Washington College Magazine
Art History: Tsui on Whistler
Art Professor Aileen Tsui is fascinated by the tension between the aesthetic and commercial values in James McNeill Whistler's paintings. Here, Professor Tsui ofers some insight into her interpretation of Whistler's "The Gold Scab."
Attracted by the small liberal arts environment and close proximity to major art museums, Aileen Tsui joined the faculty in 2004. Tsui is currently writing an article on Whistler's Japonisme and a book manuscript, Whistler's Game.
WCM: In your lecture you call "The Gold Scab" "surely the strangest" of Whistler's canvases. What makes it so unusual?
TSUI: "The Gold Scab" is not only unlike any other existing painting by Whistler, it's also unlike any other painting by a nineteenth-century artist that I know of. It's a very peculiar hybrid of a graphic caricature and a life-sized oil portrait. To caricature one's former patron as a kind of peacock-monster playing the piano might not be so remarkable in a drawing or print, but to paint such an image on a canvas more than six feet high—as Whistler did in "The Gold Scab"—is something altogether stranger. "The Gold Scab" is the one extant painting in which the aggressive personal attacks and combative wit for which Whistler was known in Victorian society are given visual form on canvas quite directly. I say "extant painting" because Whistler is known to have produced two other paintings in the same period as "The Gold Scab" that also lampooned his former patron Frederick Leyland, a man who favored frilled shirts. "The Loves of the Lobsters" apparently depicted Leyland as a frilled lobster in a love scene at Niagara Falls, while "Mount Ararat, An Arrangement in Rats" is said to have caricatured Leyland as a frilled rat on Noah's Ark. Unfortunately for us, these works seem to have been destroyed or lost. But if anyone should happen upon a painting of a frilled lobster in an amorous situation when cleaning out his or her attic, please do let me know!
WCM: Your critical work examines the relationship between Whistler's art and his public persona. What do you think Whistler would think of such a critical approach?
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903) The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor), detail, 1879 Oil on canvas, 73 1/2 x 55 in. (186.7 x 139.7 cm)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels through the Patrons of Art and Music, 1977.11
TSUI: My guess is that Whistler wouldn't think much of such a critical approach since during his life he published statements that expressed a forceful disapproval of any kind of scholarly approach to art. He seems to have assumed that the critical analysis of a work of art detracts from appreciation of the work's visual power and aesthetic qualities. My own experience, though, contradicts such an assumption. For me, the critical interpretation of a work of art tends to intensify the pleasure that I derive from simply looking at the object. The time that I spend thinking about a painting and its relation to historical problems in no way interferes with my experiences of just standing in front of the painting in the museum and looking. In fact, it would be hard for me to distinguish between the activities of thinking and looking.
WCM: What is your next project in your continuing investigation of Whistler?
TSUI: I'm involved with a number of other projects investigating other aspects of Whistler's work. Last week at a conference in Baltimore, I presented a paper that discussed the differences between the views held by Whistler and by the famous Victorian art critic John Ruskin about the relationship between artistic value and economic or commercial value in modern Britain. I'm currently working on three other projects concerning different aspects of Whistler's work and its significance for our understanding of modern art. One paper examines the issue of Whistler's fascination with Japanese and Chinese objects, which he avidly collected, and how his involvement with collecting East Asian objects affected the development of his own painting. A second paper examines how the color gold functions in Whistler's art; I look at how gold operates as a color within the paintings, as a term in the paintings' titles, and as a striking presence on the frames that the artist specially designed to enclose and surround his works. In a third paper, I'm tracing a distinctive, repeating trope in the critical reception of Whistler's art in Victorian Britain: critics often facetiously and disparagingly likened Whistler's paintings to food. I'm interested in how those food analogies—ham and peas, eggs and milk, liver and bacon—for Whistler's paintings express anxieties about not just the visual qualities of the paintings, perceived as formless and inchoate, but also about the sensuous experience of vision and its connections to appetite and desire.
WCM: Where can people go to see Whistler's work?
TSUI: We here at Washington College are lucky to have the finest collection of Whistler's works in the world nearby at the Freer Gallery of Art, right on the Mall in Washington, DC. The National Gallery of Art in DC also has several significant Whistler paintings in its collection (including "The White Girl"), so a visit there can complement a trip to the Freer Gallery. The Freer Gallery's collection of works by Whistler is especially notable for its permanent installation of the artist's dazzling Peacock Room within the museum. Another important venue for seeing Whistler's work is the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. The University of Glasgow is also home to the Centre for Whistler Studies, a tremendous archival resource for research on Whistler's work.
Aileen Tsui, assistant professor of art history, recently published an article about "the phantasm of aesthetic autonomy" in Whistler's work in Art History, a journal with an international reputation for publishing innovative essays of contemporary scholarship. Tsui, a Harvard Ph.D. who teaches classes on European and American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, talked about the tension between the aesthetic and commercial values of Whistler's work, as part of the College's Tea & Talk series.
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