James MacNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces - Softcover

Curry, David Park

9780917046674: James MacNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0917046676 ISBN 13: 9780917046674

Publisher: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2005

A maestro of modernism who made calculated use of tradition, James McNeill Whistler (1834-"1903) was one of the most easily misinterpreted artists of the later nineteenth century. His emphatically aesthetic paintings, drawings, and prints--"made the more inscrutable by his purposefully confusing titles--"remain uneasy pieces to the present day. In

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Review:

In this remarkably wide-ranging and imaginatively illustrated study, Whistler scholar David Park Curry quotes a querulous contemporary critic who complained, "A gallery does not suffice for Mr. Whistler. He needs a stage." Indeed he did, and Curry ably demonstrates the ways in which the painter--who was briefly an actor—seized center stage for himself, and startled the art world with a noisy injection of theatrical ideas. Curry proves that Whistler's drive to abstraction wasn't his only modern aspect: he was an Abominable Showman who shook up installation practice, courted fame via scandal, and knew art for art’s sake could also be, as he said of his epochal 1883 Arrangement in White and Yellow show, a "great Shebang." Curry doesn't just reproduce Whistler's sensitive Venice etchings and Ruskin-enraging paintings, he describes their influences and impact. It's illuminating to see Whistler's Rembrandtesque self-portrait next to his depictions by William Merritt Chase and Max Beerbohm, and Aubrey Beardsley's portrait of him as Pan alongside Mapplethorpe's scarily similar Self-Portrait with Horns. Curry’s eight essays are eye-opening, the 382 illustrations eye-delighting. And the Punch cartoon showing pre-Whistler art patrons zooming around a gallery clad in "Edison’s Anti-Gravitation Under-Clothing" made me laugh out loud. --Tim Appelo

About the Author:

David Park Curry is a distinguished curator and scholar of American art. He is the senior curator of decorative arts, American painting, and sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art. In addition, Curry has served as curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, and the Freer Gallery of Art.

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