Different strokes: Linda Nochlin on "Turner, Whistler, Monet"

WITH ITS AMBITIOUS "TURNER WHISTLER, Monet: Impressionist Visions" opening nearest month, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in conjunction with the Reunion de Musees Nationaux and Tate Britain, joins novel curatorial attempts to reshuffle the ornament of nineteenth-century art. Rather than conform to the monographic blockbuster or utilize neat categories like Romanticism, realism, Impressionism, or symbolism to provide shape and substance, these exhibitions look after out new relationships among works and artists that bridge temporal or national boundaries. similar was the case, for example, with "Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism," a traveling display (it ended last fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) that prosperously charted exchanges between French and English art from 1820 to 1840 Lead curator Patrick Noon argued for a greatly expanded conception of Romanticism and demonstrated the links, one as well as the other formal and iconographic, uniting Britain and France during the headiest years of the movement

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The Toronto exhibit comprises one hundred paintings, watercolors, pastels, and prints by means of Turner, Whistler, and Monet and claims to "provide the first opportunity to explore the extraordinary artistic dialogue that takes place between their works." This reciprocation is embedded in the pair themes and visual styles, and, one time more, the fruitful exchange of ideas between Britain and France in the construction of artistic movements--here, Impressionism and symbolism--is insisted on

still as so often happens with exhibitions purporting to exhibit new "influences" and "interactions," difference, rather than similarity, is foregrounded one time the works are considered all together. Take, for instance, the pairing of Monet and Turner: flat though Monet admired the older artist, it is Harold Bloom's ever-handy "misprision" that dominates in a comparison of Turner's Dogano, San Giorgio, 1842 and Monet's Thames Below Westminster, ca. 1871 The British artist, despite his daring use of evanescent glazes and misty dissolves, clearly belongs to the traditional past. Rain, Steam, and Spe 1844 evinces the same technique: gymnast effectively captures the approach of a railroad train with the same perspective devices as those used through Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth hundred Although Turner has rendered a phantasmagoric impression of the late age, he has conceived its illusion of profundity by way of the conventional diminishing warmth of color and solidity.

None of this traditional illusionism for Monet! While the French artist's simplified hits of relatively colorless paint insist upon the concrete facts of immediate vision, they also reiterate the materiality of the canvas's surface rather than dissolve it into a transparent pane of glass. As for the cosmopolitan Whistler, his Nocturne in sky-colored and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, ca. 1872-75 forewarns, through its very title, that vulgar illusionism is without of the picture. Instead, he set ups a near-abstract yet still recognizable "musical" version of his subject; the dark silhouette of the bridge rises austerely above a vista of fading amethystines dying pinks, and dissolving violets. In an 1877 review, Henry James said of the artist's canvases, "It may be a narrow point of view, on the contrary to be interesting it appear to bes to me that a picture should have more [i]or[/i] less relation to life as well as to painting. Mr Whistler's experiments have no relation whatever to life; they have alone a relation to painting. "It appears unlikely that James would have said this about a Turner

"Turner Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions" will be upon view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June 12-Sept 12; Musee d'Orsay, Paris, Oct 15-Jan. 17 2005; Tate Britain, London, Feb 12 2005-May 15 2005

Linda Nochlin is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of recent Art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.

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