Tate Britain’s big summer attraction is the first major exhibition in thirty years on Britain’s first modern artist. Except that artist happens to have been a loud-mouthed American who championed “art for art’s sake” in the face of Victorian moralising, kicking off the first great “it’s not art” row well over a century before the YBAs. Oh, and his nocturnal views of the Thames are some of the most hauntingly beautiful paintings ever created.
Yet James McNeill Whistler never quite gets his due as one Britain’s strongest contenders – probably the strongest – in the great 19th century shake-up of art, when Paris seemed always decades ahead of London in the race to modernity. Prior to this exhibition he was represented in Tate Britain by only two modestly sized works. Born into an eminent New England family in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, raised in Russia and trained in Paris, Whistler moved to London in 1859. Remaining here till his death in 1903, he turned the staid British art scene on its head over four tumultuous decades. His flair for self-mythology paved the way for generations of performative artists from Paul Gauguin to Tracey Emin. Whistler claimed to have been born in St Petersburg, because "I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell," while playing up his fleeting contacts with the Parisian greats to the hilt.
