Review of James McNeill Whistler – a thrilling, captivating blockbuster from the artist who revolutionized Britain | Drawing

Meit is odd, strange, unforgettable. Anna McNeill Whistler’s face is hard, dull and cold as she looks at her son. He is like a sculpture from an ancient tomb painted by an aesthete’s dream. Silver Starbursts danced across the curtain in front of him as he sat grim as death. Yet by painting her in silhouette, drawing on her black dress in his vision, Whistler transforms her into a symbol of art for art’s sake.

At least this is one way of looking at the masterpiece that the Musée d’Orsay has lent to Tate Britain stars in the allure and appeal of an American artist who delighted and humiliated late Victorian Britain. He competed with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde for the leadership of the Aesthetic Movement who had the courage to say that art had no responsibility to reflect real life or to have moral goals. The cosmic veil is a carefully crafted model of Whistler’s Mother adding to the original manifesto of the movement, Gray and Black No 1. Even when I am painting my mother, says Whistler, “I prepare for her”.

Yet in this brilliant show you see that, like Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, he himself is another Mother. Anna McNeill Whistler’s abstract vision of beautiful life and reality are two aspects of Whistler himself. Some want to paint beauty for beauty’s sake while the other just looks hard, suspicious of the glitz it creates.

At the end of the museum from his mother hangs his 1860s Wapping masterpiece. The surface of the Thames glistens yellow and brown amidst the multitude of cruise ships and yachts in what used to be the most famous harbor in the world: the sparkling colors of the water look beautiful until you realize that they are probably caused by faeces, piss and god knows what else. In the foreground, a woman and two men chat casually on the dock: Artist and Whistler enthusiast Joanna Hiffernan leans back curiously.

It’s a louche, surprisingly honest evocation of modern city life. The only other artists who painted like this in 1860 were French. Whistler had spent a long time in Paris amidst the avant garde and imitating Courbet’s style. But the reality was much more difficult. When industrial capitalism dissolved in the past, Manet led the way to paint a cold movement, different from modern bars, cafes, boudoirs. In Wapping, Whistler brings Manet’s eye to London. He also records the reality of the East End docks in black etchings. Surfers share news at Rotherhithe pub in front of the tall sisters; the people on the beach keep quiet about their drinks.

Then, in 1865, Whistler suddenly painted the lake as silk decorated with white lace and ribbon. Green and Grey, Channel is a wonderful declaration of artistic freedom. He takes the ocean, the uncontrollable, roaring theme of Turner’s vision, and turns it into a fun game. All of this is a fantasy and a great conceit: while other artists can look at the sea in a strange way, Whistler considers it less real than himself, and arranges it in the same way that he arranges it for his mother.

This large scale exhibition follows Whistler on an ongoing quest to organize the world. It also includes a reconstruction of The Peacock Room, a famous installation he created from Frederick Leyland’s dining room, ignoring Leyland’s wishes. At the heart of the statue hangs an original painting of himself and Leyland fighting a peacock, playing against each other.

Was Whistler the first absolute modernist? His free celebrations of color and form anticipate Klimt and Pollock. You can see here why he displayed his first public attack when the old critic John Ruskin accused him of “just throwing a pot of paint in the public eye”.

Ruskin was offended by his paintings of fires on the Thames at night, although they are accurate paintings: fireworks in the dark are so spaceless and mysterious that they are not clear. to do seem unintelligible. In Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Wheel of Fire, Whistler captures a bright yellow spiral galaxy in a black wall bursting with red lights.

That movement between reality and fantasy makes his c 1872-5 work Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge one of London’s most haunting scenes. Small flashes of golden fireworks hang outside in the evening behind a support and a gentle rubber of wood, which could be a bridge to ancient Edo printed by Hiroshige. The Japanese paintings and ceramics in his collection show where Whistler found his mastery of simplicity and precision.

However you can’t just put on a kimono and run away from your skin. Whistler was his mother’s son. In Symphony in White, No 2: Little White Girl, Hiffernan stands beside a dresser, holding a Japanese fan, looking at a sparkling blue and white vase. Whistler takes a light, shiny and beautiful scene, but the deprivation of grace is brutal: his face in the mirror is tired, lost, sad. All this beauty is boring. He knows it and so does Whistler.