BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art

DC -- Arthur M. Sackler Gallery -- Exhibit: The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art:

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Description of Pictures: The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art
January 16, 2016 – May 30, 2016
Three Girls would have been a seminal work in the stylistic development of American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)—if he had completed it. He intended to hang the large painting opposite his Princess from the Land of Porcelain in the dining room of his patron Frederick Leyland, but after they quarreled over the cost of the Peacock Room, Whistler destroyed the work. As part of Peacock Room REMIX, this related installation reconstructs how Whistler’s unrealized quest for “the perfection of art” intersected with less-rarified concerns about patronage, payment, and professional reputation.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LOST_160121_001.JPG: Overtures "I have several pictures in my head and they only come out with difficulty." -- Whistler, 1867 While working on The Three Girls, Whistler laid out ideas and arrangements for several other paintings that never progressed beyond these oil studies. One visitor who admired the oil study for The Three Girls in Whistler's studio characterized the other works as "coloured sketches of four of five other subjects of the like class, very promising in point of conception of colour-arrangement." Whistler himself referred to them simply as "sketches of figures & Sea," clearly distinguishing them from his intended masterpiece, which he set in a garden balcony. In these five oil studies, Whistler breaks entirely from the bold colors of his earlier works, which were painted under the influence of the French realist artist Gustave Courbet. Instead, he adopts a palette of pale tones to create delicately modulated color harmonies. Several of these works combine Japanese accessories, such as fans and parasols, with the glowing drapery and ideal proportions of classical Greek sculpture, an indication of Whistler's pursuit of perfect beauty among different artistic traditions.
2. LOST_160121_006.JPG: The Venus Set As the classical goddess of love and beauty, Venus is the central image of this series of paintings. The graceful figures in the other sketches appear to be her attendants. Collector and museum founder Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919) had seen these five oil sketches, which he knew as the "Venus Set," displayed in Whistler's dining room in London. They were among numerous works he purchased from Whistler's family soon after the artist's death in 1903.
3. LOST_160121_040.JPG: Standing Nude, c 1865-70
4. LOST_160121_043.JPG: Standing Draped Figure, ca 1868
5. LOST_160121_054.JPG: Draped Female Figure 1870-73
6. LOST_160121_058.JPG: Woman with Parasol 1870-73
7. LOST_160121_067.JPG: Standing Nude (Venus) 1869
8. LOST_160121_086.JPG: The Perfection of Art "A Picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.... Work alone will efface the footsteps of work." -- Whistler, 1884 Frederick Leyland's prestigious commission for a fourth "symphony in white" inspired Whistler to undertake a grueling course of self-education. Aware that he had neglected formal art studies in his youth, Whistler resolved to develop the skills needed in drawing and composition to achieve the perfection he envisioned for The Three Girls. Dozens of sketches of models, both nude and draped, working or resting in the studio, attest to his labors. The "demands and difficulties" of this practice exceeded anything he had ever known, Whistler confided to a friend. It was the pain, he imagined, of giving birth. Whistler was inspired by the working methods of his close friend, the English artist Albert Moore, who refined every element of a picture through preparatory studies before he set brush to canvas. Meticulous preparation enabled Moore to paint with brisk confidence and total certainty -- qualities Whistler knew his own work lacked. Although he complained about the drudgery of "spend[ing] the whole day drawing from models," Whistler expected to benefit from the time and effort. "The results of the education I Have been giving myself these two years and more," he assured a friend in 1869, "will show themselves in the time gained in my future work."
9. LOST_160121_093.JPG: The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art This is an exhibition about a painting that does not exist American artist James McNeill Whistler received a commission in 1867 to paint "a garden picture" for Frederick Richards Leyland, a new patron he was hoping to impress. Leyland paid him 400 guineas in advance, yet Whistler struggled to complete the painting. In 1877 he destroyed the canvas in a fit of disappointment over his failed friendship with Leyland and his unrealized ambitions for the picture. The artist had planned that work of art as a fourth "symphony in white," another iteration in a series of experimental pictures in which he eliminated conventional subject matter and concentrated instead on idealized arrangements of color and form. If Whistler had completed the large painting, it would have hung opposite his Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (Princess from the Land of Porcelain) in Leyland's dining room in London. The painting, known as The Three Girls, soon became intertwined with Whistler's aspirations to reinvent himself as an artist. Determined to make it the consummate expression of his ideals, he temporarily suspended other work to undertake experimental studied aimed at translating his progressive aesthetic theories onto canvas. Visitors who saw The Three Girls in Whistler's studio commented on its remarkable beauty, describing the setting as a "garden balcony" or a hothouse with "flowers and flower-like women." Whistler alone seemed unhappy with the picture, which bedeviled him for nearly ten years -- far longer than he spent on any other project. Obsessively, he painted, scraped, and repainted the canvas. The Three Girls remained unfinished when another ambitious work painted for Leyland -- the Peacock Room -- brought the once-friendly relationship between the artist and patron to a bitter end. Angry and disappointed when Leyland failed to appreciate the Peacock Room, Whistler abandoned The Three Girls and destroyed the canvas. A rescued fragment, numerous studies, and the frame that Whistler decorated specially for the painting are among the tantalizing clues that hint at what might have been. Echoes of Whistler's "lost symphony" resonate in his later work. For the rest of his career, he revisited its imagery and themes, and he drew on "the science of color and picture pattern" that he had developed while striving to create his elusive masterpiece. Whistler's unrealized quest for "the perfection of art" intersected with less-rarified concerns about patronage, payment, and professional reputation, themes at the heart of Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre.
10. LOST_160121_105.JPG: "Flower-like Women"
11. LOST_160121_142.JPG: A Musician Albert Joseph Moore, ca 1867
12. LOST_160121_150.JPG: Pomegranates Albert Joseph Moore, 1866
13. LOST_160121_157.JPG: Three Female Figures 1869-74
14. LOST_160121_162.JPG: Crouching Figure: Study for The White Symphony: Three Girls 1869-70
15. LOST_160121_169.JPG: The Fourth Symphony "Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all." -- Whistler, 1885 Whistler's mother, who witnessed her son's early struggles with The Three Girls, astutely perceived that the picture eluded him became "he had tried too hard to make it the perfection of art." Others who encountered the painting felt it had attained that perfection. An American journalist who saw The Three Girls in Whistler's studio in 1876, for example, praised its many "splendid qualities," adding, "The beauty of this picture in color, design and composition is simply transcendent." It is difficult to imagine the final painting now, when nothing but a fragment of the canvas survives. This study for The Three Girls represents the early, optimistic stage of Whistler's work on the painting that Leyland commissioned. It may be the "final oil sketch" he mentioned in a letter late in 1867, when the artist assured his patron that the work was "getting on." Whistler painted The White Symphony on millboard, a coarsely textures, inexpensive support inappropriate for creating a rough draft of the composition. In addition to a wide brush, he apparently used a palette knife for the blossoms and his fingers for the forms of the faces. The primary purpose of this sketch was to establish the color scheme. The delicate color harmony is appropriate to the subject of fleeting beauty symbolized by the cherry blossoms. The hothouse imagery also hints at a deeper meaning: if art is to flourish, it must be sheltered from the world, an environment inhospitable to ideal beauty.
16. LOST_160121_181.JPG: Coda This is a modern copy of the frame that Whistler intended for The Three Girls. It was the most elaborate frame he ever designed, and this reproduction indicates the scale and horizontal orientation of that never-completed painting. The floral decorations would have harmonized with both the painting's garden theme and the flowers that originally adorned the antique leather wall hangings in Leyland's dining room. A musical passage from Six Moments musicaux by the Austrian composer Franz Schubert is inscribed in a prominent position at the bottom center of the frame. It undoubtedly alludes to Whistler's theory of aesthetic correspondences between painting and music, and it would have pleased Leyland, a music enthusiast. Curiously, this exquisite frame has survived while the painting has not. After quarreling with Leyland over the expense of decorating the Peacock Room and then destroying The Three Girls, Whistler turned the frame on its side and reused it in 1879 for his vindictive caricature of Leyland. That painting -- The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre -- in Whistler's original frame hangs on the opposite wall.
17. LOST_160121_202.JPG: I Spend the Whole Day Drawing from Models! -- Whistler, 1867 Whistler's self-imposed discipline of drawing studio models resulted in new confidence and sophistication in rendering the female figure. He sketched models in form-revealing drapery that suggests a classical inspiration, even though their poses are more characteristic of the figures in Japanese prints. Often executed in pastel, these drawings have a freedom and spontaneity that suggest pleasure, rather than the toil of a painstaking drawing lesson. All works are by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), are the gift of Charles Lang Freer, and are in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art.
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