Whistler’s Giantess | Ribbonfarm
Or, an American peacock in London
First version published @ Ribbonfarm on May 12, 2020.
In Mr. Turner (2014), Mike Leigh’s lambent portrait of the artist as an old man, the protagonist sits for a daguerreotype. Behind the camera is an American prosopon, whose primordial photographs are advertised to “stand the test of time and climate.” Intentionally or otherwise, the scene establishes a passing of the torch between light-wranglers. It also anticipates the appearance of Turner’s unnatural successor, the American James Abbott MacNeill Whistler, whose technique a sitter once described as developing “a negative under the action of […] chemicals.”
Whistler would not set foot in London until 1859, eight years after Turner’s death but, when he did, the groundwork would be more or less prepared for a career agonist. A cosmopolitan whose scope extended from the US to Russia through Chile, Whistler would systematically be [at] the centre of the world, at a time when European art was barely postindustrial. Wagner may have held court at Bayreuth, but Whistler forged, and bridged, the early modern transatlantic artworld.
He refashioned his biography and cultivated his persona into something he could loose against critics and patrons alike, carving costly inroads into the contractual and public perceptual domains. Though his victory against Ruskin earned him no more than a farthing, bankruptcy and a Venetian exile, it wasn’t Pyrrhic by any epochal measure. (The same cannot, alas, be said for Whistler’s frenemy, Oscar Wilde, whose libel suit proved nothing short of suicidal.) With the Royal Academy and its satellite salons still in the game of academicism and its discontents, he became adept at solo showmanship. As with his private exhibitions, his Peacock Room was not decor but installation.
Whistler’s portraits pack terro[i]r and not just atmosphere. The best example of this is Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, the famous painting of his mother. No print can do it justice. At a nearly square 144.3 cm x 162.4 cm and mounted on a frame of the artist’s own design, it is in every way heroic. (It hardly comes as a surprise that Thomas Carlyle would become the subject of Arrangement…No. 2). Though touted as some manner of hieratic icon, the mother of a younger god is but an elder goddess, no more static than a crocodile. Behold, the Baudelairian giantess in/action.
Early in his career, Whistler shared a mistress with Gustave Courbet: Joanna Hiffernan, she of The Origin of the World. Here she is again, revised, revisited, re-dressed, in chambered and exploratory greyscale.
James Abbot MacNeill Whistler. Arrangement in Gray and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother. Oil on canvas. 144.3 cm x 162.4 cm. 1871. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
———— and Thomas Jeckyll. Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood. 1877. 421.6 cm × 613.4 cm × 1026.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
————. Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Oil on canvas. 215 cm × 108 cm. 1861-62. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.