The Battle of the Peacock Room: Two New Exhibits at the Freer

Together, “The Peacock Room Comes to America” and “Chinamania” are worth visiting, not only to get a new look at the collecting work of these three late nineteenth-century connoisseurs —extraordinary in itself—but also to understand more about Whistler’s pivotal position between Victorian Aestheticism and the early twentieth-century’s Modernist preoccupation with primitive form.

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