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

Art in America, Jan, 1993 by Wendy Steiner

Added to charges of fraud and perversity was the sin of formalist affectation. Edward Burne-Jones, a witness for Ruskin, made fun of Whistler's estheticism by describing a Titian as "a splendid arrangement of flesh and blood." In the Mapplethorpe trial, the prosecutor said to an expert witness. "You call them figure studies; I might call them sex acts." Though Whistler appears at the beginning of formalism and Mapplethorpe at the end, formalism was in both cases seen as the province of the elitist expert, and both trials were to some degree attacks on the possessors of an expertise that led them to distinguish art from what it represents. Ruskin, of course, was an expert, too, but his position had nothing to do with formalism. In the last analysis, it was not Ruskin's but Whistler's stature as expert practitioner and proselytizer that was at issue.

Because the relations among artist, expert and public depend so heavily on trust and tolerance, both trials were damaging despite their actual verdicts, wasting resources and leaving basic questions unaddressed. Whistler ended up so much in debt that he was forced to sell off his assets and leave the country. The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and its then-director Dennis Barrie were vindicated, but they and the entire art establishment endured great strain and expense. Rather than settling matters once and for all, the trial has left arts funding more insecure than ever. The law and art are seldom, it seems happy bedfellows.

A Pot of Paint, full of historical information and documentation of the trial, would have done well to consider such issues. Merrill's book is too much a faithful record of the proceedings, with lengthy and often redundant paraphrases of the transcript -- and endless display of trees with very little forest. The shift from Victorian to modernist esthetics, the sexual politics of the trial, the clash between the critic's freedom and he artist's right to a fair hearing - these are all issues that receive only cursory attention. The effect is to leave the trial in the same moral quagmire in which the jury found it, and this is a pity. For if there is any lesson to be learned here, it is that arts trials throw up too contradictory a set of issues to allow the critic to stand neutrally by. "The most celebrated lawsuit in the history of art" should not have been presented as a mere document of art history.