The Whistler book

by Sadakichi Hartmann

"Humanity takes the place of art, and God's creations are excused by their usefulness. Beauty is confounded with virtue and, before a work of art, it is asked: 'What good shall it do?'"

"Hence it is that nobility of action in his life is hopelessly linked with the merit of the work that portrays it; and thus the people have acquired the habit of looking, as who should say, not at a picture, but through it, at some human fact, that shall, not from a social point of view, better their mental or moral state. So we have come to hear of the painting that elevates, and the duty of the painter—of the picture that is full of thought and of the panel that merely decorates."

Whistler fought principally for three big ideas:

"That the main object of painting was to express the beauty of the technical medium unalloyed by any exterior motive, independent of time and place."

"That art was not restricted to any special locality, but universal, cosmopolitan."

"That art could be understood only by the artist and that all criticism consequently was futile occupation."

All these arguments have sifted down into the rank and file of the profession, they have become common property and are continually used in the every-day conversations of artists. They are all three open to criticism, and in a way (like all things, according to Walt Whitman) have done as much harm as good.

That the main object of art is art, cannot be confuted. But what is art in painting! Is all poetry and sentiment in a painting to be expressed by the actual handling of the colours, the process of handling and the mechanism of brushwork! Can all the poetry be contained in the objects themselves and the way they are painted? It has become the fashion of artists to say that they are painters, not artists.

Now what do they mean by this? What is a painter? A person who can handle the brush and who knows colour, or, in other words, who masters the tool of his trade. And what is an artist? The term artist is not limited to one profession. It applies to a musician or a sculptor as well as painter. In calling somebody an artist we mean to convey that he has a poetic conception in his work. But he must surely possess an equal mastery of technique or he would be unable to express it. And is the painter absolutely void of poetic conception? Surely not. He tries to get the poetry out of the medium itself, while the artist adds something from the outside to the medium. In that sense Abbott Thayer, Ryder and Inness are artists, Sargent and Chase are painters. But how about Chavannes, Whistler, Israels? I suppose they are both. There we are in a dilemma. They oppose subject painting; the beauty of the object, the poetry that is inherent in what they see before them, is supposed to be sufficient. But they object to the phrase that they are merely interested in surface beauty, they assert that they search for character and the inner meaning of things as much as anybody else. In this they contradict their own and Whistler's argument. Whistler himself was all his life a subject painter. Of course he has avoided telling stories, but he has suggested them, and given to each picture that vague note of interest which every true painting should possess. The main purpose is to make the picture more interesting. And you cannot make a picture more interesting without adding something. Painting for painting's sake is an impossibility. One cannot translate nature and life into colour without the help of the imagination. A little more or less, what is the difference?

The second claim, that all art is cosmopolitan, has been welcomed by all our ex-patriots, who have neither the strength nor the inclination to discover virgin material in their own country and to translate it into beauty. It furnishes a marvellous loop-hole for the imitative talent. Whistler said: "There is no such thing as English art—art is art when it is good enough." This is at its best merely a truism. We perfectly agree that only good workmanship makes a painting worthy of the name of art, but surely Hogarth, Gainsborough and Constable have a true native flavour in their work, which they could have gained nowhere but on British soil. All art, when perfect, can command universal appreciation, but it is perfect in most instances only when it has, perhaps not so much a local interest, but a local motive or stimulant, i. e. it must have inhaled the atmosphere of some peculiar locality and the faculty to exude it again. I believe, Whistler used his argument largely as a subterfuge, to hide his own enthusiasm for Japanese art. He understood how to amalgamate the foreign influences and his own individuality (this I have analyzed at length in some other chapter). His art in a sense was cosmopolitan, but merely because he was the first to adopt the new principles of an Eastern art; and it is just as easy to trace American as Japanese or Old Master traits in his work. I claim that all great art is local, and mention only three of the greatest painters, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Dürer, to prove my argument. They surely were imbued with the spirit of their time and country. And I am equally certain that a painter who would express America as it is to-day (as Whitman has done in his time in literature) would be a greater man than Whistler. The foremost masters of the nineteenth century, Monet, Manet, Chavannes, and Whistler, were all innovators in technical problems, for they discovered new mediums of expression, and, in a way, only prepared the way for more concentrated expressions of art.