The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen will host an exhibition entitled “James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903): The Butterfly Effect” as part of the fifth “Impressionist Normandie” festival which will highlight the artistic phenomenon of Whistlerism. On that occasion, an international colloquium will be coorganised in June 2024 by the University of Rouen Normandie and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne-HICSA.

The forthcoming conference intends to shed new light on Whistlerism, the artistic movement which Whistler originated and headed, by looking back at its formation, its history and its wide-ranging impact on literature, poetry, art criticism and art philosophy.

Whistler’s students and followers adopted the artist’s visual language and helped to spread his work and his artistic theories. All over Europe, artists took up the aesthetic codes Whistler established, and an ever-increasing production of nocturnal landscapes and hieratic portraits bore witness to the widespread admiration for the American painter. The enduring nature and international influence of Whistlerism made it a major artistic phenomenon; it grew out of the trial between Whistler and the critic John Ruskin and offered a new prism for exploring the history of art in the second half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. The particularity of this artistic trend is that it emerged during the artist’s lifetime and held sway over international contemporary art between 1878 – the starting point of the myth of the artist, marked by the emergence of various adjectives, such as ‘Whistlerian’ – and the beginnings of the Great War.

The aim of this conference is to review the latest research on Whistlerism – its history, context and historiography –, and to present new perspectives on the subject through a cross-disciplinary approach. We would like to promote new directions in the research on Whistler. To this end, we are seeking contributions from a variety of disciplines, including art history, literature, poetics, aesthetics, cinema studies and visual studies.