James McNeill Whistler - Tate Britain
An astonishing room of Whistler nocturnes is the highlight of this Tate retrospective. (Almost as astonishing is that the Tate’s last monograph show of the artist opened in 1994, when you consider the richness of the institution’s Whistler holdings.)
Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge is the work on the posters lining London’s tube station walls this summer. A virtuosic passage of colour, inspired by times when, in the artist’s words, “the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry… and the warehouses are palaces in the night”.
I tried to photograph the work up close, but it was impossible - the colours melted into nothing. Even on the professionally-shot poster you can’t tell what’s clear when you’re in the room with it: that the misty, smoky London sky is lit up with fireworks.
A committed minimalist in a maximalist age, Whistler resisted narrative and certainty in favour of pure mood. The mood of his nocturnal Thames-side paintings, the streaks of light, the dark industrial shadows, any person in the frame depicted in a tossed-off calligraphic gesture, is unreadable but resonant.
It resonates still, 150 years after being painted. So strongly that I felt an echo this week, across town at Maureen Paley. Paul P also produces small oil paintings that aim for gesture and mood over structure and craft. His bats in an gloomy evening sky (in Untitled, from 2025 and pictured above - simple dark letter Ms against infinite mauve and violet) reminded me of Whistler’s Battersea boatman. In the suggestive sparsity of the stroke.
What’s the meaning of this? the viewer asks themselves, often, when looking at art. It’s hard to think of two artists more impervious to such a question. The whole point of their images is that their scenes are fugitive. Escaping us, flickering briefly and flittering away. Like a bat in a night sky. Or a firework.
James McNeill Whistler is at Tate Britain (London). 21 May - 27 September 2026. Paul P.: The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset is at Maureen Paley (London). 29 May - 25 July 2026