Whistler. The Butterfly Effect

In Passing…

Synaesthesia, Correspondences and Literary Posterity

Florence Calame-Levert

Old Battersea Bridge, which, with its pale night and its twinkling points of light on the blue shadow, made the hearts of young readers of Proust and Virginia Woolf beat faster thirty years ago.

André Chastel, 1961

Scandal and undermining of ut pictura poesis

In Paris in 1863, Symphony in White, No. 1 (1861–63) caused a scandal at the Salon des Refusés. The painting, then entitled The White Girl, perplexed the public. First of all, it was in the format normally used for official portraits of high-ranking figures whose identity, indeed, was emphasised. Here, the anonymity of the young woman challenges that common doxa. The model – a dreamy concubine with loose red hair – is none other than the painter’s mistress. On the floor, the wolfskin is caressingly soft.

By mobilising the academic codes of painting that traditionally construct a narrative – here the immaculate dress and the white lily, which in another context would be symbols of virginity – Whistler was commenting ironically on the rigid patterns of thought and morality in which the societies of Second Empire France and Victorian Britain were corseted.  In doing so, he underlined the narrative control of pictorial works, the ascendancy of story-telling over painting. However, what he places before us, he claims, is simply a woman in white in front of a white curtain. Whistler rejected the dominance of narrative over painting, which he intended to liberate from then on.

Throughout his life, Whistler spent a lot of time in the company of writers, foremost among them Swinburne, Mirbeau, Montesquiou and Mallarmé, but also Henry James and Oscar Wilde. He always refused to be called a ‘literary painter’, though he was often described as such. We understand: Whistler, like a number of his contemporaries, based his distinctiveness, his modernity, on disputing any link that might be drawn between a pre-existing literary work and one of his paintings. He was against anecdote on principle: a painting is nothing other than timeless relationships established between the colours of which it is composed.[1]

Although many artists in the nineteenth century still followed the principles of ut pictura poesis, which remained the norm in academic circles, the novel also played a leading role in this process of liberation, which was actually mutual. It is worth recalling that during his lifetime, Gustave Flaubert forbade illustration of his work, as it should be subject to the free-ranging imagination of the reader… An infinite imaginary was thus to be preserved as essential to the very nature of literature. Edifying stories featuring painters and painting, from Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu [The Unknown Masterpiece] (Balzac, 1831 and 1837) to The Madonna of the Future (Henry James, 1873), show the progressive undermining of the notion of translatability in favour of intermediality,[2] an alternative to the relationship between painting and literature, promoting their reciprocal liberation. Both these philosophical tales present a painter similarly spellbound by his painting, an ultimate masterpiece, jealously kept secret. The strangeness and unease that ensue are specifically literary, although at the same time the particularities of the painting are specified. A common denouement highlights the peak of painting’s autonomy, which supposedly blinds the artist, depriving him of all discernment, and giving the writer de facto clairvoyance, gradually revealing the plot to his reader. In so doing, literature specifies painting. As we know, the unknown masterpiece figures only as its tragic failure, and James’s Madonna is nothing more than a sad white monochrome made decrepit by time, as its model has become, showing the signs of age. The telling of the story raises the anecdote to the heights of narrative progression, with the reader as accomplice at the heart of a gradual revelation. James and the virginity of the canvas give us a wonderful account of painting: it is a work both of the mind and of the hand, of  action and of matter; provided it is seized in time, it fixes its subject for eternity. Narrative, on the other hand, needs time; it exhausts it, and tragedy feeds on that exhaustion.

[1] Dayan, 2009, p. 8.

[2] This concept is borrowed from Charlotte Ribeyrol (see Ribeyrol, 2004, p. 64).