The Self-Created Genius of James McNeill Whistler
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Posted by Meg Nola Dec 12, 2008 |
For many artists, the creation of a unique persona and lifestyle is as interesting as creating the art itself. Never one to quietly accept what he’d been handed, the great James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) rejected the notion of being born in sensible Lowell, Massachusetts and instead invented more interesting backdrops for his coming into being. ("I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell….") While his actual and not fabricated childhood was in Europe, he found himself putting in an incongruous stint at West Point Academy following the death of his father. He then headed to Paris to pursue the whole bohemian artist experience before eventually making London his home base.
Robert M. Crunden’s book American Salons features fascinating characters like Whistler who reinvented themselves between the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the process changed the course of art, fiction, poetry, music and life in general. Here is an excerpt regarding Whistler’s painting method:
Nature gave him its inspiration, while the Japanese gave him intuitions about what to do with it…He had a large palette, a board two feet by three with a butterfly inlaid at one corner, on which he laid out his colors, the pure at the top. He then mixed large quantities of the prevailing color in the intended picture, producing results so juicy that he called it “sauce”…[h]e had to lay his canvas on the ground because the sauce would run if the canvas were in any way tilted -- sometimes it did anyway, and he often accepted the accidental results…He designed special frames, to make the whole a complete ensemble. He had to invent everything, for no one had ever proceeded in this manner before.
Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.
If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this. (James McNeill Whistler)
