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What fewer people know is that Whistler spent several decades depicting storefronts — or as the English call them, shopfronts. He returned to this gritty theme continually, not only in oil paintings but also in watercolors, drawings, etchings, lithographs and sometimes pastels.
A gem of an exhibition at the Freer Gallery of Art (part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art) is devoted to these and Whistler’s other urban images. “Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change” presents a whole new idea of an artist too quickly associated with the kind of rarefied aestheticism on view in the museum’s splendid “Peacock Room,” which Whistler designed for the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland.
The show, for reasons I can’t quite pin down, is a lot of fun. It was curated by David Park Curry. What is clear is that, far from remaining aloof from gritty social realities, Whistler loved making pictures of street life, building facades and stores. He liked rag-and-bone stores. He was fond, too, of greengrocers and fruit markets, florists, furniture stores and stores selling birdcages. He showed barbershops, candy stores and butchers.
He remained committed to these subjects over the long term. The results of this commitment are extraordinary, in terms both purely pictorial and urban-anthropological.
Although born in Lowell, Mass., Whistler lived most of his life in London and Paris and traveled widely. The pictures in this show depict streets in French cities and towns as well as in London and Venice.
Plenty of late 19th-century artists indulged a sentimental taste for picturesque images of street life. Whistler’s renderings are distinct. Where other artists’ images were heavy-handed, overworked, often tediously moralistic, Whistler’s pictures look provisional, disinterested (in the impartial, non-sentimental sense) and (to our eyes) remarkably modern.
Regardless of the kind of shop he was depicting, Whistler stuck to a preferred format. Anticipating the 20th-century photographs of Walker Evans, he showed his subjects frontally, so that each shop’s windows, doors, awnings and signs tended to be arranged on a grid. He left the foregrounds mostly empty, with just a few sketchy details — children playing, the hint of a street curb, the prows of two gondolas — leading our eyes across empty foregrounds toward otherwise tactfully distanced views.
Whistler loved the marvels and eccentricities of storefronts. He loved darkened doorways that led the eye inside, often revealing, on close inspections, figures disappearing into shadow. He loved first-floor windows obscured by curtains or shutters. But in none of these pictures did he mystify the subjects or take refuge in Romantic vagueness, as he often seems to in his “Nocturnes,” for instance.
Instead, he relished details and textures of the kind that give life to 17th-century pictures of streets by Vermeer, Rembrandt and de Hooch. Dutch painting was a big influence on him, but so were the novels of Charles Dickens and the illustrations of Gustave Doré.
He wanted you to see exactly how many people were congregating around this doorway and how many birdcages were suspended in front of that shop. He wanted to show you sunflowers and carcasses of beef and heaped window displays of delicious orange candies.
But Whistler didn’t want to be fussy. His lines are a bit scratchy and loose, the subjects sensitively observed but not too defined. The result is that you feel lured in but at the same time, held slightly at bay.
I found myself totally seduced by this dynamic — the pictorial equivalent of flirting. The small scale and lack of narrative in these works means that your eyes and brain must do a bit of work to “complete” them. They have to read subtexts and clues, some of which trigger little chortles of surprise or recognition. All this leaves scope for the imagination, which can venture into the picture as far as it likes, or stand back in a state of animated unknowing.
Whistler was a dandy, and on the surface, his interested-but-aloof attitude chimes with Charles Baudelaire’s description of the dandy (in his great essay, “The Painter of Modern Life”) as “a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.” But given Whistler’s commitment to these subjects, and his almost mischievous eye for Dickensian detail, you can’t help suspecting that his feelings run deeper than the typical dandy’s.
To complement the scores of works on paper on display, there are several superb paintings, each executed in Whistler’s characteristically diluted, flowing oils. (He once said paint “should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.”) Having been attuned to detail by the works on paper, your eyes start to see more in these diaphanous paintings than they otherwise might.
“Nocturne: Silver and Opal — Chelsea,” for instance, shows a suspension bridge through evening fog. You can barely make out the bridge itself, which was initially named for Queen Victoria but renamed after it was found to be unsound.
What makes the picture so beautiful is the pall of spidery dark lines in the foreground. Describing nothing substantial, this dark, optical cobweb leads the eye into a picture that could otherwise present a brick wall to the imagination, so nearly abstract is it.
See this show, and, guaranteed, you won’t see Whistler the same way ever again.
Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change Through May 4 at the National Museum of Asian Art. asia.si.edu.
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