red room. He was the Watteau of the music halls, and his nude drawings are carried out with a tender, nervous line that, heightened with flicks of chalk, does recall that master. But his main inspiration for such work was Japanese ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world), the scenes of the Edo print. Whistler loved these, and in Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864, his red-haired Irish mistress Jo Heffernan, dressed as a geisha, is seen studying what might be some Hiroshige woodblock prints.

If Whistler had been content to do pieces of studio exotica and Japonaiserie, he would not have his place in art history. He wanted to go further, integrating the "Japanese aesthetic" into the texture of late 19th century European experience. Whistler was enraptured by the half-seen, the evanescent, the image that vanishes almost before it can be named. Hence his predilection for moments in the life of landscape that are about to slide into illegibility: the moody vistas like Nocturne: Blue and Silver--Battersea Reach, 1870-75, in which forms preserve the last vestiges of themselves--boat, horizon, crane, bridge--before they are utterly lost in the blue darkness; the fog scenes with their pearly chaos, or the tiny seascape sketches in which a mood is fixed with seeming instantaneity, each ribbon and bubble in the paint surface corresponding by inspired accident to a wavelet, a patch of foam or a pebble. With their elegant abstractions and syncopations of form, such paintings look back to the high decorative art of the Edo period, to Ogata Korin or Suzuki Kiitsu; but they also look forward, in their indeterminacy, to Monet's water lilies at Giverny.

Whistler loathed narrative and fervently espoused the idea of art for art's sake. Hence his abstract and musical titles--"Arrangement, " "Symphony" and the like. In France, where he had studied, this desire for an amoral, formalized art had been mooted 40 years earlier by writers like Theophile Gautier. But in London it was quite new (the time lag across the Channel was immense), and in making propaganda for it, Whistler became a scandalous figure. When the dying industrial baron in Kipling's The "Mary Gloster "(1894) speaks to his effeminate son, one knows he has Whistler's influence in mind:

. . .the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live. For you muddled with books and pictures, an 'china an'etchin 's an 'fans, And your rooms at college was beastly--more like a whore's than a man's;

Such was the dread influence of the Aesthetic Movement, whose dragon Whistler became.

In the last years of his life (he died in 1903, just outliving Beardsley and Wilde, who owed so much to his ideas and style), Whistler was seen as an honored veteran and not an avant-garde figure; his paintings had lost whatever experimental look they once had, and were surpassed by impressionism. Curiously, his biggest influence was on writing. Poets Stephane Mallarme found their own cult of the indeterminate, the penumbra of experience, confirmed in his work. The Whistlerian landscape of Thames kept turning up in English poetry for another generation--not least in The Waste Land, with its "brown fog of a winter dawn" lying on London Bridge. Marcel Proust so adored him that he purloined one of his gloves, as a souvenir, at a reception. Meanwhile, the paintings have beautifully survived: strict in taste, limited in range, precise in key, and never, ever, cloying.

--By Robert Hughes