VMFA Collaborates with Freer Gallery to Present Whistler Exhibition
VMFA to Focus on Arrangement in White and Yellow; Freer to Revisit Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey
November 20, 2003 - April 4, 2004

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution join forces to revisit two James McNeill Whistler exhibitions originally staged in London: Arrangement in White and Yellow (1883) and Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey (1884).

James McNeill Whistler Photo courtesy of Glasgow University Library This reconstruction concept of Arrangement in White and Yellow provides a glimpse of the exhibition. It is a 1994 work in watercolor and ink on paper by Jared I. Edwards, FAIA. (Photo by Katherine Wetzel, © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) Location of the Freer Gallery of Art

The collaborative exhibition is Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London, on view at the Freer Gallery through April 4, 2004. “As the VMFA embarks on the biggest expansion in its history, it is very timely to look back at the work of ground-breaking artists such as Whistler, especially his theories concerning the display of art in public galleries,” says Dr. Michael Brand, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “At the beginning of a new century it is also timely to seek new ways of collaborating with other art museums for the public benefit. This unique collaboration with the Freer Gallery of Art sees a major VMFA exhibition staged in Washington rather than Richmond, primarily in order to strengthen the visual and intellectual impact of the project, but also to provide an illuminating VMFA experience for Virginians who live near the nation’s capital.” Visit the Freer Gallery of Art Whistler web site Mr. Whistler’s Galleries combines two unique exhibitions that will be shown side by side in Washington. Arrangement in White and Yellow is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Dr. David Park Curry, curator of American arts at the VMFA. Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey is organized by the Freer Gallery of Art and Dr. Kenneth Myers, assistant curator of American art at the Freer. Whistler is famous as an avant-garde artist who challenged accepted standards of subject matter, scale and even public behavior, but his artistry as an exhibition designer has been largely overlooked since his death in 1903, according to Curry. “Now my rooms,” James McNeill Whistler proclaimed more than a century ago, “are pictures in themselves.” Drawn from the worlds of domestic decoration, fashion and the theater, Whistler’s presentation techniques were as advanced as the art they showcased, according to Curry. Visitors to Mr. Whistler’s Galleries will have the opportunity to experience both Whistler’s artworks and his groundbreaking gallery design. Amidst a flurry of controversy, the 19th-century White and Yellow exhibition traveled to six American cities after its British premiere, showcasing Whistler’s recent etchings of Venice and London. Whistler covered gallery walls with white felt embellished with brilliant yellow moldings.

“Decorations included draperies of yellow fabric, a yellow sofa in the center of the room, a group of ‘perilous little cane bottomed chairs,’ oriental pottery, and flowers in various shades of yellow,” Curry says.

“Straw matting covered the floor. Although critics complained that the ‘superabundant yellowness almost gives one the jaundice,’ there was a general consensus that Whistler had created a background admirably suited to display his etchings.”

Whistler revealed his flair for showmanship, hiring an attendant “habited in the tints of a poached egg” to circulate through the exhibition selling a catalogue that included critical quotations taken out of context by the artist to hoist journalists with their own petards.

The following year, his Flesh Colour and Grey exhibit was similarly orchestrated to feature pastels, watercolors and oil paintings.

“It was shocking to the sensibilities of 19th-century ‘gallery-trotters,’ but Whistler’s innovations irrevocably changed approaches to gallery design and foreshadowed contemporary installation and performance art of the 20th century,” Curry says.

Mr. Whistler's Galleries: Avant-Garde in Victorian London is a collaborative exhibition project of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Generous support has been received from The Lunder Foundation, and from VMFA's Elisabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund, Faberge Ball Endowment and Faberge Society.

The exhibition is sponsored by SunTrust Bank

VMFA COMPANION BOOK
JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER: Uneasy Pieces, Essays in Visual Synthesis
by David Park Curry, Curator of American Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Published by VMFA and Quantuck Lane Press, New York.

Funded by the Luce Foundation for American Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; and FLOWE, a private Denver foundation.

368 pages, 320 color and monotone illus.
$50.00 hardcover (Museum members $45.00)
$34.95 softcover (Museum members $31.46); plus tax

Order in The Museum Shop, by phone at 1.800.943.VMFA(8632), or on-line: at the VMFA Shop

112 pages, 100 color illus. Published by Freer Gallery of Art in association with Scala Publishers, London, 2003.
$24.95 softcover (Museum members $22.45)