Reading Whistler's Nocturne In Blue And Gold Old Battersea Bridge As A Piece Of Music

(MENAFN- The Conversation) In 1877 the American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) achieved notoriety when he exhibited his recent views of the river Thames at the Grosvenor gallery in London. He gave his paintings musical titles: Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875) and Nocturne in Blue and gold – Old Battersea Bridge (circa 1872-5).

The view of Battersea Bridge includes Chelsea Church and the then newly constructed Albert Bridge. The lights of Cremorne Pleasure Gardens twinkle in the distance, while fireworks explode in the pale sky above.

The painting is remarkable for its intense, light blue tonality suggestive of evening, the time of day sometimes known as“the blue hour”. Painting from memory, Whistler thinned his paint with copal (a tree resin), turpentine and linseed oil. This created what he called a“sauce”, which he applied in thin, transparent layers, wiping it away until he was satisfied. He left areas of the dark preparatory layer unpainted to create the illusion of the bridge. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, he exaggerated its height.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics . The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books, films and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

All this was lost on the critics, however. The author Oscar Wilde reviewed the exhibition and wrote that the Battersea Bridge Nocturne was“worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute”.

A few years earlier Whistler had exhibited another view of the Thames, Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (1871), at the Dudley Gallery in London. The critic for The Times summed up Whistler's intention, observing that the painting was:

Arrangement in Gray: Portrait of the Painter by Whistler (1872). Detroit Institute of Arts

Whistler's paintings were first compared to music as early as 1863 when the French critic Paul Manz described his haunting portrait, The White Girl (1872), as a “symphony in white” . Whistler adopted the title retrospectively, creating a series of three aesthetic mood paintings or“symphonies”, featuring young women in flowing white dresses.

Press and public alike were puzzled by the artist's insistence that his paintings lacked any specific narrative or moral message.

When he witnessed the abstraction of Whistler's latest Nocturnes at the Grosvenor Gallery, the leading English art critic John Ruskin published a venomous review .“I have seen, and heard much of Cockney impudence before now,” he wrote,“but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.”

Whistler's retort

Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and used the ensuing two-day trial to defend his views on art. He referred to his paintings throughout proceedings in musical terms, as“arrangements”,“symphonies” or“nocturnes”. When asked what the Battersea Bridge painting was intended to represent, he replied:

Whistler won the court case, but was awarded only a farthing in damages, resulting in his bankruptcy. Undaunted, the following year (1878) he published The Red Rag , in which he articulated his aesthetic theory:

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In 1885 he delivered his, now famous, 10 o'clock Lecture . In it reiterated his aesthetic theory.“Nature,” he wrote,“contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music”. He urged artists not to copy nature slavishly, as Ruskin had recommended, but to approach it more like a musician, waiting for that moment when:

It is then, he argued, that nature“sings her exquisite song to the artist alone”.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we're asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn't (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Frances Fowles' suggestion:

Whistler was not the only artist of this period to view his art as the equivalent of music. His work anticipated symbolism, a literary and artistic movement that rejected naturalistic representation in favour of more abstract concerns, such as the connections between words, colours and musical notes.

Mikalojus Čiurlionis and his 1908 painting, Stellar Sonata. Wiki Commons

The relationship between colour, rhythm and sound was central to the work of French artist Paul Signac (1863-1935), who worked in a pointillist technique (applying dots of colour), and assigned his paintings opus numbers and tempos. The Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Čiurlionis (1875-1911), too, fused music and colour and gave his artworks musical titles.

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