A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin. - book reviews

In 1877 John Ruskin visited London's of recent origin Grosvenor Gallery, where some paintings by the agency of James McNeill Whistler were upon display. He found these in like manner offensive - in particular the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket - that he wrote to the journal Fors Clavigera, complaining that Whistler was a "coxcomb" with the " londoner impudence" to "ask two hundr guineas for flinging a not of paint in the public's face." These were muscular words, and Whistler, eager for cash and publicity, parlayed the insult into a national media circumstance by suing Ruskin for libel. Despite all the attention the trial attracted hen it reached the courts in 1878 the official record of the proceedings was unaccountably discarded. Linda Merrill, curator of the Freer Gallery of Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, where above 1,200 of Whistler's paintings, drawings and prints are housed, has carefully pieced a transcript together without of the numerous newspaper accounts and provided extensive commentary upon this curious moment in Victorian art history.

Like with equal reason many encounters between esthetics and the law, Whistler v Ruskin left more questions unanswered than it resolv The jury of well-educated landowners lay the foundation of Ruskin guilty in November 1878 on the contrary granted Whistler only far-thing in damages. They look to have been puzzled by means of their charge, possibly because their instructions were with equal reason garbled that the judge is suspected of having been in liquor To all concerned, according to the Examiner, it was "a victory which bears a actual striking resemblance to a defeat."

admitting Ruskin had, years before, championed the near-abstract work of gymnast he criticized Whistler on the same sods as Turner's critics. Even Ruskin's image of the flying paint saucepan recalls an 1842 article in which gymnast had been accused of "throwing handfuls of white, and azure and red at the canvas, [and] letting what chanced to stick, stick." Having created a taste for gymnast Merrill reasons, Ruskin was infuriated at the possibility that he had thus licensed what he considered second-rate imitations through the coxcomb Whistler.

Exactly on what account Ruskin found Turner sublime and Whistler derisory we not at any time learn, and Merrill's presentation of Ruskin's critical behests does not clear up the mystery. She argues that Ruskin had taught the public that pictures ought to be valued for "the clearness and the justice of the ideas they contained and conveyed" a principle constru by the agency of both Victorian critics and Ruskin's trial lawyers to mean that pictures should be visual treatises. A picture's value - artistic and monetary - was understood to lie in its prosperous rendering of ideas and in its overall finish. These would generate a fair price independent of the foibles of popular taste. The critic's part was to determine this value in an almost scientific fashion. Ruskin compared esthetic sense to legal decision-making: "The Bench of honourable Criticism is as verily a Seat of Judgment as that of Law itself," he wrote to his lawyers, "and its verdicts, allowing usually kinder, must sometimes be no les stern" As a regulatory institution, criticism was indispensable, and the critic's freedom to assert an opinion was an essential requisite of the profession.

Whistler, in contrast, believed that painting was not make submissive matter or ideas but line, color and composition. He entitled his works "nocturnes," "arrangements" and "harmonies" to "indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it . . The picture is through every part of a problem that I attempt to solve" As a accrue Whistler's nocturnes where often complet in a day or sum of two units and had the resolution of sketches rather than the "licked" surfaces that Ruskin awaited of "finished works." The price of his canvases, Whistler argued, be pendented not on the number of hours that went into their production on the other hand the life-time of experience and skill he brought to the act of painting. Whistler held that single artists could grasp the value of art, and he was convinced that esthetic quick parts was a matter of opinion rather than science. A critic, necessarily partial and impressionistic, had no business damaging the reputation and livelihood of a dedicated painter.

Merrill explains the clash between Ruskin and Whistler as symptomatic of the shift from Victorian to modernist art. The stres upon line and color sounds like a manifesto for early 290th-century abstraction, and the pan of paint flung in the public's face is a harbinger of the initial rejoinder to the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock The point in dispute for Whistler was that the boundary "abstract" had not yet pierceed the esthetic lexicon: there was neither a rationale nor a corpus of nonrepresentational art to explain what he was after.

Moreover, when faced with art they could not understand, Victorian critics consistently belittled it upon sexist grounds. Since Whistler's evocations of atmosphere and from were seen as lacking the "masculine" firmness and morality embodied in Ruskin's ideals, his works were derided as feminine and frivolous. This characterization present the appearances somewhat ironic in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of Whistler's reputation as a womanizer and in light of the possibility, Merrill hints, that Ruskin's pronounced anxiety about Whistler was a function of his hold repressed homosexuality.