Exhibit of the week: Portraits, Pastels, Prints: Whistler in the Frick Collection

Frick Collection, New York

Through Aug. 23

Turn-of-the-20th-century steel baron Henry Clay Frick “may have cared little for people, but he had a soft spot for artists,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. One of his favorites was contemporary James McNeill Whistler, the boldly experimental American-born painter who spent most of his career in Europe. Whistler “cast himself as a brave revolutionary, wiping away fusty sentimentalities and focusing on dispositions of form and color.” The Frick Collection possesses some of the best Whistlers in the world, and has temporarily arrayed them in an intimate summer exhibition. But “there’s a revealing abyss between the show’s hushed atmosphere and Whistler’s brash personality.” With his daring use of darkness and color, Whistler aimed to shock. The Frick, displaying his works in marbled galleries usually reserved for old master paintings, “has pickled him in reverence” rather than reveal him as the daring troublemaker he was.

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The cocky Whistler certainly would have considered himself equal in talent to the old masters, said Ann Levin in the Associated Press. But for the most part, he eschewed traditional academic genres and “firmly embraced the avant-garde aesthetic movement” of his time. For him, that meant an emphasis less on realistic representation than on creating striking compositions, dashed with color, that often verge on abstraction. In the “charming views” of Venice displayed here, Whistler does not provide “the typical, tourist’s-eye view” of the romantic city. Rendering scenes of the city’s working classes and little-known backwaters, he often “dispenses with the custom of presenting his subjects against a recognizable landscape.”

But though Whistler liked to emphasize “the abstract qualities” of his own work, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times, the paintings here prove that he actually “had a rare talent for conveying specific places and personalities.” This is nowhere more evident than in this exhibition’s remarkable portraits. “The demure ­subject of Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871–3) peers over her left shoulder,” seemingly snubbing the social arriviste depicted in Harmony in Pink and Gray: Portrait of Lady Meux (1881–2). Whistler’s mysterious, nearly monochrome portrait of the “unctuously luxurious” Count Robert de Montesquiou helps you understand why Marcel Proust based one of his most fascinating characters on the man. In these paintings, Whistler seems to model himself directly on old masters such as Velázquez and Rembrandt. He hardly suffers by comparison.