BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London

DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London
November 20, 2003 – April 4, 2004
This exhibition, marking the centenary of Whistler's death on July 17, 1903, highlights his importance to the history of exhibition design by creating new versions of 2 of his most influential installations: Arrangement in Yellow and White, which exhibited 51 of his etchings in 1883; and Arrangement in Flesh Color and Grey, which exhibited 67 of his paintings, watercolors, and pastels in 1884. Many rarely displayed works are on view, including 34 oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels from the original 1884 exhibition and 49 of the original 51 etchings of Venice and London.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Slide Show: Want to see the pictures as a slide show? [Slideshow]

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] SIFGAG_040109_23.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] SIFGAG_040109_29.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] SIFGAG_040109_38.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[4] SIFGAG_040109_48.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] SIFGAG_040109_53.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] SIFGAG_040109_61.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIFGAG_040109_23.JPG: Portrait of Whistler With a Hat (1857-58) by James Whistler, oil on canvas Whistler's prints were often compared favorably to those of Rembrandt van Rijn. Here, wearing a large beret, the young Whistler identifies himself with known images of Rembrandt. In this early self-portrait, painted using the dark palette and rich impasto characteristic of the Dutch master's work, Whistler exhibits the strategic role-playing that he used to draw attention to himself and his art throughout his career.
2. SIFGAG_040109_29.JPG: Mr Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London "Now my rooms are pictures in themselves." -- James McNeill Whistler James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) is most often remembered as a painter and printmaker but he was also an important designer of both private and public interiors. "Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room" (1876-77) is Whistler's best-known interior. Originally designed as the dining room in the London home of a wealthy shipping magnate, it is now permanently installed in this museum. But few of Whistler's contemporaries would have had access to "The Peacock Room" or any of his other private interiors. Whistler's designs for temporary public exhibitions, on the other hand, were both accessible and influential. When Whistler arrived in Paris to study art in 1855, public and private art installations were usually hung "salon style." Paintings were displayed close together, frame to frame, wall to wall, and floor to ceiling. Beginning in the 1870's, Whistler organized a series of innovative and provocative installations that presented his own work as he wished it to be seen. Drawing public attention to his art, these installations also promoted his ideas about interior decoration, playing a crucial role in the transformation of exhibition practice. Many elements of Whistler's installations are now commonplace, including his use of indirect lighting, color-coordinated walls, uniform framing, elegant spacing, special seating, and neutral floor coverings. While Whistler did not invent any of these features, his ability to asestheticize them was unequalled. His highly publicized installations challenged contemporary exhibition practice, hastening the decline of the salon-style hang and paving the way for the sparer installations found in most galleries and museums today. In the early 1880's, Whistler began to title his installations, suggesting that he had come to think of them as independent works of art. The first two installations to be given titles were the "Arrangements in White and Yellow," created for an exhibition of etchings in 1883, and the "Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey," designed for an exhibition of oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels in 1884. "Mr . Whistler's Galleries" highlights Whistler's contribution to this history of exhibition design by displaying new versions of those groundbreaking installations.
3. SIFGAG_040109_38.JPG: Scherzo in blue -- The Blue Girl One of the most perplexing decisions we had to make in creating our version of Whister's "Arrange in Flesh Colour and Grey" concerned "Scherzo in blue -- The Blue Girl," which was the only large painting included in the 1884 exhibition. Period reviews suggest that "The Blue Girl" was hung in the most prominent location in the gallery, in the middle of the back wall, facing the entrance. Whistler's correspondence suggests that he intended to juxtapose the large painting with the sixty-six small paintings, drawings, pastels -- stars of different magnitudes, grouped around a blue moon -- a lifesize full-length portrait, called by the artist "Scherzo in blue -- The Blue Girl." Many reviewers complained about Whistler's treatment of the model's face, and Whistler eventually destroyed the painting, although his first biographers published a photo of it in 1911. Faced with a choice between including no large portrait and the "wrong" large portrait, we decided to make Whistler's "Arrangement in White and Black" the focal point of our installation. "Arrangement in White and Black" was completed a few years before "The Blue Girl." The model is a few years older than the model in the destroyed painting and the color is very different, but it is a life-sized image of similarly assertive young woman. By substituting "Arrangement in White and Black" for the destroyed painting, we were able to recreate the play of scale that was integral to Whistler's conception of the 1884 installation.
Multi Column: Number of columns of thumbnails to appear per page (normally defaults to 3): [1 col] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: ) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2024_03_18C2_SIFG_Imagined: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Imagined Neighbors: Japanese Visions of China, 1680–1980 (88 photos from 03/18/2024)
- 2024_03_18C1_SIFG_Raku: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea (26 photos from 03/18/2024)
- 2023_DC_SIFG_Words: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Words of Wisdom: Buddhist Calligraphy from Japan (33 photos from 2023)
- 2023_DC_SIFG_Whistler: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change (110 photos from 2023)
- 2023_DC_SIFG_Mounting: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: A Journey of Taste: Freer and Japanese Scroll Mounting (19 photos from 2023)
- 2023_DC_SIFG_Egypt: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: A Collector's Eye: Freer in Egypt (78 photos from 2023)
- 2022_DC_SIFG_Zen: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Mind Over Matter: Zen in Medieval Japan (74 photos from 2022)
- 2022_DC_SIFG_Tessai: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Meeting Tessai: Modern Japanese Art from the Cowles Collection (24 photos from 2022)
- 2022_DC_SIFG_Rinpa: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Rinpa: Creativity Across Time and Space (19 photos from 2022)
- 2022_DC_SIFG_Feathered: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Exhibit: Feathered Ink (91 photos from 2022)
- ...More (List all 22 pages)...
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(Smithsonian) Freer Gallery of Art] [Display ALL (Smithsonian) Freer Gallery of Art photos] [Museums (Art)]
2004 photos: Trips this year: (1) Margot and I went off to Scotland for a few days, my first time overseas. (2) I went to Hawaii on business (such a deal!) and extended it, spending a week in Hawaii and another in California. (3) I went to Tennessee to man a booth and extended it to go to my third Fan Fair country music festival. Equipment this year: I bought two Fujifilm S7000 digital cameras. While they produced excellent images, I found all of the retractable-lens Fuji models had a disturbing tendency to get dust inside the lens. Dark blurs would show up on the images and the camera had to be sent back to the shop in order to get it fixed. I returned one of the cameras when the blurs showed up in the first month. I found myself buying extended warranties on cameras. Number of photos taken this year: 110,000.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Limiting Text: You can turn off all of this text by clicking this link: [Thumbnails Only]
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].