Microsoft Word arth111 2-Whistler-Symphony-in-White docx



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Source URL: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/Whistler-Symphony-in-white.html 

Saylor URL: 

http://www.saylor.org/arth111/#8.2

 

 

 

Attributed to: SmartHistory 



www.saylor.org

 

 



Page 1 of 2 

 

Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl 



Meg Floryan 

 

Radical Portraiture 

 

James Abbott McNeil 



Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: 

The White Girl, 1862, oil on canvas 

(National Gallery of Art, Washington 

D.C.) 

 

The woman in white stands facing us, 



her long hair loose, framing her face. 

Her expression is blank, her 

surroundings indistinct; posed before 

some sort of pallid curtain, she appears 

almost as an immobile prop on a stage.  

 

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White 



Girlepitomizes James Abbott McNeill 

Whistler’s departure from the 

established norms of the era, and was 

perhaps his most reviled work. When he 

submitted it to the 1863 Paris Salon, the 

jury rejected the painting and the artist 

instead showed The White Girl at 

Napoleon III’s exhibition of snubbed 

artwork, the Salon des Refusés. Though 

it certainly defied many time-honored 

artistic conventions and earned much 

derision from criticsThe White 



Girl does show some echoes of older 

standards. After all, its creator had 

studied under Marc-Charles Gabriel 

Gleyre in Paris, learning to paint in the 

academic manner – thus it is 

unsurprising that in the representation 

of his mistress Joanna Hiffernan, 

Whistler opts for the customary full-

scale society portrait format, and 

reproduces her features in a seemingly 

realistic and honest fashion. 

 

 




Source URL: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/Whistler-Symphony-in-white.html 

Saylor URL: 

http://www.saylor.org/arth111/#8.2

 

 

 

Attributed to: SmartHistory 



www.saylor.org

 

 



Page 2 of 2 

 

The ways in which Whistler follows his own rules, however, far outnumber the few examples of 



accord, and they include the painting’s flattened and abstracted forms, distorted perspective

limited color palette, and penchant for decorative patterning. Though an intimate portrait, The 



White Girl is contrived and reveals no overarching mood or the personality of its sitter. While 

many of Whistler’s stylistic innovations are unique to the artist, he associated himself with other 

artists – such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, who also defied the traditions of 

academicism. The influence of Théophile Gautier is also apparent; in the 1830s, Gautier stated 

that art need not contain any moral message or describe any narrative, as art making is an end in 

and of itself – Whistler accepted this credo, “art for art’s sake,” wholeheartedly. In this lightThe 



White Girl is less a faithful portrait painting and more an experimentation in color, pattern, and 

texture.  

 

Whistler produced many portraits of similar format in the next decades, and continued to fine-



tune his style and technique. In paintings such as Harmony in Gray and Green: Cecily 

Alexander(1872-74) and Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Portrait of Théodore 

Duret (1883), the artist exercised his need to balance the realist components of a picture with its 

more abstract needs, cherry-picking elements from the real world and reorganizing them in 

controlled, harmonious ways. Often these images feature a subdued palette, a lack of depth

unresolved backdrops, and irrational props that serve only as accents. His figures typically stand 

upon an unthinkably flat floor, appearing almost to hover like specters. As for Whistler’s 

signature, it evolved to take the form of a butterfly, applied to the surface in the manner of a 

mere decorative element. 

 

Despite the controversy stirred when he entered the scene, Whistler won many wealthy and 



prestigious patrons over his career, and his portraits stand as testaments to growing interest in the 

radical new avant-garde approach to painting. 



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