The gently useless art of making enemies
Or, Whistler's bother
As a painter, James Whistler was a master of the brush-off. His art was brilliant and his life was spent making sure that everyone knew it. Posthumous recognition wasn’t for him. As the old line goes, he didn’t want to live on in the hearts of his countrymen; he wanted to live on in his apartment, and frankly he thought he deserved the penthouse suite.
Why was he such a jerk? In an uncharacteristically helpful way, he explained:
“Early in life I made the discovery that I was charming, and if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death.”
Born in 1834 in Lowell, Massachusetts (not his first choice of venue, he later made clear), he failed out of West Point for talking back to his professors. When asked what he would do if he couldn’t remember key battles at a dinner party, he snapped, “Do? Why, I should refuse to associate with people who talk of such things at dinner.”
And so he moved to Europe and started acting like a Great Master, and it worked. As Degas told him, “If you were not a genius, you would be the most ridiculous man in Paris.” And when his genius was compared to Velasquez, he haughtily replied, “Why drag in Velasquez?”
Whistler’s ideas about art were genuinely novel and interesting. He titled all of his paintings “arrangements” and “harmonies,” an extension of his theory that “art should be independent of all clap-trap.” As he reasoned, “The great musicians knew this. Beethoven and the rest wrote music — simply music; symphony in this key, concerto and sonata in that.”
But his reasoning bumped into reality with his most famous painting, the one pictured above:
Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black.’ Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?
The public knows it and loves it as Whistler’s mother, which in Whistler's view meant they were wrong.
Even more wrong was the critic John Ruskin, who accused Whistler of charging “two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” and got sued because of it. Though Whistler’s larger case against criticism was ridiculous, he excelled in courtroom repartee. This line, in particular, can be employed by anyone whose hard-earned mastery of their work is undervalued:
“Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!”
“No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”
Whistler won the case the way he won most of his battles: On paper, at great expense, and to no one’s discernable satisfaction. The jury awarded him a single farthing and he had to split the costs of the trial.
He did, however, get the idea to publish his arguments in a book that lives on because of its terrific title, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. If Whistler had come up with that, you’d have to credit him for seeing the big arrangement.
But no: The original plan was to call it The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, though Whistler fired his original editor and publisher, that ticked-off editor decided to publish the work illegally in Belgium, the Belgian printer rolled his eyes at the dull title and then plucked the words The Gentle Art of Making Enemies from the introduction. It’s Whistler’s greatest title, a perfect description bestowed upon him by the very foes he cultivated.
Was Whistler better at making enemies or making art? 50-50? 80-20? No matter the balance, the lesson from his life is clear: Choose the easel over being a weasel.
Quick quips; lightning
“He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machines.”
— Auguste Renoir on Leonardo da Vinci
“It resembles a tortoiseshell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
— Mark Twain on J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship.
“The only genius with an IQ of 60.”
— Gore Vidal on Andy Warhol
Speaking of…
Strong reactions to art
Argument as art form
Get Wit Quick No. 146 was an Arrangement in Pixels and Links, not that the public cares. Whistler spent years squabbling with Oscar Wilde, who noted that “Mr Whistler has always spelled art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I’.” Peter Schjeldahl has a perfect little appreciation of Whistler’s mother here, with this great quote from the painter: “Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible.” The Belgians couldn’t come up with anything better than Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The public is invited to tap the ❤️ below.