Art
The Whistler Exhibition
IT is rather difficult for the visitor who goes to the Whistler Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum to fix his attention on any one of the quantities of rather slight pastels of draped female figures, so religiously over-framed in what is still known as the " Whistler " style of moulding. I once saw an etching framed and mounted by Whistler himself, at Sotheby's, and it was in perfect taste ; surely in this show the water-colours at least might have been spared the proximity of so much gold.
But I did stop and read with intense interest the letter he wrote at fourteen about his own portrait which had just been painted by Sir James Boxall. It shows a genuine and unselfconscious interest in painting for its own sake ; the young Whistler addresses to his father words which few boys of fourteen would use about any picture, and fewer still about a portrait of themselves : for they are what in the common Whistler legend is the least likely thing for Whistler's words to be-quite serious ; full of a sincere and simple boyish admiration, as is natural at that age, for the eminent Sir James Boxall whom he compares favourably with Gainsborough, but entirely without affectation, cleverness, or preoecupation with himself as sitter.
Curiously enough, his comparison of Boxall's beautiful transparent use of paint in the background of the portrait and in the clothes to Gainsborough's work is extremely apt ; and it is also curious to see Whistler at that age showing such .intelligent interest. in the technique as opposed to the dramatic appeal of the art which he had then no reason to suppose he was going to make his life's work. Or had he ? That is a point for a biographer, and the reader cannot do better • than refer to the life, recently published, by Mr. James Laver, for an understanding of this artist, so un- forgettable as a character, so easily underrated as a painter. If the Miss Alexander. at the Tate, which everyone will be flocking to see now that it is so beautifully re-hung, . could be exhibited without glass for a .few months this summer when there is less smoke in the air, I believe many artists who now turn away, repelled by the low tones, the too- familiar pose, the general reminiscence of a fiat process- reproduction, would linger, fascinated by the beauty of the pigment.
Have we any right to treat Whistler as an English artist ? Who shall, say ? I have met at least one French student who, contrary to the usual practice, has been recommended by a famous French painter to come and study art in London. Nationality certainly affected art in the past ; it certainly affects it a little at present, but how little 1 How much easier for a sensitive and touchy painter to judge work which he does not associate with a-fellow student's personality, with the notions of some particular set, social, intellectual, or even political.
There must be some things which are above human pettiness. Pictures are one of those things. People associate pictures too much with painters. Really, they have far less to do with each other than is usually supposed. There are things that are transmitted intact, as flame, which are handed down un- affected by the hands they pass through, hands which do no more than keep them burning. All pictures are sacred pictures, if they are pictures at all. Whistler felt this obscurely ; he felt somehow that everything he did was precious. It was a sort of mania, but he was right. The written word, the paper scored with marks, the wood exquisitely polished with varnishes, - have a life r p art from their creators.
Art will go on irrespective of whether it is " bad" or " good," modernist or traditional. ' Even in Oxford-for universities are more shy than their shyest undergraduate of beauty, which they attempt to hush up by the invention of aesthetic philo- sophieseven there, Mr. Albert Rutherston, discreetest and doughtiest of champions, now in charge of the Ruskin drawing school, = iS preventing its extinction, as witness- the recent exhibition of his students' work in London ; and in Cambridge there is Mr. Roger Fry. Art was still just alive when Whistler came tti 'stimulate it in England again ; it is' very much alive, and most healthily kicking, at the present moment.
W. W. WINKWORTII.
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