THE ETCHING shows a young man, posing in a wide-brimmed hat, a tied neckerchief and smock. He is a bohemian with thick wavy hair and a luxuriant moustache. His eyes are narrowed in concentration: here is the artist at work.
This is an early s
elf-portrait of James McNeill Whistler, only 25 in 1859 and already honing a carefully calculated self-image as one of the greats. For with the casual arrogance of youth this small etching is designed to recall the self-portraits of one of the greatest artists of them all: Rembrandt.
It's a typical self-aggrandisement for Whistler, the arts for art's sake aesthete, the dandy, womaniser and eventual melancholic. He is an artist as irksome as he is fascinating. He was a pioneer, a controversialist. He was trouble.
Even this small and academically centred show cannot escape his personality. The show's title sounds like some placid homily to Victorian gentility, but is a pun on Whistler's collection of letters and pamphlets on art, The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, published in 1890.
Enemies he did make, most famously Ruskin, whom he sued for the notorious comment that the artist was "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". But Whistler and his works made friends of the highest calibre too, including artist Claude Monet and the poet Mallarmé.
Glasgow University is home to one of the most important collections of Whistler's work as well as extensive correspondence, possessions and ephemera. Gifts and bequests from Whistler's sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip form the core of this collection but it has also been bolstered throughout the years by judicious acquisition and the recent occasional gift (including an etching from the crime writer Patricia Cornwell).
This show highlights the work of Glasgow University's Whistler Etchings Research Project, part of a wider endeavour which brings together three major collections: the artist's estate in the University of Glasgow, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, to examine the history of Whistler's prints and their place in the print market.
The exhibition brings these practical matters alive, by displaying Whistler's own tools and numerous copper plates. Many show the cancellation marks which guaranteed that a limited edition would indeed remain limited. Some have never been used and the prints they might have created have been reconstructed using digital scanning techniques.
Whistler first pursued his art while never quite learning the art of being a soldier. An American who had spent some of his upbringing in Moscow, he was a student at the US military academy at West Point until "deficiencies in chemistry and discipline" led to his expulsion. That often unexplored link between visual art and military endeavour is apparent in his next career move, working for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington.
Here Whistler learned the art of etching and this display includes one of two known works from this period, an image of Ancapa Island in California. There is nothing in it to suggest anything more than technical ability. But within four years Whistler, who had by now made it to Paris, made an astonishing leap forward with the suite of prints that became known as the French Set.
Whistler worked from life, but he was a remarkable editor of the world before him. For all that he later professed to be against narrative in art he often sought out anecdote and played a subtle game of balancing his human interests with aesthetic concerns. His work was a world away from the overt moralising of much Victorian figurative art, but despite his protestation his prints are not without emotional content.
Take The Unsafe Tenement, from the French Set. It shows a tumbling picturesque farmhouse in the Alsace region. In the shadows we see some children play. It is not just a picturesque landscape of some quaint architectural interest, but a melancholy meditation on ageing.
In London, Whistler made some very fine work, the Thames Set, in the wharves of the East End at Wapping and the area around Battersea Bridge. There is a Dickensian interest in working class life, panoramic scenes of men at work, but they are set against an impressive spider's web of line and pattern, an intricate lacework of masts and ropes, pulleys and rigging.
Here we also see Whistler's magical ability to infuse scenes of everyday modernity with his distinctive aesthetic sensibility. The span of Battersea Bridge is transformed into the arc of a stylised Japanese woodcut by Hiroshige or Hokusai.
But it was in Venice, where he spent a year trying to recover from financial woes, that Whistler reached a new level of artistic achievement. He sought to make his fortune from a tourist city, but could not resist the lure of life beyond the well-trodden route. Among the smaller piazzas, the quieter canals, the Renaissance palaces that had lost their grandeur and become artisan workshops, Whistler portrayed a compelling world of shadows and thresholds, of watery reflection and melancholy. These prints were technically brilliant and emotionally charged.
It's hard now to understand where these images fit into art history, and this exhibition's focus on purely Whistlerian matters can sometimes obscure the sense of context. Some scholars, among them Peter Black of the Hunterian, have argued that Whistler's prints may have been seen by some of the key figures of modernism like Picabia and even Picasso.
Even if we can't be sure of that, we should understand Whistler as modern, and his printmaking as precursor of the techniques of mass communication.
Sarah Walden, the fine art conservator who wrote a "biography" of Whistler's most famous painting, the portrait of his mother, after she restored it for the Louvre, has compared him to Andy Warhol. It's not an outrageous claim: both were dandies and careful constructors of their own artistic image in self-portraiture. Both were careless (or perhaps ruthless) in revealing their own frailty behind the mask. Both produced sly and self-mocking artistic manifestos.
Both were masters of the print medium, exploiting its capacities to the full both for deeply held aesthetic reasons as well as the shallow but pressing need or desire to make money. Before setting out for Venice, Whistler wrote to his mother that he would turn "copper into gold". Warhol was a poor man grown wealthy. Whistler started a wealthy man and through his lawsuit achieved bankruptcy.
Whistler: The Gentle Art Of Making Etchings is a wonderful example of how rich research culture can be. However, it also reveals the dangers of the silo mentality that research can engender. It is essential to look a little beyond this detailed and rewarding exhibition to understand how significant and potentially exciting Whistler's printmaking is.
Until May 30
The full article contains 1148 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
