Volume 42, Number 9 · May 25, 1995
Supreme Outsider
By John Golding
James McNeill Whistler 28-August 20, 1995
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, May
James McNeill Whistler
by Richard Dorment, by Margaret F. MacDonald
Abrams, 336 pp., $75.00
James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth
by Ronald Anderson, by Anne Koval
Carroll and Graf, 416 pp., $30.00
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
by James McNeill Whistler
Dover, 340 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Whistler on Art: Selected Letters and Writings of James McNeill Whistler
edited by Nigel Thorp
Smithsonian, 192 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The case of Whistler is an odd one. He became one of the most influential artists of his age, and his influence spread insidiously, like a stain, over generations of artists. His early work was admired by such giants as Courbet, Manet, and Degas; yet his total output of paintings was relatively small, and he produced a mere handful of individual works that could be described as having international importance. He was a celebrated wit and a dazzling conversationalist, but in the final analysis his mind was inferior to its intellectual pretensions. The famous 'Ten o'Clock' lecture, which he first delivered in 1885, for example, is in reality little more than the frothiest gloss on the aesthetic of art for art's sake enunciated by Théophile Gautier sixty years earlier.
Review, 4762 words
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