Art: Pleasures of the Iron Butterfly

On his 150th anniversary, fresh views of Whistler

Among the thousands of nasty quips and barbed conceits that James Abbott McNeill Whistler sped at the world, the only one that everyone knows is perhaps apocryphal. Oscar Wilde, in admiration of some Whistlerian mot: "Jimmy, I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." In all his long career Whistler produced only one painting that enjoyed the same permanent celebrity as this riposte, and it, of course, is Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, 1872, one of the half-dozen most famous pictures of the 19th century. The reasons for its fame are obscure and debatable, but the results are plain to see: "Whistler's Mother" swamped the rest of his output, turning him (at least in the eyes of the public after his death) into a one-painting man. A quip and a portrait of an old lady from North Carolina: on such thin pedestals do legends rest.

There was, of course, much more to Whistler, as both man and artist, than this. He has never faded from view, yet he remains poised for rediscovery; and 1984, which marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, is the right year for it. The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow has put 79 of its Whistler oils on view until November. In the U.S. the main Whistlerian event, which opened last month at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., and will run until December, is a display of paintings, drawings and notes, more than 300 in all, curated by Art Historian David Park Curry and assembled from the Freer's own collection, the world's largest source of Whistler material.

The Freer exhibition is a fascinating show, for its context as well as its contents. Charles Lang Freer, who made his millions in rolling stock in the boom railroad years of the late 19th century, was an impassioned Orientalist, a disciple of the "Boston bonzes," chiefly of Ernest Fenollosa. As Bernard Berenson fanned the ardor of the American rich for the Italian Renaissance, so Fenollosa was busy shaping American taste for Oriental art. He adored Whistler's work, calling him "the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter of East to West." Freer concurred, and in the 1890s he became Whistler's chief patron — not always an easy role, since Whistler could go for the hand that fed him like an amphetamine-crazed Doberman. Freer also consulted Whistler about his Oriental purchases, so that in Washington one can see some highly informative parallels between Whistler's work and his taste in other art. There are, for instance, two majestic Satsuma-ware sake flasks, with a glaze the color and texture of old, cracked ivory, adorned with faint blue landscape paintings by Tangen, whose ghostly suggestiveness, mere scribbles wreathing out of the whiteness as though through fog, is exactly like Whistler's own images of twilit landscape.