Timed to coincide with Tate Britain’s impressive gallery show – which closes at the end of September, so you haven’t long if you’ve missed it so far – this latest from the Exhibition on Screen strand does a fine job in outlining the ins and outs, and ups and downs of this still somewhat divisive artist who, Whistler’s Mother notwithstanding, is still probably most famous for winning a farthing in damages in his “flinging a pot of paint” libel action against John Ruskin. The film assembles the customary lineup of notables including the Tate’s Carol Jacobi, critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston and art historian Stephen Calloway, the latter of whom’s dandyish attire and Colonel Sanders goatee suggests he has very much bought into the Whistler aesthetic.
In fact, as all the interviewees are keen to point out, Whistler’s self-constructed persona, always with an eye to making a splash, is as significant an element of his artistic presence as the art itself – even if, as I can’t be alone in thinking, there’s something fundamentally irritating about his southern-genteel attudinising even at a century and a half’s distance. Be that as it may, the film gets to grips with Whistler’s instinctive brilliance as an artist, his natural flair for boundary-pushing and forward-thinking idealism. The big life episodes – his arrival in London, painting his mother, the brouhaha over the Peacock Room, the court case and subsequent bankruptcy – are recounted, but there is impressive detail on the actual art: from the dynamics behind his brooding Wapping picture to the temper tantrums (not his) that made Harmony in Grey and Green, his portrait of the eight-year-old Cicely Alexander so distinctive. And while Whistler’s dealings with the women in his life wouldn’t exactly pass modern-era scrutiny, his pictures of them are genuinely brilliant, with especial attention given to a wonderfully tender sketch of his wife Beatrix, terminally ill in a hotel bedroom.
The only downside is that, so delicate and subtle is his work, Whistler’s shimmering proto-modern visions are perhaps let down a little by pointing a camera at them; it’s hardly the film-maker’s fault but they just don’t jump out of the screen as they do in the gallery. Nevertheless, the film itself is an excellent primer to one of the greats, whose richness of artistic achievement appears to be getting the comprehensive attention it deserves.
• James McNeill Whistler is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 September
