WHISTLER UNVEILED

By ROBERT HUGHES

AFTER BENJAMIN WEST IN THE 18th century, James McNeill Whistler was the first American artist to become really famous across the Atlantic: not only in London, like West, but in Paris as well. Since America loves to see its children imposing themselves on the world's culture--a less common sight 100 years ago than now--this perpetual expatriate, with his viperish tongue, large ego and delicately nuanced paintings, has long been an American favorite.

And not only an American one. As a young man, he worked with Gustave Courbet. He knew, and was respected by, some of the finest artists in Paris: Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet. He appears (with Baudelaire, Manet and other French luminaries) in Henri Fantin-Latour's group portrait of the rising art stars of 1864, Homage to Delacroix. "This American is a great artist, and the only one of whom America can be justly proud," said Camille Pissarro. And Marcel Proust turned part of his name, unpronounceable by the French, into an anagram: he became the painter Elstir in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Though Whistler never went to Japan, he was seen as a bridge between East and West, the voracious collector of blue-and-white porcelain who brought a Japanese aesthetic of hints and nuances into late 19th century painting. His abhorrence of narrative, his preference for the exquisitely designed moment over the slice of life, was new; it epitomized the idea of Art for Art's Sake. It was provocative, in 1871, to call a portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. It implied that the hallowed sentimentality about motherhood in Victorian England was cultural baggage, that the aesthetic life of shapes mattered at least as much as social piety.

Today how good does he look? A large retrospective jointly organized by London's Tate Gallery, Paris' Musee d'Orsay and the National Gallery of Art in Washington (where it is on view through Aug. 20) offers the evidence. Whistler was an artist whose legend as wit, dandy and aesthetic kamikaze--for what was his libel suit against the critic John Ruskin but a suicide mission, compelled by his own claims to "Southern honor"?--continued after his death and became a barrier to appraisal of his work. One would prefer to think that Whistler the artist flies free of Whistler the celebrity, the "personality." Not so. On one hand, his pose as a self-constructed man remains as fiercely impressive as Oscar Wilde's. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee"--he did that long before Muhammad Ali was born. On the other hand, he was a fine painter but never a great one, though some of his decorative work--conspicuously, the fabulous gold-on-leather Peacock Room in Washington's Freer Gallery--rose to greatness as decoration.

It is absurd to class him with Degas or Manet. He didn't have the range, the formal toughness or the breadth of human curiosity for that. Yet sometimes he approached them, as in his finest portrait, his 1872-73 study of the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle. When he sat for Whistler, Carlyle was 78 and heavy with fame, depression and guilt. All this is conveyed in the disturbed but massive black profile of the coat and in the tenderness of Whistler's treatment of the face.

Whistler was a very considerable artist, none the less so for being a self-invented man. Perhaps, like West a century before, he was irked by the low status of artists in America; his solution was not to attach himself to a court, as West did, but to pretend to be a native aristocrat. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, and partly raised in Russia, where his father, an engineer, was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad for Czar Nicholas I. Doubtless the Russian fixation on rank impressed him; in any case, he began to insist quite early in his life that he was no prosaic Yankee, but a Southern gentleman from Baltimore, Maryland. He enrolled at West Point, but was flunked in 1854 for his cluelessness about chemistry. "Had silicon been a gas," he would say later, "I would have been a major-general."

He left for Paris the next year. Thus, although he liked to posture as a dashing Tidewater cavalier, Whistler never became an officer, let alone saw action in the Civil War. This insufficiency troubled him and accounts for a curious adventure he undertook in 1866, when he sailed from France to Chile--a long and grueling trip across the Atlantic and around the Horn--to be present at a Spanish naval blockade of the port of Valparaiso. By the end of the year he was back in Paris, with a few crepuscular seascapes but no honorable scars to show for his excursion.

By then he had been out of his native land for 11 years. He would never return to it, though at the end of his life he still called America "my home," after almost a half-century of continuous expatriation. Nobody knows why; Whistler may not have been sure himself. He feared not being honored as a prophet in his own country, but in fact his work was eagerly sought by American collectors and portrait clients, some of whom were all but obsessed by it; the Detroit millionaire Charles Freer owned 40 of his paintings and hundreds of his drawings. Moreover, he was a prophet--Americans imitated him, especially photographers. After 1900, Alfred Stieglitz and his circle labored to give their prints the evocative blur, the tonal harmony, the self-conscious aestheticism of Whistler's night and twilight pictures.

Whistler's Mother remains his most famous painting--up there in the peculiar grab bag of images that for one reason or another, usually unconnected with their quality as art, everyone knows, like the Mona Lisa and Grant Wood's American Gothic. The picture that made his reputation was earlier, and better. Painted in 1862, it is a portrait of his Irish lover, Jo Hiffernan, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. Shown in London first and then in Paris, it provoked a buzz of irrelevant interpretation. The expressionless young woman in virginal white, standing on a wolfskin with a lily in her hand (that floral emblem of the Aesthetic Movement), was declared to be a bride the night after; or a fallen ex-maiden; or a victim of mesmerism--anything, except what she was, a model posing in Whistler's studio to give him a pretext to paint shades of white with extreme virtuosity and subtlety. The story was that there was no story; it was Whistler's first sally against the narrative tradition in English art, though by no means the last.

Shrewdly, Whistler kept just enough American quirks to make him look exotic to Europeans--while speaking to other Americans in a Franco-British accent. He liked buckwheat cakes and green corn, sweet potatoes and American cocktails; he had a flat American straw hat and a specimen of American invention, a horn gramophone, on which he would play Fourth of July orations to mystified French guests.

But artistically, he was entirely a European. None of the American preoccupations with national landscape found the smallest echo in his work--not the sublime rhetoric of Frederick Church, not the tight-surfaced stillness of the Luminists and certainly not the blunt factuality of Winslow Homer. Whistler was a superb topographical etcher, as his scenes of London, Amsterdam and Venice show; but he cared nothing for realism when aesthetics pointed away from it.

In the most beautiful of his Thames nocturnes of the 1870s, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in a luminous blue twilight, appearance is sliding off into illegibility under the aegis of Japanese prints; Hokusai, one of Whistler's favorite artists, had done a similar scene of fireworks at night behind a tall wooden bridge. The real Battersea Bridge was too stumpy for Whistler, so he made it into a tall Orientalized dream, with the falling rocket fire spangling the dusk like gold flakes on Japanese maki-e enamel. If he could choose where he was born, he could certainly decide what country of the mind a mere bridge was in.