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Books: Scorpions & Butterflies

4 minute read
TIME

THE WORLD OF JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER (255 pp.)—Horace Gregory—Nelson ($5).

He affected a laugh so bloodcurdling that Actor Henry Irving imitated it for dramatic moments in Shakespeare’s plays. He often signed his paintings with a butterfly armed with a scorpionlike tail. He inspired much of Trilby’s demonic master villain, Svengali. His mistress-of-the-hour strutted nudely past his devout Episcopalian mother, neither one guessing that posterity would make James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s mother the most renowned artist’s model of all time.

“Few men are life-size,” Whistler once said—and fewer still combine the gall, gallantry and genius with which Whistler fashioned a larger-than-life legend. Poet and Critic Horace (Amy Lowell) Gregory skirts the legend, feeling that many of the stories are in their anecdotage. He sacrifices color for perspective, but even a toned-down Whistler is no still life.

West Point Esthete. “I do not choose to be born at Lowell,” said Massachusetts’ James Whistler in later life, but he was, on July 10, 1834. The boy’s father, a West Point engineer, shortly obliged him with a surrogate birthplace (St. Petersburg) by accepting Czar Nicholas I’s commission to build a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad. When the elder Whistler died in a cholera epidemic, James was old enough to enter West Point. In a chemistry exam, Cadet Whistler identified silicon as a gas, and West Point decided to do without him. “If silicon had been a gas,” Whistler used to say, “I would have been a major-general.”

Nursing a bruised ego and a gift for sketching, the 21-year-old Whistler embarked for Paris and the studio of French Painter Gustave Courbet. From Courbet he acquired his early brush strokes, his first model-mistress, Eloise, and a point of view: “Beauty is truth.” This creed spurred the art-for-art’s-sake movement with which an entire generation of painters and writers thwacked at the Victorian taste for the didactic, the sentimental and the morally elevating. From London (where he moved in 1859), Whistler deployed his canvases like troops in this avant-garde campaign. The fury to which he goaded proper Victorians bubbled over in 1877 when Ruskin, the reigning art pundit of the day, wrote that Whistler was “a coxcomb, flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” At a farcical libel trial in which one of Whistler’s paintings was displayed upside down and the jury mistook a Titian for a Whistler, the painter won damages of 1 farthing.

Under One Roof. With his monocle, his grey, lavender-tinted gloves, his white forelock setting off Italianate good looks, Whistler cultivated an exotic showmanship to mask self-doubts about his craft. The company he kept added a satanic touch by being mad, neurasthenic, and sexually deviate or profligate. The most colorful of the odd lot was Charles Augustus Howell. One of his exploits was to dig up the coffin of Elizabeth Rossetti by moonlight to retrieve a manuscript her grieving husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had buried with the body. Howell housed his wife, a bevy of artistically inclined mistresses, and half a dozen children under the same roof. Howell kept the girls busy forging art works, and in particular a set of obscene etchings, which he peddled as originals.

Against such a background, Artist Whistler deserves more credit than he usually gets, Author Gregory believes. He sees Whistler as a proto-impressionist, as an early Western exponent of Japanese and Chinese techniques, and as the experimental godfather of modern nonobjective painting. Less debatably, Author Gregory ranks Whistler as a culture hero who refused to play drawing-room jester to Victorian philistines and who always regarded art as a basic necessity, not a superficial luxury of civilized life.

Post-Office Immortal. In his last years, Whistler was racked by debts, and fought a losing battle of telegraphic wits with Oscar Wilde. Whistler’s best was the telegram he sent to the church where Wilde held his wedding: FEAR I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO REACH YOU IN TIME FOR THE CEREMONY. DON’T WAIT. Had he lived to his centenary (he died in 1903), the aristocratic Whistler would have been crushed by something far smaller than a telegram. His Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, as Whistler titled the portrait of his mother, achieved the sentimental distinction of gracing a 3¢ stamp. With stamp collectors, at least, the waspish dandy had become an immortal.

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