James McNeill Whistler, The Artist in his Studio, c.1665-6 Chicago Institute of Art
Whistler can be as difficult to pin down as the butterfly he adopted in his monogram. It makes him fascinating and frustrating in equal measure and the same could be said of Tate's once in a generation exhibition. It begins with a painting, a larger than life reproduction of the same painting and a mirror. Too tricksy by half. A pet annoyance of mine is the use of large scale reproductions in big, expensively priced shows when you've paid to see the real thing. If your pulling power is not sufficient to get a particular work then find a substitute (the Peacock Room recreation here is an exception). If you can’t make original artworks sufficiently interesting as a curator then you're in the wrong job. At best it looks like a gimmicky space filler, at worst it appears lazy. Here, with the original hanging alongside, it is just bewildering. You can make a strong case that Artist in his Studio is Whistler 101 and I’ve heard Carol Jacobi do this very effectively: him at his easel, models including one in white, Japanese objects, vacant mirror, all riffing off Velazquez but translucent, inconsequential and uncertain. The painting says it all so why is it not allowed just to speak.
A disorientating first room also tosses aside two great early portraits: Effie Deans and Maud Franklin. Their scale is grand manner, their palette muddy, the figures twist towards us emerging reluctantly from the gloom. Here they mean very little: I wanted to carry them to the end of the show and set them up up alongside a wall of great later figures, including Lady Archibald Campbell. One of the striking things about Whistler is that he remains remarkably consistent as an artist, something which the relentless chronology of the exhibition does not illustrate.
Paint dribbles down the canvas in his view of Maud Franklin. Whistler's brushes and palette are in vitrines to the side. The curators justifiably want to make a lot of his innovative technique, no underpainting, liquid pigments, scraping back. The points are much repeated but never with quite enough clarity. When it comes to printmaking the labels simply give up: you need to be something of an expert to separate lithography and lithotints. There are two intrusive and theatrical audios during the show but a simple video illustrating Whistler's technique might have been much more effective.
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James McNeill Whistler, Brown and Silver Old Battersea Bridge, c.1859-63,
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
After a lot of early faffing we get Whistler in Paris and making his first Dutch / Realist inspired works, small, tentative, mostly still prints. One of the great unanswered questions is how an artist so interested in line in could simultaneously be so obsessed with avoiding it in painting. His etchings are vividly evocative, bursting with life, energised by detail but also rooted in the past. This is an exhibition heavy on prints, perhaps too much so, but in the early stages, before visual fatigue starts to set in, they are a dynamic presence.
There's a convenient narrative that Whistler begins as a realist, influenced by the likes of Gustave Courbet, whom he painted with in Normandy, but it is difficult and ultimately rather fruitless to impose that kind of chronology. The Last of Old Westminster Bridge and Brown and Silver, Old Battersea Bridge are poles apart works from the early 1860s: the former prefigures Monet's Waterloo Bridge series with its bustling activity, whilst the latter blurs life into the misted horizontal brushstrokes of the Nocturnes. Does Whistler develop or does he just struggle to find a reconciliation between beauty and life?
In a room of glorious Nocturnes that sense of harmony is achieved. Never mind the high farce of the Ruskin libel - which barely merits a mention - and regardless of the, admittedly fascinating, in-depth analysis that reveals Whistler as an artist of precision and control, repainting his firework sparks to find the perfect balance - these works have a perfect poetry which is like a sigh of contentment. But there is an aching sadness too, for Whistler's self-destruct button which had already cost him his biggest patron, Leyland, would lead to bankruptcy, homelessness and effective exile.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1871, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The big names are here: Tate's own Symphony in White Number Two and Miss Cicely Alexander, Wapping, At the Piano, and of course Arrangement in Grey and Black Number One. Whistler's Mother is given star billing, flanked by a guard of honour of two portraits and with a bench placed in front for those who want to pay extended homage. It is worth taking a seat: overfamiliar this might be, but it is a tremendous portrait, the bottom left is in itself worth the price of admission with the canvas weave emphasising verticality in tension with the edging of the rug. And that tension hangs in exquisite balance in everywhere. The only obvious omission in what is a weighty show, is Falling Rocket, but what is really lacking is a sense of context. Whistler knew anyone and everyone, and fell out with most, but although names are dropped and occasional associations made, there is very little sense of the cultural, cosmopolitan world in which he moved.
There is inevitably a downbeat feel to the tiny tentative Venice works produced after Whistler was thrown a lifeline commission to produce a print series in the city, but Whistler was incapable of being down and out for too long. His final fame-drenched phase, as performer, theorist, teacher, society portraitist is a glorious reaffirmation which does not really get the celebration it deserves. Partly perhaps it is a result to his palette increasingly dominated by low key browns, partly because the exhibition has failed to carry through the ebbs and flows of his career. Perhaps the lack of focus here is deliberate; perhaps you are meant to leave feeling ambivalent about Whistler the man and unsure about his art. Perhaps, however, it is a failure of nerve. Despite its edgy opening, this is a conventional, chronological show about an artist who did his best to defy convention at every turn.
