Victorians: Prudish and Sensuous

'Cult of Beauty: Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900'

Jesse Hamlin

Sunday, February 12, 2012

San Francisco Chronicle--Datebook Section, pink

People didn't know what to make of Whistler's 1862 painting "The White Girl" when it was first shown at a London gallery that year. The picture - which the expatriate American dandy later titled "Symphony in White No. 1" - shows a red-haired young woman wearing a flowing white dress and a blank expression, standing in front of a whitish curtain on a fang-baring wolf-skin rug. There's a white lily in her hand and a sprig of flowers dropped on the brushy brown pelt.

"It shocked viewers at the time because it doesn't have a subject matter," says Lynn Orr, the curator of European art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "They didn't know what it meant. It's not a portrait. It's the most beautiful choreography of color - this white on white, cream on white. This is Whistler beginning to explore formalist ideas at the expense of story."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/09/PKK31N1V2E.DTL#ixzz1mBze0Tq6