cover image Whistler: A Retrospective

Whistler: A Retrospective

. Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, $75 (378pp) ISBN 978-0-88363-689-3

With a style as cosmopolitan and eccentric as his own personality, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, an American in London, set the Victorian art world reeling with pre-modernist studies and impressionist nocturnes. Compiled by Scottish art historian Spencer, this valuable collage of writings about (and by) Whistler--letters, memoirs, reviews, diary extracts, essays--reveals that this feverishly productive expatriate has been periodically written off as an aesthetestyle change! hooray!/I like it too.gs or a decorator. Yet this gloriously illustrated album, with 237 plates (half in color), profiles a genius of constant invention who switched fluidly between etching, painting, watercolor and lithography, and whose best works are ``modern'' in their daring originality and lyricism. (Nov.)