Scratching the surface on Whistler

In Clark exhibit, his work is praised but not questioned

WILLIAMSTOWN - "Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly," the Clark Art Institute's summer show examining ethereal, soft-focus effects in the paintings of James McNeill Whistler and his American followers, is a fine idea beautifully presented. But from the thinking behind the show something is missing: a healthy dose, I would suggest, of skepticism.

The show takes its title from Whistler's 1880 assertion, "Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass." The metaphor was reiterated by Henry James, who wrote that Whistler's manner of painting "was to breathe upon the canvas," and in various comments on George Inness's art. The critic Elliot Daingerfield, for instance, suggested that an Inness painting was "breathed upon the canvas in waves of color."

The kind of painting the organizers dwell upon, then, eschewed detail in favor of suggestion, encouraged soulful and swooning responses, and tried to rid painting of evidence that it had been created by human hands. All this was in stark contrast to the thickly applied palette knife textures of Gustave Courbet (whose realism Whistler began his career trying to emulate) and to the Impressionists, who applied pure colors in broken dabs.

Whistler is the show's hero, and quite rightly: He was one of those few artists who can genuinely be said to have changed the way we see - in particular, the way we think of urban fogs, misty riverside or seaside scenes, and all kinds of dreamily imprecise nighttime vistas.

The exhibit begins unforgettably, with four of Whistler's "Nocturnes" (two from Boston, one from Yale, and one from the Tate in London), all painted in the 1870s. The three vaporous nighttime views of London and the one watery evocation of Venice revel in indeterminacy. They are gorgeous aesthetic objects, their apparent simplicity masking tremendous subtleties of tone and design.

Three of them are described as "Nocturnes in Blue and Silver" and include, by way of visual information, stretches of placid water, fuzzy horizons, and foregrounded evocations of spectral figures in slender river craft.

If you feel acquainted with these images through reproductions in books and catalogs, you may not appreciate the effect of their exquisite gold frames, which set off the deep blues in the paint and increase our sense of the images as objects in the world; things of exquisite artifice.

Whistler's influence, especially in America and England, was immense. But he was hardly without flaws, and the show's organizers needed to remain measured in their appraisal of him.

They did not. As if made giddy by prolonged exposure to his paintings' woozy atmospheres, they seem to have let Whistler's own rhetoric go to their heads. Writing of London's thick fogs, for instance, the curator Marc Simpson claims: "Of the millions who struggled against that darkness, [Whistler] alone, one evening as the mists clothed the riverside with poetry, heard nature's exquisite song."

The fact is, the "Nocturnes" represent a rather singular achievement. To extrapolate a whole theory from them and to applaud it so unreservedly seems to me a fraught exercise.

There are two reasons for skepticism. The first is technical, and it applies primarily to Whistler. The second is both more fundamental and more general, having to do with the underlying aesthetic of "painting softly" as it was pursued by all the artists represented in the show.

We are told that Whistler urged people to see his paintings "from a distance, not allowing questions of technique or details of surface to distract from the effect of the whole." And it's true: Whistler really did go all out to create a unified effect, a premier coup ("in one go"). The less people could see of the methods he used to achieve this effect the better.

But did this philosophy mask a certain tendency to fudge things? Yes, if you believe Sarah Walden, the conservator charged with restoring Whistler's masterpiece, "Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother." In her fascinating book "Whistler and His Mother: An Unexpected Relationship," Walden points to serious flaws in his technique.

Whistler lacked, she writes, "both the technical foundations and the temperament . . . to create something both artistically novel and technically sound. Hence the frequent suspicion of trickery in his work and the undeniable strain of evasion in his art."

In this show's catalog, Joyce Hill Stoner's essay on technique is by far the most interesting piece of writing, but it completely ignores Walden's revelations and fails to hint at the potential for disaster in Whistler's experimental techniques.

Seeking to achieve a surface that was as one with the canvas support, Whistler repeatedly scraped the paint back and applied it afresh. He diluted the oil medium as much as possible and used what he called a "sauce" to keep the image liquid and unified.

He also used absorbent grounds, made from chalk and glue, which increased the penetration of the oil, enhancing the matte appearance of the image and allowing the weave of the canvas to show through. He used a thin, colorless varnish instead of the generally preferred yellow varnish, and liked it to be applied regularly after the painting's completion.

All this is explained by Stoner. What she neglects to spell out is how poorly thought-through these methods were. Whistler's thirsty grounds absorbed so much medium that they frequently left the colored pigments sitting high and dry on the surface of his canvases. Hoping to bring his subtle coloration back to life, he applied lots of varnish, but the more he applied, the more unstable the painting became, as the varnish aged and permeated the other layers of paint and ground.

As a consequence, many of the subtleties in Whistler's masterpieces have been lost or irrevocably altered. I wanted to know more about how all this has affected the "Nocturnes," but there was no mention of the problems inherent in Whistler's notoriously ad hoc techniques. It was as if the curators were too wrapped up in the genius of their hero even to raise the question.

"A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared," said Whistler. The statement curls with ironies when you consider the technical difficulties he had in finishing his late paintings. But it chimes with the attitude of his admirers in America - artists like John Henry Twachtman, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and, to a lesser extent, John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. They all sought - certainly in the works on view here - to paint in ways that minimized evidence of the painter's touch, thereby suggesting something beyond the "coarseness" of the material world.

Here, I must admit, it becomes a question of predilection. Personally I have reservations about the aesthetic philosophy of these "soft painters." By the end of the show, having seen so many blurred and hazy landscapes, my reservations were only enhanced.

Snow that looks soft and gauzy, as in Twachtman's "Round Hill Road" (c. 1890-1900), rather than wet and heavy makes me suspicious. Trees that look like smudged calligraphy rather than robust living entities may briefly romance the eye, but after seeing too many of them, one longs for the heft and substance of a painting like Courbet's "The Oak of Flagey."

That said, the late landscapes of Inness can be marvelous, if only because he introduces vigor via his sturdy compositions and always original color. Note especially his wonderful contrasts of russet and green, and the deft use of scumble on his paintings' surfaces.

Another great exception is Eduard Steichen, the pioneering Pictorialist photographer whose painted landscapes from the turn of the century are masterful and underrated. Six of them round out this show. They may be blurry, imprecise, poetic, but to me they also feel keenly observed, stunningly fresh. Above all, Steichen's color combinations - light blues with acidic greens; pinks and light greens - feel wholly original.

The whole "painting softly" approach is especially vexing when applied to portraiture, since people, as a rule, are not hazy abstractions, much less "arrangements" or "nocturnes." They are flesh and blood.

What is so wonderful about Chase's spellbinding 1884 portrait "The Young Orphan (At Her Ease)" is that despite the soft touch in the background, the girl has a direct and immediate presence. Her facial expression is instantly legible - not fudged - and her body is described with strong contours.

Whistler made the softly painted approach work in the portrait of his mother, and in a handful of other late portraits. But I felt less than persuaded by the two Whistler portraits displayed here. One, depicting Pablo de Sarasate holding a violin against an indeterminate background, is certainly arresting. But everything about the painting, from the title ("Arrangement in Black") to the weirdly pitched perspective and the vast enveloping darkness around Sarasate, made me conscious of the painting's artifice, and of Whistler's loyalty to aesthetics over truth.

Don't get me wrong: I may have reservations about the Vaseline-lensed approach to painting, but historically the show is fascinating, and there are many works of considerable beauty.

"To generalize is to be an idiot," writes Simpson in the catalog (quoting William Blake). "To particularize is the alone distinction of merit." In saying so he fails to grasp that generalizing was at the heart of these painters' approach, and the lesser among them failed to give their paintings sufficient particularity.