LOUISVILLE.- The Speed Art Museum has announced the gift and partial purchase of 88 works on paper, including 87 lithographs by James McNeill Whistler executed between 1878 and 1903, and a lithograph of Whistler by printer Thomas Way. The works –the gift of collector Steven Block – make the Speed a major center for the study of this important American artist.

Steven Block, a graduate of the University of Louisville and Harvard University, began assembling his important Whistler lithograph collection in the late 1970s. It is considered to be the largest collection of Whistler’s lithographs in private hands. In giving the collection to the Speed, Block said, “I am delighted to bring this collection to the Speed Art Museum and to Louisville. Over the last two decades it has been an honor to participate in the study and renewed appreciation of Whistler’s lithographs. With this gift, the Speed and my hometown of Louisville become one of the world’s centers of scholarship on James McNeill Whistler.”

Best known for his exquisite painted portraits, Whistler (1834 - 1903) was also an accomplished printmaker whose lithographs offer insight into a more introspective side of the artist’s career. When Whistler began experimenting with lithography in 1878, he faced a dual challenge: mastering the artistic nuances of a new medium and confronting public and critical prejudices against the technique. By the mid-nineteenth century, lithography was largely perceived as a commercial enterprise used for the production of advertising materials, inexpensive illustrations, and reproductions made for the growing middle class. Nevertheless, Whistler—aware of the lithographic explorations of French artists Camille Corot, Édouard Manet, and Edgar Degas—hoped to bring about a lithographic revival in Britain while simultaneously expanding the range of his work and attracting a broader audience.

Whistler’s interest in the medium never waned and he experimented with lithography intermittently until his death in 1903. He created the majority of his lithographs during his time in London and Paris, 1887-1897, aspiring to create airy “drawings” that were the visual equivalent to music. Whistler found that he could achieve more subtle effects with lithographic crayon than with any other medium.

Works in the collection depict intimate scenes from daily life, delicate landscapes, and images of the friends and family closest to the artist. In addition to black and white lithographs, there are three of Whistler’s very rare colored lithographs, a technique with which he began to experiment in 1890. Whistler’s lithographs have been described as his most abstract, yet personal, form of expression.

The Gift and partial purchase from the Steven Block Collection has been made possible in part by Mrs. W. L. Lyons Brown.