Whistlerian Frames: Aestheticism and the Borders of Autonomy

Abstract

This dissertation examines Whistler’s framing practice from 1864 to 1881 as the primary site where aesthetic autonomy is put to work. The claim that art legislates its own grounds of value depends on a separation between artwork and world that the picture frame would seem to materialize. But the picture frame is also not quite so obliging an instrument, belonging simultaneously to the work it enframes and to the conditions of display, exchange, and patronage from which that work claims its independence; it is, in other words, precisely the wrong place to look for a clean separation, and precisely the right place to observe autonomy’s contradictions play out. In Whistler’s pursuit of an art that would “stand alone” amidst Aestheticism’s entangled ambitions, his picture frames disclose just how much standing alone depended upon.The three chapters of this dissertation pursue the implications of this condition across distinct framing campaigns, each of which revises the terms of the one that came before it. Chapter 1 examines the frames of 1864-65, where East Asian ornament and calculated illegibility fuse painting and surround into composite objects whose formal coherence depends on reading canvas and frame together. The framed painting is thus transformed into a new kind of art object. Chapter 2 considers the “all-over” decorative frames of the 1870s, whose incised or painted basketweave and wave patterns extend the painting’s compositional order outward through the surround. When, in the Peacock Room, this extension runs across an entire architectural interior, the achievement becomes inseparable from its own undoing, for the frame’s spatial reach depended on the very patronage it had endeavored to overwrite. Chapter 3 shows how the Venice Pastels exhibition of 1881 addressed the resulting impasse by grounding the installation’s coherence in the material character of the medium itself, submitting gilt frame, coordinated gallery, and commercial apparatus to pastel’s elemental condition as color. What the three campaigns share is that the means whereby autonomy was produced proved inseparable from the conditions it purported to transcend. The formalist tradition from Kant through Greenberg treats that inseparability as a problem to be solved by sealing the work against its surroundings; the institutional critique derived from Peter Bürger and Pierre Bourdieu dismisses it as ideological. Whistler’s frames suggest a third possibility, for in them the claim to aesthetic self-legislation and the commodity relation operate not as opposites but as aspects of the same gesture. How autonomy was materially produced in the nineteenth century thus puts pressure on what we take modernist autonomy to have been, and Whistler’s Aestheticism, far from the decorative retreat its critics have supposed, emerges as an early and sophisticated confrontation with the conditions under which art could continue to matter.