The Artistic Philosophy of Whistler

By: Wade Gwin

James Abbot McNeill Whistler studied realism in Paris in the early 1850s. He later switched from this artistic style when he moved to London in 1859. Whistler started to focus on the pure aesthetics of art versus how “real” it looked. He believed a painting could be aesthetically pleasing no matter what it was. He integrated this idea into not only in the paintings he did, but also in the rooms that the paintings were displayed. He was one of the first to arrange his paintings side-by-side, instead of stacked on top of one another in the gallery. He was indeed concerned with the harmony of the viewing experience.
Whistler was also interested in his art speaking directly to the viewer. When talking about art in general, he mentioned that, “Art should be independent of all clap-trap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it, and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and `harmonies’” (Pioch). Clearly, he was interested in the affect of art as visual stimulation alone, and not it’s emotional appeal.
Whistler’s titles for his paintings were also unique in that they commonly had names that were generally given to music pieces and not artwork. Words such as “arrangements”, “harmonies”, and “nocturnes” were used to name the pieces, suggesting that they had pleasing compositions that resembled the enjoyable arrangements of chords and notes in a piece of music. This way of titling pieces resulted in a curious experience with a Whistler piece. He intended the viewer to find the mood he portrayed, paralleling his abstracted art with the indeterminate art of music itself.



Works Cited

Pioch, Nicolas. "Whistler, James Abbott McNeill." WebMuseum Paris. 26
May 1996. WebMuseum Paris, Web. 7 Nov 2009.
http://www.sai.msu.su/wm/paint/auth/whistler/

Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History Portable Edition Eighteenth to Twenty-
First Century Art. 3rd ed. 6 vol. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Prentice Hall, 2009. 1024-25. Print.