Whistler's Nocturnes and the aesthetic subject.

Abstract

Throughout the 1870s, James McNeill Whistler devoted much of his creative energies to the development of his signature visual form, the Nocturne. In thirty-two extant oil paintings Whistler explored the nighttime landscape, especially that of his adopted London, familiar terrain made more intriguing by darkness and mist that concealed mundane identities and uncovered the implicitly pictorial possibilities of the urban subject. Regarded as a singularly inventive aesthetic expression by contemporary admirers and detractors alike, the Nocturne was Whistler's declaration of his difference from the younger generation of realist painters with which he was closely associated from the time he arrived in Paris in 1855. Whistler's Nocturnes--by definition indefinite and multivalent--elude clear categories and contexts. This study treats the Nocturne in successive chapters as a hybrid pictorial form that mediates between plein-air realism and the conceptual work of the studio, naturalist observation and stylized decoration, legible reference and imaginative allusion, and a dynamics of presentation and retreat. This dissertation attends closely to the formal qualities of the Nocturnes, and reads them through and against a series of contemporary texts, from the artist's own theoretical pronouncements and commentary in the nineteenth-century periodical press, to the fin-de-siecle construction of a hermitic Whistler offered by writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Geffroy, and Camille Mauclair. Whistler's art is at once firmly present in the canon of modernism and peculiarly peripheral to it. The Nocturnes, in particular, frequently are enlisted in the modernist march toward an art of pure form. Yet Whistler's ostensibly radical reputation and rhetoric appeal to ahistorical, transcultural standards for their oppositional authority, just as his Nocturnes attempt to inhabit both terms of the binary structures from which they are formed. The aim of this dissertation is to account for the paradoxical challenges of Whistler's project by situating his Nocturnes in the context of work that does not constitute a full-fledged assault on representational conventions so much as it seeks to incorporate and reconfigure those conventions in the name of transcendent tradition as defined by the ultimate aesthetic subject of this study--Whistler himself.