WHISTLER

by Stanley Weintraub ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1973

Comparable to Michael Holroyd's biography of Strachey, this may also be a major biography of a minor figure although as Weintraub wisely points out, the accomplishments of the artist are often overshadowed by capricious live performances of the man -- ""perfectionist, poseur, poet and prophet"" -- his own worst enemy who also disposed of most of his friends before he died. This is corporeally and otherwise a much more substantial book than Roy McMullen's Victorian Outsider, expanded and enlivened by the use of infinite contemporary materials, also including a great deal about his pictures with their casual titles (Arrangements, Nocturnes) and his epigrammatic theories about painting (paint ""should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass""). The women in his life figure in far more prominent relief than in the shorter McMullen work -- the devoted, attractive Jo of six years, the practical, managerial Maud Franklin of fourteen, and finally Trixie who in her death elicits a fraught tenderness in Whistler absent in his other relationships. Then of course there's always his mother, glum save toward her ""Jemie"" and pious, who in the words of his friend Greaves retired upstairs perhaps to be ""nearer her Maker."" Whistler in his later, almost psychopathically contentious years, became the almost legendary coxcomb, more finished than the paintings he so often failed to complete -- the more youthful bohemian/bon vivant turning into one of those fabulous originals, like Wilde or Beardsley or Robert de Montesquieu of that mauve decade adding a page to the yellow book with phrases coined with stunning panache -- ""Noblesse Abuse."" In any case Mr. Weintraub's commanding work is likely to be around almost as long as Whistler's mother, commemorated in white and black.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Weybright & Talley--dist. by McKay

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION