To say they are forerunners of abstract art is almost to do an injustice to them. As if they were just passports to. The grandiose Kantian sublime is gone in the Nocturnes; I do love Turner, but it's still there in his storms of light: the fabulous scene of such splendour or power you bow before it.
The Nocturnes, rather, are the stream of life; the Tao de Ching instead of a fire and brimstone Jehovah construction of the world. As viewers who encounter his art through these paintings, we are moved, not by our relation to the huge forces, but by the ordinary flow of events, the wash of simple paint across a canvas, the sound of a music of water that continually drifts past. It's not the dissolution of the self as the river sweeps into the ocean, but the current of everyday, swimming our way through.
Certainly Whistler had a fairly complex aesthetic regarding the autonomy of an art that is its own dynamic force driven by its own internal logic and momentum,1 but these pieces, oh, lyrical, yes.
Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea
James McNeill Whistler
1871; Oil on wood, 50.2 x 60.8 cm; Tate Gallery, London
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1Craig Staff, in 1001 Paintings (Universe, 2006), p.450.
