Existing comment:
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. |