Whistler's legacy.

Today celebrities at vast expense hire armies of consultants, agents, and public relations experts to create their public image--frequently one that has nothing to do with who they really are. In earlier times celebrities like James McNeill Whistler did the job themselves. To some of his contemporaries Whistler was a brilliant spin doctor, and to others, including his great patron Charles Lang Freer, the artist's legendary petulant and idiosyncratic behavior was part of a facade he constructed to hide his true self. Whistler's interest in designing everything, including the frames for his pictures, the colors of the walls on which they hung, and their arrangement in an exhibition, was considered by some to be an outlandish eccentricity, while others regarded it as a manifestation of his desire to create a total work of art. As a result, some reviewers and critics misread or made light of his aesthetic intent and failed to understand his highly cerebral approach to art. Freer understood this when he wrote to a fellow collector in August 1903, one month after Whistler's death: "Still, the world at large may some day see the truth more clearly and perhaps that would be well." As Freer had hoped, the world does now understand Whistler's art more clearly and celebrates him as one of the most innovative artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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One of the several exhibitions organized for the centenary of the artist's death investigates this aspect of Whistler's legacy. Entitled American Attitude: Whistler and His Followers, it was organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it was on view late last year. It may be seen at the Detroit Institute of Arts from March 14 through June 6. The exhibition presents thirteen works by Whistler and fifty by artists who absorbed much of his aesthetic philosophy. The set pieces of the show are two of Whistler's most famous works: Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother of 1871, (commonly known as Whistler's Mother), which rarely travels from its permanent home at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (illustrated below), which is the canvas that ignited the spectacular libel suit between the artist and John Ruskin. Among the artists represented in the show who investigated Whistler's art and aesthetic approach in their own work are John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Hermann Dudley Murphy, Childe Hassam, Alfred Henry Maurer, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Robert Henri, Cecilia Beaux, and Julian Alden Weir.

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Some of these ...