NARRATOR:
Symphony in White, No. 1, The White Girl, by the American-born expatriate James McNeill Whistler, caused an uproar when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1863. It’s a portrait of Joanna Heffernan, Whistler’s mistress. But it was the artist’s radical approach to painting that really caused the furor.

The picture was criticized for vulgar subject matter and poor draftsmanship, for being eccentric, unintelligible, and unfinished. Later, the English critic John Ruskin compared Whistler’s style to “flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued for libel and won—but went bankrupt paying off his lawyers.

The public believed that works of art should be “about” something; should illustrate a moral truth or a work of literature. But Whistler declared:

WHISTLER (ACTOR):
"Art should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like."

NARRATOR:
Curator Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr.

NICOLAI CIKOVSKY:
“Whistler often referred to his painted images by using musical terminology, by calling them symphonies, nocturnes and so on. And he did it for the obvious purpose of trying to make a painting, an art that visually did what music could do, an art that was not dependent on telling stories on depicting objects. It was just to be about painting, about color, or in this case, about white.”

“And so here we have a figure dressed in white, against a white background. And yet it is remarkable how much there is in the whiteness of his painting, how many different varieties of white, some cool and bluish, others warmer, more yellow, more orange. So it’s a self-imposed limitation, which has the result of calling our attention, even more forcefully in many ways, to the painting’s variety of tones of white.”

What we would also see is the extraordinary quality of painting, of the various textures, of the gown, of the sleeves of her blouse, the wonderful drapery in the background. The extraordinary variety of brushwork that Whistler manages to include in this otherwise extraordinarily simple image.

NARRATOR:
On the upper-right edge of the frame, you’ll see the outline of a butterfly. Whistler had strong ideas about how his paintings should be shown. He often designed or painted his own frames, as he did here. Like many artists in the late 19th century, Whistler was influenced by Japanese art. In the Japanese spirit, he adopted the butterfly as a personal symbol, and used it here, on the frame, as a second signature.