James MacNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
James MacNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces Details
Amazon.com 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 Read more 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. Read more
Reviews
This is a very irritating book with all kinds of beautiful pictures and lots of information. The irritation is that the author feels obliged to show off and connect everything in the universe to his topic(s), and much of the time it is only vaguely relevant. We get dissertations on whiteness, and how Mies Van der Rohe uses white in his architecture, which is obviously linealy connected to Whistler, etc., etc. (not). Darwin appears because a painting was made in 1858, and it was a big year for important things like books. And so on. There is a lot of repetition, mostly unnecessary. The author really has nothing original to say that I can think of, but did a ton of research, for which one is grateful. But really, give the digressions a rest.Meanwhile, there are all these lovely pictures (there is an appendix of etchings).
