Art: Pleasures of the Iron Butterfly

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Quite the Grandma Moses, in fact; yet he seems to have had no homosexual life. A stream of cocottes, demireps and actresses passed through his London and Paris studios, leaving their traces — pert, sly, lascivious — in images like Red and Pink: La Petite Mephisto, circa 1880, with its wanton froth of tulle gleaming like a nocturnal peony from the sullen red room. He was the Watteau of the music halls, and his nude drawings are carried out with a tender, nervous line that, heightened with flicks of chalk, does recall that master. But his main inspiration for such work was Japanese ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world), the scenes of the Edo print. Whistler loved these, and in Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864, his red-haired Irish mistress Jo Heffernan, dressed as a geisha, is seen studying what might be some Hiroshige woodblock prints.

If Whistler had been content to do pieces of studio exotica and Japonaiserie, he would not have his place in art history. He wanted to go further, integrating the "Japanese aesthetic" into the texture of late 19th century European experience. Whistler was enraptured by the half-seen, the evanescent, the image that vanishes almost before it can be named. Hence his predilection for moments in the life of landscape that are about to slide into illegibility: the moody vistas like Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach, 1870-75, in which forms preserve the last vestiges of themselves—boat, horizon, crane, bridge—before they are utterly lost in the blue darkness; the fog scenes with their pearly chaos, or the tiny seascape sketches in which a mood is fixed with seeming instantaneity, each ribbon and bubble in the paint surface corresponding by inspired accident to a wavelet, a patch of foam or a pebble. With their elegant abstractions and syncopations of form, such paintings look back to the high decorative art of the Edo period, to Ogata Korin or Suzuki Kiitsu; but they also look forward, in their indeterminacy, to Monet's water lilies at Giverny.

Whistler loathed narrative and fervently espoused the idea of art for art's sake. Hence his abstract and musical titles—"Arrangement, " "Symphony" and the like. In France, where he had studied, this desire for an amoral, formalized art had been mooted 40 years earlier by writers like Théophile Gautier. But in London it was quite new (the time lag across the Channel was immense), and in making propaganda for it, Whistler became a scandalous figure. When the dying industrial baron in Kipling's The "Mary Gloster "(1894) speaks to his effeminate son, one knows he has Whistler's influence in mind:

. . .the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live. For you muddled with books and pictures, an 'china an'etchin 's an 'fans, And your rooms at college was beastly—more like a whore's than a man's;

Such was the dread influence of the Aesthetic Movement, whose dragon Whistler became.