Whistler: streetscapes, urban change

Abstract

"James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) created hundreds--oils, watercolors, prints, and drawings--that depicted urban sites undergoing rapid transformation during the Victorian era. Despite Whistler's aversion to overtly narrative or political themes, his art reveals a long-term engagement with social and economic change. In London, Paris, and elsewhere, the picturesque old neighborhoods where he lived and worked were in the throes of relentless redevelopment as spacious parks, avenues, and buildings for affluent city dwellers obliterated crowded historic districts, squeezing the urban poor into increasingly squalid conditions. Many of the old-fashioned shops and ateliers that engaged Whistler's attention were torn down shortly after he rendered them. Although a determined modernist, Whistler, ever the contrarian, had attracted a somewhat undeserved reputation as an historic preservationist by the end of his life. The wide-ranging artworks featured here, drawn from the permanent collections of the Colby College Museum of Art, the National Museum of Asian Art, and other sources, bear silent witness to the uncertainties of modern metropolitan life that Whistler saw firsthand. However, his streetscapes also presage the contemporary practice of 'artwashing', wherein the negative consequences of gentrification can hide behind aesthetic screens. Like Whistler, working a century and a half ago, today's artists and their audiences are immersed in an era of shifting cultural expectations. Whistler: Streetscapes, Urban Change invites the reader to consider the multivalent implications of images that memorialize the ongoing struggles of the urban poor while romanticizing poverty for a lucrative art market."-- Provided by publisher.