During his time at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, James McNeill Whistler was expelled for failing chemistry. But he excelled at drawing. A natural rebel, Whistler moved to Paris and intentionally set himself apart from his contemporaries. “He seemed to be always inaugurating a revolution,” wrote the art historian Roger Fry. Whistler thought of his work in the abstract language of music, and titled his paintings after musical forms—symphony, composition, arrangement. Instead of embracing realistism, he disrupted typical Victorian customs of figuration and anchored his work in color and tonality, inspired by Japanese aesthetics. Whistler ultimately went bankrupt, yet as the critic Charles Caffin wrote of him, in 1907, “his genius permeates modern artistic thought.” This exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum is the first retrospective in the Netherlands dedicated to Whistler’s work. —Maggie Turner