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<\/p>\n\u201cSome artists get put in a place that you can\u2019t get them out of,\u201d says Carol Jacobi, the curator of a new exhibition of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) at Tate Britain in London. \u201cYou can\u2019t mention one without the other: with Whistler, it\u2019s that court case.\u201d Jacobi is talking about the artist famously suing the critic John Ruskin in 1877 after the latter called him \u201ca coxcomb\u2026 flinging a pot of paint in the public\u2019s face\u201d.<\/p>\n
Being an artist of such dazzling variousness, Jacobi says, it is deeply unfair that Whistler is so firmly welded in the public imagination to such a contentious single moment\u2014if nothing else, because Whistler had a habit of squabbles, rows and contretemps throughout his career. \u201cOne of the most important aspects of the show is that he worked so hard his whole life. He was unbelievably productive. He had these beliefs about art and what an artist should be, and he put everything into that,\u201d Jacobi says. \u201cHis fights were always about art and his demand that his ideas should be respected. And if he felt they weren\u2019t respected, that\u2019s when things got, you know, controversial.\u201d<\/p>\n
As history records, Whistler won the day against Ruskin. But the case, with token damages of just a farthing, contributed significantly to his subsequent bankruptcy. The combative Whistler also fell out with the French artist Gustave Courbet over Joanna Hiffernan (the model for several of Whistler\u2019s paintings, such as Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 1864), as well as with his wealthy patron Frederick Leyland over his elaborate designs for the so-called Peacock Room in the latter\u2019s Kensington mansion.<\/p>\n
Whistler\u2019s mercurial temperament was perhaps perfectly suited to his continuous evolution as an artist, one that Jacobi is at pains to point out. \u201cHe was part of that generation that explored what it means to paint everyday life, the world around you,\u201d she says. \u201cHe\u2019s an exact contemporary of Degas and exhibited alongside Manet at the Salon des Refus\u00e9s in the 1860s; they really admired each other. Fifteen years later, they had their Impressionist exhibitions and they invited him to join them, but by then he had decided that capturing an impression of the world is not enough and an artist should be doing something extra\u2014finding a sort of a more fundamental beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is what is behind the Tate\u2019s assertion that Whistler \u201cforetold the future of Modern art\u201d. Jacobi says: \u201cHe famously said that nature is very rarely right. What is beautiful is an arrangement of colour, of line, of form. And, of course, we know that as abstraction. As he went on he seemed to be leaving behind the details of the world and that is, I think, a very early form of post-Impressionism. And it\u2019s no coincidence that his work looks so much more at home with people like Seurat or Gauguin, and that he was such a huge inspiration for Van Gogh.\u201d<\/p>\n
Loans and logistics<\/p>\n
Part of the issue, Jacobi says, behind Whistler\u2019s uncertain place in the pantheon is the difficulty of displaying all his work in the same place; conditions of various bequests make loans of some of his most high-profile paintings impossible. This show, she says, is only the fourth full survey since his death in 1903, and the UK\u2019s first since the Tate\u2019s Whistler show in 1994.<\/p>\n
Jacobi says she is particularly excited at being able to show most of Whistler\u2019s celebrated \u201cnocturnes\u201d together\u2014although Nocturne in Black and\u00a0Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), which kicked off\u00a0the legal action against Ruskin, is sadly not among them\u2014as well as showing Whistler\u2019s sketchbooks for the first time.<\/p>\n
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Whister’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold\u2014Old Battersea Bridge (around 1872-75) \u00a9 Tate<\/p>\n
The sketchbooks (complete with digital page-turning replicas) will be key in demonstrating another of the show\u2019s aims: what Jacobi calls the \u201cincredible skill and magic and variety in the way he\u2019s putting paint on canvas and the wonderful effects that he\u2019s getting\u201d, deriving from a research project that preceded the exhibition. Jacobi is also very enthusiastic about Whistler\u2019s portrait, Head of a Peasant Woman (1855-58), from his early \u201cFrench-realism\u201d period, which the research has established is his first known portrait from life.<\/p>\n
This most aesthetically oriented of painters may appear out of step with the currently politically charged climate of the art world, but Jacobi is adamant that Whistler is more relevant than ever. \u201cIt is the wonderful relationship that he explored between everyday experience and beauty, and his proposition that beauty is something necessary and important\u2014something that we need.\u201d<\/p>\n