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

Art in America, Jan, 1993 by Wendy Steiner

Yet Ruskin mocked Whistler's effeminacy, and was not alone in doing so. A cartoon from the time of the trial shows an "esthetic youth" standing amid a bevy of fashionable beauties admiring painting, while an older male skeptic looks on bemused. The defense lawyer also found it useful to conjure up in the jury's mind the image of lady viewers: "artistic ladies - beautiful ladies who endeavor to disguise their attractions..., but do not succeed in consequence of sheer force of nature - (Laughter) - and I daresay we would hear those ladies admiring he pictures and commenting upon them." He went on the complain of a contemporary mania for art, a fashion for admiring be encouraged. Clearly, the connection was already well established between the representational, the male and the normal on the one hand, and on the other, the "esthetic" (abstract), the female and the unstable.

The jury's job was not to decide whether Ruskin or Whistler had the better view of art, or even whether Whistler's paintings were worth the 200 guineas that so outraged Ruskin. But in determining whether Ruskin had violated Whistler's privacy, cast aspersions on his name, or indulged in personal malice, they inevitably had to consider whether Ruskin's criticism was justified. As the presecution wheeled in a Titian (later discovered to be by Vincenzo Cateno) to show what a real painting was like, the jury might have been excused for feeling that Whistler's art rather than Ruskin's criticism was on trial

It is surprising that Whistler resorted to such a populist forum as the courts to protest Ruskin's criticism. As the Spectator observed, "Mr. Whistler is clever and original, but he will never hit upon anything more original in art than the device of settling abstract artistic questions by an appeal to an intelligent British jury." Ahead of his time in so many respects, Whistler has much to teach us in the current climate of governmental and judicial intervention in matters of art.

We have only to compare Whistler v. Ruskin with the Mapplethorpe trial in Cincinnati to see how grotesquely exaggerated esthetic issues become in a time of cultural flux. Both artists, though perhaps not of major stature, embody the esthetic transitions of their time with particular clarity: Whistler by merging Victorian representationality with the beginnings of modernist abstraction, and Mapplethorpe by using the formal elegance of modernism to render postmodern pastiche and shocking subject matter. This clash of esthetic norms so disoriented conservatives in 1878 and 1988 that in each instance they denied that the respective works were art at all, evoking in both cases a mythical "common citizen" who was supposedly appalled by these esthetic put-ons. Whistler becomes a fraud pitching paint at canvases at 200 guineas a throw, and Mapplethorpe, according to the prosecution, was like the emperor in the fairly tale who had no clothes. Both shocked their audiences by presenting style as content: Whistler by reducing his subject matter to a minimum, and Mapplethorpe by choosing subjects that contrasted strongly with the statement made by his exquisite style. To make sure that the "common citizen" was suitably outrated, Whistler's esthetic transgressions were associated in the court and the press with sexual transgression. The complaint against Mapplethorpe, of course, was sexual from the start, but the idea that true art was incompatible with non-normative sexuality was implicit in the earlier trail as well.