Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
American, British (English); 19th-century
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
83%
The Seashore. c1885. Oil on thin board
This painting is like Fitz Lane doing Monet — a special artwork, though one which can't be liked without reservation. What ought to give one a small amount of pause is the streaky application of paint, which at its best can be equal parts abstract and evocative of real movement, but which Whistler has relied on too completely: this becomes a minor liability in the painting's quieter passages, where it appears affected (for instance, the stretch of water between the lone woman at right and the boats above her). But what nevertheless enthralls one about this picture is the disconnect between its carapace of a surface — an impenetrable glossy threshold, echoed within the image by the adamant shoreline and horizon — and the ethereal rendering of its scene. All those streaks that make up the painting seem to rest on top of, rather than to compose, what's being depicted. It's as though there are two separate abstractions operating here at two different registers: that of the image and that of the object of the painting. (Typically, we think of modernism as being defined by the confluence, not the dissonance or parallelism, of these two registers.) When this artwork really shines is when these two aspects of the painting glance off of each other momentarily. It happens in the blur to the left of the pair of figures on the beach, in the streaks of paint that rhyme with the verticality of the ships' masts, and in the zig-zagging that the paint in the sky does to signify "clouds." (TFS, 2025)