ATLANTA, GEORGIA.- The High Museum of Art presents “After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting,” on view through February 8, 2004. Whistler’s Mother may be the single most famous painting by an American artist, yet James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) occupies an uncertain place in American art. He left the United States for Europe at the age of twenty-one, never to return, and his style developed independently of American art currents. After Whistler, organized in observance of the centenary of the artist’s death, reveals that Whistler’s significance as an American derives less from his parentage or his birthplace than from the impact he exercised on the art of this country. As one of the most celebrated and controversial artists of his time, Whistler, through his distinctive artistic persona and modernist aesthetic, informed the work of a generation of American painters. 

Curated by Linda Merrill, a leading authority on the artist, After Whistler is the first major exhibition to detail his importance to American art around the turn of the 20th century. Some Americans studied his works in major exhibitions held in this country and abroad; some sought out the artist himself in his London or Paris studios. Others were affected at one remove, through such influential intermediaries as William Merritt Chase and Arthur Mathews or through the profusion of illustrated publications about Whistler. By juxtaposing a dozen of Whistler’s most important oil paintings with an array of works by other artists, the exhibition demonstrates how Whistler’s American contemporaries were affected by his principles, techniques, color schemes, compositions, subjects, and abstract titles. This exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art. Support is provided by The Rich Foundation, Bank of North Georgia / Synovus Financial Corporation, The Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Jim Cox, Jr. Foundation, the John and Mary Franklin Foundation, The Philip and Irene Toll Gage Foundation, and a friend of the Museum.