A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin. - book reviews

Art in America, Jan, 1993 by Wendy Steiner

In 1877, John Ruskin visited London's new Grosvenor Gallery, where some paintings by James McNeill Whistler were on display. He found these so offensive - in particular the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket - that he wrote to the journal Fors Clavigera, complaining that Whistler was a "coxcomb" with the " Cockney impudence" to "ask two hundred guineas for flinging a not of paint in the public's face." These were strong words, and Whistler, eager for cash and publicity, parlayed the insult into a national media event by suing Ruskin for libel. Despite all the attention the trial attracted hen it reached the courts in 1878, the official record of the proceedings was unaccountably discarded. Linda Merrill, curator of the Freer Gallery of Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, where over 1,200 of Whistler's paintings, drawings and prints are housed, has carefully pieced a transcript together out of the numerous newspaper accounts and provided extensive commentary on this curious moment in Victorian art history.

Like so many encounters between esthetics and the law, Whistler v. Ruskin left more questions unanswered than it resolved. The jury of well-educated landowners found Ruskin guilty in November 1878, but granted Whistler only far-thing in damages. They seem to have been puzzled by their charge, possibly because their instructions were so garbled that the judge is suspected of having been drunk. To all concerned, according to the Examiner, it was "a victory which bears a very striking resemblance to a defeat."

Though Ruskin had, years before, championed the near-abstract work of Turner, he criticized Whistler on the same grounds as Turner's critics. Even Ruskin's image of the flying paint pot recalls an 1842 article in which Turner had been accused of "throwing handfuls of white, and blue, and red at the canvas, [and] letting what chanced to stick, stick." Having created a taste for Turner, Merrill reasons, Ruskin was infuriated at the possibility that he had thus licensed what he considered second-rate imitations by the coxcomb Whistler.

Exactly why Ruskin found Turner sublime and Whistler derisory we never learn, and Merrill's presentation of Ruskin's critical precepts does not clear up the mystery. She argues that Ruskin had taught the public that pictures ought to be valued for "the clearness and the justice of the ideas they contained and conveyed," a principle construed by both Victorian critics and Ruskin's trial lawyers to mean that pictures should be visual treatises. A picture's value - artistic and monetary - was understood to lie in its successful rendering of ideas and in its overall finish. These would generate a fair price independent of the foibles of popular taste. The critic's role was to determine this value in an almost scientific fashion. Ruskin compared esthetic judgment to legal decision-making: "The Bench of honourable Criticism is as truly a Seat of Judgment as that of Law itself," he wrote to his lawyers, "and its verdicts, though usually kinder, must sometimes be no less stern." As a regulatory institution, criticism was indispensable, and the critic's freedom to assert an opinion was an essential requisite of the profession.

Whistler, in contrast, believed that painting was not subject matter or ideas but line, color and composition. He entitled his works "nocturnes," "arrangements" and "harmonies" to "indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it . . . The picture is throughout a problem that I attempt to solve." As a result, Whistler's nocturnes where often completed in a day or two, and had the resolution of sketches rather than the "licked" surfaces that Ruskin expected of "finished works." The price of his canvases, Whistler argued, depended not on the number of hours that went into their production but the life-time of experience and skill he brought to the act of painting. Whistler held that only artists could grasp the value of art, and he was convinced that esthetic judgment was a matter of opinion rather than science. A critic, necessarily partial and impressionistic, had no business damaging the reputation and livelihood of a dedicated painter.

Merrill explains the clash between Ruskin and Whistler as symptomatic of the shift from Victorian to modernist art. The stress on line and color sounds like a manifesto for early 290th-century abstraction, and the pot of paint flung in the public's face is a harbinger of the initial response to the poured paintings of Jackson Pollock. The problem for Whistler was that the term "abstract" had not yet entered the esthetic lexicon: there was neither a rationale nor a corpus of nonrepresentational art to explain what he was after.

Moreover, when faced with art they could not understand, Victorian critics consistently belittled it on sexist grounds. Since Whistler's evocations of atmosphere and from were seen as lacking the "masculine" firmness and morality embodied in Ruskin's ideals, his works were derided as feminine and frivolous. This characterization seems somewhat ironic in the context of Whistler's reputation as a womanizer and in light of the possibility, Merrill hints, that Ruskin's pronounced anxiety about Whistler was a function of his own repressed homosexuality.