" According to the Whistlerian
gospel, the artist not only has now no point of contact with the public,
but he should not have and never has had any. He has never been a man
among other men, but has been a dreamer "who sat at home with the women"
and made pretty patterns of line and color because they pleased him. And
the only business of the public is to accept "in silence" what he
chooses to give them.
This kind of rootless art he practised. Some of the patterns he produced
are delightful, but they are without imagination, without passion,
without joy in the material and visible world--the dainty diversions of
a dilettante. One is glad that so gracefully slender an art should
exist, but if it has seemed great art to us it is because our age is so
poor in anything better. To rank its creator with the abounding masters
of the past is an absurdity.
In their efforts to escape from the dead-alive art of the salon picture,
Monet and the Impressionists took an entirely different course. The
gallery painter's perfunctory treatment of subject bored them, and they
abandoned subject almost as entirely as Whistler had done. The sound if
tame drawing and the mediocre painting of what they called official art
revolted them as it revolted Whistler; but while he nearly suppressed
representation they could see in art nothing but representation.
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