All images courtesy Interiors Magazine, April / May 2015.
Darren Waterston’s installation, Filthy Lucre, is a contemporary reimaging of Whistler’s 1876 Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. We have always loved The Peacock Room as an immersive experience, an early precursor to the notion of installation (as conceived by a contemporary artist); when one conjures Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk as “a synthesis of sensory impressions overwhelming the spectator”, Whistler’s Peacock Room quickly comes to mind.
Waterston became fascinated with The Peacock Room both for its unrivaled union of painting and architecture and for its dramatic story of patronage and artistic ego. The story goes (as recounted on the artist’s website): The original — the dining room of the London home of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland — was designed to showcase Leyland’s collection of Asian ceramics, with Whistler’s painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863-64) featured over the mantel. Asked to consult on the color scheme for the room, Whistler took bold — if not egregious — liberties while Leyland and his architect were away and in a fit of enthusiasm painted the entire room — executing his now famous peacocks over the expensive Italian leather wall panels. The collector refused to pay the artist and banned him from his house; Whistler, in response, painted an unflattering caricature of his patron titled The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor). Conflating the words frilly and filthy, Whistler made a jab at Leyland’s own “peacocking” as well as his miserliness. The architect, Jeckyll, abandoned the project as emotionally unstable and finished out his days in a sanatorium.
Today, the artist’s contemporary reconstruction aims to have the viewer take in feelings of repulsion and seduction simultaneously. Ravages of broken pottery alongside crooked and haphazard gilt millwork are presented amidst opulence, all in a claustrophobic space (the artist lowered the ceiling by two feet). Experience this grand project at the Sackler Gallery through November 29, 2016 in Washington D.C. For more information (and a great video), click here.
