Nocturne in Blue and Silver

For his contemporaries as for recent scholars, the primary fact about Whistler is his singularity. It may be said that he and his critics, in a strange collusion born of antipathy and adulation in equal measure, have made of Whistler himself an object of aesthetic judgement...

In 1905, B. O. Flower, editor of the liberal magazine Arena, described the great crisis of contemporary art as a battle “between those who stand for sane and normal freedom and who though true to the basic principles of art refuse to be copyists or imitators,” and “those . . . imbued with the soul-stagnating spirit of modern commercialism” who are intent on forming a trust “where the measuring-rod of mediocrity would become paramount.” Pitting incorporated modes of artistic practice against the …