'Art Happens': James Whistler and Ten O'Clock lecture
February 1885: the Ten
o’clock Lecture
A man in
immaculate evening dress stepped onto the stage in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly. He placed a glossy opera hat on the table, set
down his walking-cane and adjusted his eyeglass. James Whistler appeared in the footlights
like a figure from one of his own canvases: an Arrangement in Black and Silver.
‘It is with great hesitation and much misgiving’ he began, ‘that I appear
before you, in the character of The Preacher’. Whistler had practised his lines
during the past winter months, trying out turns of phrase as he strode up and
down the riverbank at Chelsea. He had
perfected his principles over countless dinner-tables. As one friend put it, ‘the only new thing was
Whistler’s determination to say in public what he had said in private.’ But now he faltered a little as he cast his
eye over the up-turned faces before him.
He recognised several devoted followers, some sceptics, many
critics.
What had they
come to hear? Most expected a fashionable evening’s entertainment, an American
eccentric showing-off. His droll
delivery meant that they underestimated the force of his attack on the
art-establishment. For Whistler’s
monogram was very apt – a butterfly with a sting in his tail.
Whistler’s
radical artistic manifesto struck at the heart of Victorian assumptions about
beauty, Nature and the role of the artist in society. Firstly,
he declared that art-critics should leave the masses alone. Most folk would never be enthusiastic about
spending their spare time in galleries or creating the House Beautiful. ‘The people have been harassed with Art…their
homes have been invaded’ and, Whistler suggested, this has left the public
bewildered and resentful. Instead, Art should
be left to those who could best appreciate it.
The true artist, Whistler said, was an outside, a ‘dreamer apart.’ Like
himself.
And Art was not
meant to be improving. The public were encouraged to delight in pictures that
were morally uplifting. They admired naturalism, anecdote or sentiment. Whistler summed up this approach: ‘Before a
work of Art, it is asked: ‘What good shall it do?’. In his view, this was utterly
wrong-headed. For Whistler, Art was
‘occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach’. Art was about beauty, delight, joy.
He went on to
tackle another fundamental tenet of Victorian thinking. Whistler denied that
art was more likely to flourish in a particular time or place. The most beautiful things could be made in
ancient Greece, or at the Court of Philip II of Spain, in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam
or Hokusai’s Japan. Whistler scoffed at
the ‘fabled link between the grandeur of Art and the glories and virtues of the
State’. Beauty was wedded to
individuals, not to Nations. In his words, ‘peoples may be wiped from the face
of the earth, but Art is.’
His delivery
gained strength as he took on the British obsession with painting the natural
world. An artist, Whistler believed,
‘does not confine himself to purposeless copying, without thought, each blade
of grass.’ (This was a dig at the hypnotic realism of the Pre-Raphaelites.) Whistler denounced Nature as vulgar. He
acknowledged that many in the audience would be shocked by this blasphemy. ‘Nature
is very rarely right’, he argued, ‘to such an extent even, that might almost be
said that Nature is usually wrong.’ Only
the artist could select elements from the natural world, group them, and create
something harmonious.
Whistler used a
musical analogy to explain his idea. He suggested that ‘Nature contains the
elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the
notes of all music’. So drawing directly
from natural examples was like saying to the musician ‘that he may sit on the
piano.’ Whistler knew how to make an
audience laugh, but he also kept them on their toes. They could not anticipate whom he would lunge
at next.
In his
bantering way, Whistler was taking on the Victorian heavy-weights, John Ruskin
and William Morris, as well as the more esoteric art-criticism of Oscar Wilde
and Walter Pater. He was paying off old
debts, and sizing up new rivals. In 1878 he had been publicly humiliated by
Ruskin. In the ensuing libel case, Whistler
was forced to justify the value of his art to the Attorney-General. His paintings were described in court as
‘strange fantastical conceits,…daubs,…not serious works of art’. He was bankrupted. Whistler destroyed many of his paintings,
sold his house and left London. He passed a chill winter exiled in Venice. He took with him two dozen copper etching
plates, reams of brown paper and boxes of pastels. He etched, though his
fingers were so numb with cold that he could hardly hold the needle. He drew
his bare lodgings in a dilapidated palazzo, with his companion Maud Franklin
silhouetted against the open window. He
called this work The Palace in Rags. He refused to picture the buildings
that Ruskin had glorified in his book, ‘The Stones of Venice’. Instead Whistler’s Venice was ephemeral,
glittering and intimate.
Now, five years
on, Whistler was ready to answer his critics.
He had regained a foothold in the London art-world, with his one-man
exhibitions at the Fine Art Society. He was
re-establishing his name as a portraitist. Whistler combined the verve of Velasquez
with a sharp critique of modern manners.
His painting of Lady Archibald Campbell caused a sensation at the
Grosvenor Gallery in the summer of 1884: her shiny yellow boot and black
stocking could be glimpsed beneath the hem of her dress as she whisked her
skirts away from the picture frame. Whistler’s
female figures were supple and ambiguous.
He designed many of the gowns worn by the women who sat for him and he chose
to dress them gorgeously in translucent layers of tulle and soft pleated silks. He disliked the current vogue for ‘Aesthetic
Dress’. Whistler deplored the
uncorseted, ‘unbecoming’ robes in sad colours that made young women look lanky
and dishevelled. One reason for his
dislike was that the campaign for ‘Dress Reform’ was so publicly championed by
Oscar Wilde. Both men liked nothing
better than a verbal sparring match.
Wilde had lectured
on ‘Beauty, Taste and Ugliness in Dress’ to audiences across Britain in 1884-5,
from Leeds to Dublin, from Bury St Edmunds to Newcastle. So it was partly in response to Wilde’s successful
speaking engagements that Whistler decided to book the Prince’s Hall in
February 1885. Whistler had heard Wilde
there, delivering his ‘Impressions of America’.
Now an American-born artist would take to the stage to lecture about the
British, their failings and follies.
Whistler’s line about the public’s reluctance in the face of Art – ‘they
have been told how they shall love Art, and live with it…their very dress has
been taken to task’ – was a jibe directed at Wilde. Their wit was competitive. Their friendship, formed in 1881, was now
wearing thin. But the rivalry was still, to some extent, stage-managed.
Whistler asked Helen
Carte, wife of the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, to arrange the booking of
the lecture hall. As she was in the
throes of producing The Mikado, Whistler took to wandering over to her tiny
office at the Savoy Theatre in the evenings.
There, in the winter lamplight, they discussed Whistler’s plan. He
wanted his audience to enjoy an un-hurried dinner before coming on to the
lecture. Ten o’clock in the evening
seemed like a civilised hour to start. Whistler recognised that this timing
alone would raise eyebrows among the industrious middle-classes. He evidently did not expect his audience to
have to rise early the following day. But
as he consistently explained in the lecture, Art was not a matter for the
masses, but for the Few.
Whistler was of
course aware of the paradox. He was
preaching the gospel of the artist set apart from society before a large paying
audience. And he was prepared to take
his ideas on the road. He gave the same
lecture on three more occasions in 1885 – Cambridge, Oxford, and again in
London – and then had the text privately printed. It was an edition of 25 copies, a trifle that
could be passed off to friends. His Ten
o’clock lecture was a triumph of self-publicity, it made him a celebrity, a
gift for the cartoonists with his monocle and his tuft of white hair carefully
arranged among the black curls.
But, for all
the swagger, Whistler was in earnest. He
derided Ruskin, as he would later deride the poet Swinburne and indeed Wilde,
because they could do nothing but
talk. They could not make an image
appear upon the canvas as Velasquez did when he ‘dipped his brush in light and
air, and made his people live within their frames, and stand upon their legs.’ Critics were parasites. The true artist did
not want his pictures to be read as novels, decoded for their morals. Painting was about form, colour and
composition, not about subject. Whistler
gave his works musical titles – Arrangements, Harmonies, Symphonies – to
deflect attention from the thing in the picture, and to focus on the way it was
painted. His canvases could be consumed
as a piece of music is consumed, the audience concentrating on the formal
aspects of the art, its shape, its rhythms, its mood. Whistler was not interested in
story-telling. When he was questioned
about one of his landscapes, a Harmony in Grey and Gold, Whistler wrote,
‘I care nothing for the past, present or future of the black figure, placed
there because the black was wanted at that spot.’ Narrative was unnecessary. Morality, history, faith, patriotism, pity
were irrelevant.
It may have
seemed on that February evening that the audience were merely watching a
butterfly flapping its wings, and causing a small stir in Piccadilly. But the
repercussions were breath-taking. Whistler’s lecture brushed away the old
certainties about what to paint, how to paint it and how to write about
painting. Whistler imagines the artist as
‘differing from the rest, whose pursuits attracted him not.’ An artist was not bound by the laws of
realism. An artist could decide when a
work was finished: it may look like a sketch to the uninitiated, but according
to Whistler, ‘the work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow –
suggests no effort – and is finished from the beginning’. An artist worked for the pleasure of the few,
not for the many.
This was a
manifesto showing how art could be made modern.
Art is uninhibited by history, uninterested in explaining itself to
those who cannot see. It is concerned
with the vision of the artist, not the expectations of the patron or the
critic. Art is swift. It is eclectic. As Whistler put it, ‘Art happens’.
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