Portraits, Pastels, Prints: Whistler in The Frick Collection
June 2 through August 23, 2009
The Paintings
The five paintings on display span nearly three decades of Whistler’s career, from his trip to Chile in 1866 to his move from London to Paris as a mature artist and married man in the early 1890s. The ensemble represents the two chief genres in which he worked — portraiture and
landscape — and demonstrates the development of his artistic concerns
throughout his career. The pictures bear his characteristic titles, which in their use of such terms as “Symphony,” “Arrangement,”
and “Harmony” invoke the abstract nature of music, regarded in
the nineteenth century as the purest of art forms. With them,
Whistler asserted the precedence of formal elements over content. Yet
the images vividly convey the essence of their subjects, whether the
calming rhythms of ocean waves under an overcast sky or the willful
flair of Lady Meux. These works demonstrate that his aesthetic and
representational aims were in fact often mutually reinforcing. The
butterfly monogram he developed from his initials and began to use in place of a signature in the late 1860s underscores this dual pursuit.
Like only a few other artists represented in the collection, Whistler
was a contemporary of Henry Clay Frick, though the collector would
not acquire any of his work until more than a decade after the artist’s
death. These paintings, purchased by Frick between 1914 and 1919,
reveal Whistler’s admiration for many of the same masters — Velázquez,
Hals, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough, among them — esteemed by the
collector. Today, as then, Whistler’s works appeal as declarations of
a personal idiom achieved through the synthesis of Eastern and
Western conventions, embrace of avant-garde ideals, and continuity
with the grand tradition of European art. |
