Episode 63: James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1, The White Girl (1862)
VOICE 1: Okay. I see a young woman maybe in her early 20s or late teens. She seems quite young and she's standing quite plainly in a long flowing white dress.
VOICE 2: And it's long and rectangular. So it just really shows like the length of the lady. It's quite beautiful.
VOICE 1: And her hair is brilliant, red colored hair, kind of disheveled. It's not neatly coiffed, I guess.
VOICE 3: Striking red hair. It's almost like a fox's hair.
VOICE 1: She's holding a white flower in her left hand. Behind her is what looks like maybe very thick white curtains.
VOICE 3: She's almost fading into the curtain, but her red hair really makes her stand out. So you get the sense that she's got a lot of power and strength to be all in white and standing out against her white backdrop.
VOICE 4: She looks very almost similar to, I guess, a person today. But the dress is definitely like of that time.
VOICE 5: It's got long sleeves and white cuffs and the sleeves are has a little more gray in it. There's a belt around the bodice - is that what you call that? With a bow. It looks like silk.
VOICE 3: Reminds me almost of a waterfall. It's like the the froth just kind of cascading down, although it's very long and straight, doesn't have a lot of waist or ripples, but it sort of has that falling look.
VOICE 6: The dress looks kind of like a wedding dress.
VOICE 7: It looks very religious, kind of reminiscent of the dresses that people put their children in to be christened or baptized or for their first communion.
VOICE 5: I don't know, maybe a prom dress at the time. She's...she's going to the prom.
VOICE 6: So with with the white dress and the flowers, it kind of makes me feel like maybe a spurned lover, you know, someone who was jilted at the altar.
VOICE 5: She has kind of a faraway look like she's contemplating something.
VOICE 4: Either just woke up or maybe going to bed.
VOICE 1: You're standing on the edge of a lake and there's this, like, angelic female being that's like kind of wispy at the edges. So a little ethereal, that's coming to you from across the lake to tell you something, to warn you something. She disappears into smoke.
VOICE 8: I mean, classic purity, chastity, virginity.
VOICE 3: It makes her seem kind of fierce, like she's so angelic and beautiful and pure, but she's has kind of conquered this wolf on the on the ground.
VOICE 5: She's standing on a rug that disturbs me because it's a dead animal.
VOICE 9: I see a dog hiding in the carpet.
VOICE 3: And he's also staring at me like also kind of asking, what are you doing here?
VOICE 2: I am very actively trying to avoid the wolf/bear kind of thing. That's...they're really not doing it for me.
VOICE 1: I don't know if it's a bear skin or a wolf skin rug. And that rug is on top of an antique-type blue and white Persian rug.
VOICE 9: And there are some flowers on the bear between her dress and the bear's face in the foreground.
VOICE 3: She's even dropped some flowers onto the wolf. So it's sort of like her dropping the mic on this wolf that she's sort of very casually conquered.
VOICE 2: All we get to see of their lives is like this, this particular picture. So it just makes me think about, like, what their lives were like, what it looked like. They were so young and got to sit for this incredible painters. But but what else do we know about their lives? And I don't know anything.
[Opening credits]
Let’s run an experiment together. “How much can you tell about a person by their signature?”
[Sound of keys typing.]
Shush, this is science, go with it. What does your signature say about you? How to tell your true personality from your signature? 14 types of signatures you must avoid. Ah, here we go.
Unclear: you are arrogant.
Underline: you lack confidence.
Short signature: you’re impatient.
Period: you’re a titan of industry!
Upward slant: you think about the future…?
Butterfly with a long stinger, you’re a painter of incredible aesthetic subtlety and quiet grace who goes out of his way to approach the world with the kind of smug combativeness that even has Oscar Wilde telling you to tone down a notch. Hm. So in other words, hey Muhammad Ali, the American ex-pat Gilded Age painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler called. He wants his motto back.
So… I didn’t realize Whistler was such a piece of work. I mean, his paintings are so… quiet. Serene. Lovely. His colors, in the words of the late, great New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, look as though they were “exhaled onto the surface.” This is the same painter who is known for a portrait of his mother that has gone down in art history as one of the most Victorian, dowdy, and humorless renderings of a woman ever committed to canvas. And this is also the same painter who could paint a woman in a white dress who is totally unpretentious, yet as elegant as a bride. But you guys, I should have noticed the growling wolfskin rug she’s standing on top of. This painting, “Symphony in White, No. 1, The White Girl” was painted a full decade before Whistler perfected and started implementing his infamous stinging butterfly signature, but the message is still there, loud and clear. By all means, it says, admire the languid beauty of Whistler’s paintings. But don’t cross him.
The story of Whistler is best told as a story, starting at the beginning and moving chronologically through his life, where, like we saw with Caravaggio in episode 60, the paintings of a very public punk responded to that punk’s circumstances. Whistler was born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts, although he decided later on to claim that he’d been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he later moved at the age of 8, claiming that “I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell.” Burn. So that really gives you the sense of the kind of kid he reportedly was: moody and unfocused, brilliant and obnoxious. It was in St. Petersburg, where his father was transferred to design railroads for Nicholas the first, where Whistler first started taking private art lessons, and at age 10, his mother was given the report from a noted artist that “your little boy has uncommon genius, but do not urge him beyond his inclination.” He lived up to that advice, imagining an art career, but making a pit stop beforehand at West Point Military Academy, where he was skillful at both drawing maps and little caricatures of mermaids and whales in the margins, and was then summarily kicked out for being sarcastic, rebellious, and growing his curly hair too long like a damn beatnik. He packed his bags, moved to Paris to pursue art professionally, and never came back to the United States.
Once in Paris, Whistler fell in with the kind of set you’d imagine for a rebel artist without a cause: Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, who actually very much identified a cause for them all to explore: Modernism itself. We’ve looked before at the origins of modernism in mid-19th century Paris, particularly Sargent in episode 11, where the most important – and revolutionary – characteristics of painting were, quite simply, to show how wholly secular, how ordinary, the subject of a painting could be. After centuries of church control, biblical narrative, mythological allegory, and the inner turmoil of the post-Enlightenment Romantics, what could be more revolutionary than showing life exactly as it was, that is, mundane, boring? This movement, later classified as Realism, aimed to simply show reality, life being lived in all its unvarnished truth. Baudelaire challenged artists to scrutinize the world, life, and nature, and depict it faithfully, without heroics, flowery descriptions, rhetoric. And so you end up with paintings that can seem, on their surface, kind of…meh? People going about their business, going to work, hanging laundry, sharing a pint. They are kind of boring, that is, until you realize how brave a statement these artists were making, how revelatory they were in opening up painting to the masses, and the classes, that is, for the first time ever, the lower classes. Take Courbet’s “Burial at Ornans” from 1849, a huge history painting for modern times. It’s a bleak funeral in the rural French town of Ornans, focusing on unidealized, mostly lower-class mourners. The painting’s composition is intentionally off-kilter; the figures are mostly interacting with one another, except the few staring right at us, implicating us as participants, present at this grim scene, and standing in front of the unceremonious hole in the center, the grave, which is cut off. Whoever’s going in it is not the point, which is the case for so many people. And maybe there’s something heroic about acknowledging that, and especially rendering it on a 22-foot-long canvas.
This is a political act, drawing attention to a socio-economic population that had been historically overlooked, and Courbet has largely been seen as a political painter. But something else happens, too, when you’re painting things as they are, without sentimentality, or morality, or even commentary. Something that’s not political at all, even if it’s also revolutionary. Another poet-philosopher of the group, Theophile Gautier, was considered the founder of what would become the Aesthetic movement, where Whistler ultimately found his home. Gautier popularized the phrase “l’art pour l’art,” “art for art’s sake,” meaning that art doesn’t need to have some higher purpose, some didactic lesson, some moral takeaway – instead, it can be independent of, in Whistler’s words, “all that claptrap.” It can just be beautiful. It can stand alone. It can, as Whistler continues, “appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding these with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like.” You know, the demons you must slay to achieve success, as Mr. Burns would say. Furthermore, the capital-A Aesthetics continued, the artist’s responsibility was not to society, or to nature, but to himself. If he has the opportunity to improve upon the world he sees, it’s his job to do so, for “nature is very rarely right.” Of course, we have a paradox here: how can an artist both be true to the natural world without embellishment and believe it’s his responsibility to improve upon it? Hold that thought, because we’ll come back to it.
But whether or not you believe that, hypothetically, art that is divorced from all social, societal, or human sentiment is a good thing, or even possible, it’s interesting to look at their actual paintings that they believed embodied these values. Because this art is by no means fascist or robotic. In fact, it’s really, really beautiful. These paintings focus on color and line, movement and grace. And to accentuate these characteristics, Whistler named the bulk of his paintings for music: symphonies, arrangements, nocturnes, all alluding to the same sense of the coming together of individual instruments in an orchestra, or aesthetic conventions on a canvas, to create a harmonious whole. In fact, Whistler’s mother, from 1871, is actually titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” and is meant not as an exercise not in drab filial devotion, but monochrome in paint. It’s first and foremost about aesthetics. He uses an intentionally constrained, austere palette to capture the diversity of shapes, while still rendering the unvarnished specificity of her face and hands and the lacy bonnet and handkerchief, as they emerge, contrasting, from the large black mass of her dress. It’s wonderfully reminiscent of another dowdy crone in black, Degas’ Aunt Fanny from a year later, which we looked at in episode 4, not just for the grim expressions of sitters who look as though they’d rather be anywhere else, but because these portraits aren’t telling their stories so much as the story of the entire movement they find themselves in.
But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s jump back a decade to Whistler and his buddies in Paris in the mid-1850s, and then to London, where he moved to permanently in 1859, although he traveled back to Paris frequently after that. The constrained palette and musical titles, which we later see in Whistler’s mother, were part of his work from the jump. And this becomes clear when we come to our painting of the day, and his first big, famous splash onto the scene: “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl,” from 1862. It’s an absolute stunner: standing at 7 ft tall, a beautiful girl with large green eyes and long red hair worn loose, stands in a simple, elegant, cream-colored dress, holding a simple, elegant flower, against a simple, elegant, cream-colored backdrop, standing on a bearskin rug atop an understated blue oriental rug. And what all of this simple elegance amounts to is that it’s an artwork that’s meant to tell the story of artistry, and nothing else: the woman is a passive, decorative figure, not actively participating in a narrative, instead just a model who has dropped her pose at the end of a long session, her hair down, and dressed in the 19th century equivalent of a housecoat. This moment is realistic in that she’s no one and actually very much someone, that is, a woman named Joanna Hiffernan, who was his primary model for a decade. Hiffernan was an Irish ex-pat artist who managed his studio and his financial affairs, who was his power of attorney and his sole financial heir, and who even ended up raising his illegitimate son – not hers – in 1870 until her death in 1886 at the age of 52. The point is, when you consider the role of figures in paintings, you expect her to both be playing a narrative role – goddess, queen, wife – and to have no external life outside the frame. A painting that honors Realism subverts both of those expectations: here is a real person who, for the purposes of the painting, is simply a model, simply showing that a painting can fundamentally be about capturing a figure and her simple elegant space, harmoniously.
But for a painting that was meant, by design, to say so little, it certainly got tongues a-waggling. It was rejected by both the Royal Academy in London and the Salon in Paris, although was eventually accepted by the Salon de Refuse, the Salon of the Refused, an independent exhibition spearheaded by Courbet and his friends in 1863. Whistler exhibited this painting alongside Manet’s infamous “Dejeuner sur l’herbe,” “Luncheon in the Grass,” and the pair of paintings got into their fair share of mischief. Art for its own sake was still a revolutionary idea, especially as it played out in Realism - Manet’s scandal came from the merging of model and real life, the naked-not-nude woman in the grass lunching with clothed men, which, as with many of the paintings that got Manet in trouble, was a trope that was actually borrowed from art history, specifically Titian’s “Pastoral Concert” from around 1509. But the difference is that here, it’s been given Manet’s trademark cringy spin: the woman is not an allegory or apparition but most likely a very real prostitute, alluding to a very real reality of the mid-century French bourgeoisie, which was not one they wanted to talk about in polite company or have displayed on their hallowed Salon walls. Still, the painting’s infamy helped to boost Whistler’s; both paintings were seen by critics as making a big capital S statement with their subject matter. And Manet’s did make a statement – about art history, about contemporary audiences, about class. But Whistler’s painting did not. No big statement. It was just supposed to be art for its own sake. No matter what those fucking critics said.
Now, why it was so important for critics to pull meaning out of this painting isn’t really our concern here, beyond the fact that Victorian Era critics, as we’ve discussed, were used to paintings meaning things. But for our purposes, what this criticism really did was solidify Whistler’s hatred of critics, who seemed to willfully ignore what he was trying to do – which, as you can imagine from what you already know about him, only pissed him off even more. Because what they did was to look for every bit of allegorical meaning they could squeeze from this painting. A painting that he already said, with Seinfeldian assurance, was about nothing. It was a formalist exercise not unlike how he would later describe the portrait of his mother. “My painting,” he said, “simply represents a girl in white standing in front of a white curtain.” But oh no no, the critics said, it was about a ghost, a bride, maybe a ghost bride, definitely about innocence lost. I mean, see the virginal white lily? See the lusty, masculine bear head? Heck, maybe she’s the Virgin Mary. Maybe she’s the heroine of Wilkie Collins’ novel “The Woman in White.” A book that Whistler said, adamantly, he had never read.
His pushback against his critics culminated in an actual libel lawsuit in 1877 against the noted Victorian critic John Ruskin. We’ve talked about Ruskin before, mostly to point out what a mimsy priss he was, but here it finally got him, and criticism going forward, in trouble. Specifically because of his review of Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket” from 1875, a pluming abstract painting of fireworks in nighttime priced at the relatively steep amount of 200 guineas. What impudence, Ruskin wrote, to ask for that kind of a sum for “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler took Ruskin to court, and, incredibly, won, changing the face of art criticism pretty much permanently, as now critics, who had previously been seen as the voice of truth, even the voice of God, were now actually seen for what they were: the voices of men. Subjective, with opinions that were formed by their own preferences, their own movements. It’s not the fault of Aesthetics like Whistler that Ruskin came up Victorian, and held painting to Victorian standards. And guess what…it’s not Ruskin’s fault either.
But I should also be clear: there is no real winner here. Because the critics had a point when they held Whistler to account for the ambiguities, even contradictions, in his philosophy. Remember I said before that we would come back to that central paradox: how an artist squares the circle of both being true to the natural world without embellishment and believe it’s his responsibility to improve upon it. Spoiler, he doesn’t square it. He just does it, and the critics noticed. That said, other times they just seemed to be messing with him, willfully ignoring what he did well and delighting in kicking his hornet’s nest, like when they pointed out for a painting that was all about aesthetics, his third in his series of symphonies in white, he featured a woman in a yellow dress. And I’m with Whistler when he asks if they also expect a symphony in the key of F to only contain the F note. That said, if Whistler is going to claim that his work is purely aesthetic, purely about color and form and completely divorced from society, how does he account for the clear influence of the British pre-Raphaelites in his painting of Joanna Hiffernan, and in his other women in white, who lie languidly with their long faces and brilliant eyes and rich loose hair, and who absolutely positively reference the very same bible stories and allegories that occupy pre-Raphaelites canvases, a movement that was particularly beloved by, you guessed it, John Ruskin? Whistler was a known friend and admirer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the el hefe of Pre-Raphaelites. He knew what he was referencing. And he knew what they were referencing.
And this is why Whistler’s victory over Ruskin hasn’t gone down as an unmitigated success for artists everywhere. Whistler’s attitude essentially served to ruin his own reputation, at least while he was alive. He couldn’t seem to keep a friend, really, besides Joanna Hiffernan. He was a great buddy to Oscar Wilde, and even credited for some of Wilde’s zingers, only to lose him in a series of public spats, which itself culminated in Wilde “symbolically murdering him” by basing the doomed artist character of Basil from The Picture of Dorian Gray on Whistler. I’m not going to spoil it entirely, but suffice to say, his murder is described with a side of relish. Poor guy. It takes a particular kind of self-centered waspishness to lose the bitchy conspiratorial confidence of Oscar Freaking Wilde, and yet “Whistler,” Wilde wrote, “spelled art with a capital ‘I’.”
And I, for one, am still surprised by all of this, even though I see Whistler’s signature, and the bear under Joanna’s feet, and almost feel like I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t, and, and you probably didn’t too, and to that end, it’s remarkable how Whistler’s reputation in his afterlife doesn’t seem to precede him, or even define him. His paintings, divorced from his person, are simply gorgeous. They are true examples of what happens when you remove an artwork from commentary, politics, even the punkish peccadilloes of the artist. They just become shapes, line, arrangements, symphonies, artistry, even if they’re existing within a very real world.
And to that end, I’m grateful to know this background, to understand the stingers and barbs and slings and arrows that make his humane style of painting also deeply human. The reality of a painting can also be the reality of a model who is tired of posing and just wants to get back to her life. Great art, and great artists, can contain both butterflies and bees. And maybe there’s something heroic about acknowledging that.