“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique; and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have to know much more than I know. But every now and then it happens that a musician or painter or sculptor is not satisfied with his own art, but uses mine; and then I have him!”
“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,” says Mrs. Ogi.
James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work. These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a leisure-class portrait-painter.
Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a major in the United States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was “deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of our ruling classes.
Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by letters to the newspapers.
To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply. Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly.
Whistler was not content to be a great painter; he was also a lecturer, man of letters, and historian. His idea was that when he overcame one of his enemies by a witty retort he made history, and when he collected these retorts and the stories of his quarrels into a book, he wrote history. The collecting was suggested to him by a journalist, who proposed the title, and was authorized to gather the various items from newspaper files. After the work was done and the book prepared and printed, Whistler decided to take the credit for himself, so he sent the journalist a check for ten pounds and dismissed him. Naturally the poor fellow insisted that he had rights in the matter, and tried to bring out the book in Belgium and in Paris. Whistler pursued him and had him arrested and heavily fined; he took over the man’s idea and title, and so we have the beautiful volume with the fancy butterflies. Whistler’s conduct throughout the affair was brutal, and his book I am inclined to call the most hateful thing in print. Its content is the egotism of a highly intelligent and persistent hornet.
Whistler has, to be sure, some ideas to advocate. He reprints a lecture called “Ten O’clock,” named from the after-dinner hour at which it was given in London. To his well-fed audience he explained that art is for artists, who alone can understand it; art has nothing to do with the people, who only degrade it when they touch it. Moreover, art has no concern with morality, whether individual or national; “in no way do our virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its triumph.”
As for painting, Whistler declared it to be a matter of the arrangement of line, form and color; it has nothing to do with any other idea, not even with the subject being painted. To quote the painter’s own words: “The subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of color.” In order to emphasize this point of view Whistler took to calling his portraits by such names as “Harmony in Green and Rose,” “Caprice in Blue and Silver,” “Symphony in White,” “Variations in Violet and Green,” “Arrangement in Black and Gray.” One of his most famous paintings showed fireworks at night, and was called “Nocturne in Black and Gold.” John Ruskin wrote of it: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” So there was a picturesque and sensational libel suit, and the jury awarded Whistler damages of one farthing, that is, half a cent. That was not enough to pay his lawyer’s fees, and so the painter went into bankruptcy and spent a few years in Europe.
What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races. Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind, they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely parasitic females.