Europe’s biggest exhibition of James McNeill Whistler’s artworks has opened at London’s Tate Britain and it’s a “luscious, seductive blockbuster”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
The boundary-pushing American artist “delighted and scandalised late Victorian Britain” in his day. Like his Aesthetic Movement contemporary, Oscar Wilde, he “dared to say that art has no responsibility to depict real life or serve a moral purpose”.
At the heart of this show is Whistler’s famous painting of his mother, Anna, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It’s an “odd, ungainly, unforgettable” portrait, which depicts her like a “carving from a medieval tomb” with a “rigid, lightless and cold” face. The “carefully composed pattern” and muted tones of black and grey transform his mother into a “symbol of art for art’s sake”.
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His mother might be the “headline act” but it’s a “tiny sketch” of his niece that steals the show, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Whistler’s drawings and etchings are dazzling evidence of “how precise he could be when he wasn’t having one of his attacks of the vapours”.
Tate Britain “never misses an opportunity to remind you of the injustices of history”. But this is a show that “seeks to transport you to the past” instead of trying to re-examine it. “Let Whistler be Whistler and history be history”.
It’s an “alluring” retrospective that’s an “unapologetic display of pure peacockery”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. “Beauty” tends now to be “treated like a dirty word” in some parts of the art world but the Tate chooses to put Whistler’s “relentless pursuit of beauty” front and centre. “Kudos to curator Carol Jacobi for insisting on its importance.”
Alongside the paintings and sketches are “gorgeous pieces of furniture” that Whistler decorated, and Japanese prints he took inspiration from. Throughout the show, the “storytelling is crisp, the analysis smart”. But there are “too many” reproductions of works that couldn’t travel, and a “glut of minor pieces towards the end”.
Still, the exhibition “elucidates the alchemical nature of his art” and there’s something “beguiling” and “daring” about his “wraith-like experiments” that verges on 20th-century abstraction. “It doesn’t take long to succumb to his spell.”
Until 27 September, Tate Britain.
