Whistler

Newsnight Review discussed the Whistler exhibition at the Hunterian Gallery.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I didn't want to go as I had rather dismissed Whistler as a stylist, a saloon painter, who liked really beautiful women. It's been a lesson to me about how are assumptions get in the way of new experiences. When I went there it was exciting, fabulous, beautifully curated. They brought in a lot of memorabilia, a letter from Lily Langtry. The tea cups and saucers that he liked to have at his famous breakfasts with Oscar Wilde. He was a great dandy, a man about town. For somebody that perhaps we don't know so much about, this kind of memorabilia puts him in a biographical context of the time. We begin to sense the excitement, that way of life. But for me, the most exciting thing was looking at the etchings that he did. Well before the post-impressionism begins to dissolve the world. Already for him objects were beginning to lose their shape. To become something which was a dream, a cloud, an image, an idea. It's there. The Scottish term for swagger is "gallas" and I would say Whistler was gallas.

PAUL MORLEY:
Yes, I go along with Jeanette. The Arrangement In Grey And Black, it's tremendous. He is a lot more rock and roll than I thought. The Whistler, The Mother, you see it, it's one of those things like the Mona Lisa, one of those great things you are stood in front of £30 million. How long do you give it? Two seconds or four hours? Even that was lifted up beyond the kitsch that it's become. I think it's interesting that an artist like Whistler is so demeaned over time. I love the fact that he was in with Manet. We've turned him into something kitsch, a tea towel thing. The story we get of Whistler and the Mother herself, it's so beautifully told.

KIRSTY WARK:
The stories behind this exhibition are extraordinary. The portrait of his wife, Beatrice, when she was still married to Godwin. You get a real sense of the eroticism.

TOM PAULIN:
Absolutely, but also, if you take the portrait of The Mother, what is similar, the portrait of Thomas Carlyle, they both look as though they are in hospital waiting rooms. Not so much on chairs, but on almost litters. They are to be taken in on a stretcher. He has a strange way of elongating paintings. There is one beautiful painting he painted in an hour-and-a-half. That is fascinating. What I always found about Whistler is the fascination, that it's that French-Scottish thing, in dialogue. But I found him always a bit too posed on the side of being decadent, but still very fascinating. I still kept thinking about that. But the great sympathy with women. The great engravings. Praised by Boddelaire, who reviewed an exhibition in Paris. He was praised with huge rapture.

PAUL MORLEY:
I also like the fact that this thing is called Arrangement In Grey And Black. That is what it is. I started to think about the fact that this has transcended. The spirit of the mother prevails. The devotion for the son and the mother has transmitted for so long. That is his love of women as well.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
It's partly the way it's been curated. The way she has arranged it.

PAUL MORLEY:
But it falls back on this, what we thought was austere painting.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Also in a way he is posing them like film stars, but the women look as if they're chewing lemons, as if they are saying we don't want to be portrayed like this. So there is a real tension in the paintings I think.