I caught the Whistler exhibition at The Frick last week and was initially concerned about its size—it hangs in that smallish room in between the place where you pay admission and the hallway to the restrooms—but I suppose at some point during the 40 minutes I spent in there reading every bit of wall text and pondering the small etchings and pastels first one-by-one, then randomly, I realized that this is the kind of show that proves quality beats quantity every time.
Fascinating aspects of James McNeill Whistler's artistic choices practically leaped out at the viewer. For example, standing in the middle of the room, I could look over one shoulder at a very spare etching of a Venetian lagoon, then turn my head 180 degrees and see another etching that uses quite a bit of detail to fully render an ornate doorway. Heidi Rosenau of The Frick Collection graciously sent these photos of the two pieces:
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Little Lagoon
by James McNeill Whistler, 1879–1880, etching and drypoint drawing.
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The Doorway
by James McNeill Whistler, 1879–1880, etching and drypoint drawing.
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It's one thing for an artist to be quite spare, or quite ornate. It's another when an artist has both weapons in his or her arsenal and uses whichever approach best expresses his or her impression of the scene in his drawing. I love that Whistler went to Venice to intensely observe it, and his etchings and pastels show that he developed a well-rounded view of the city, and that his interpretations in his pencil drawings translated eventually to these austere works.
In a way, Ingres moved easily from a sparse commentary to a fully rendered one in a similar fashion. The major difference with Ingres is that these contrasting approaches often showed up in the same drawing. Witness these two typical portraits, in which the heads are rendered and the costume is barely outlined.
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Princess Letizia Murat
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1813, graphite pencil drawing, 10 x 6 1/2.
Collection Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Madeleine Ingres With the Artist
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1830, graphite pencil drawing, 7 3/8 x 5 1/4.
Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
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