I don’t think we got the fancy commemoratives.” She was never much for art, she reminded me. Could she recall the 1934 stamp that reproduced the image with the words “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America”? No, she said, “It was a fourth-class post office, the smallest. Her father was a postmaster in a North Dakota prairie town. When I walked into her building, she was at the piano accompanying a sing-along that concluded with a briskly rendered “Yellow Rose of Texas.” Charlene is ninety-eight, but her memory is sharp, and I had hoped that it would yield associations with Whistler’s portrait. I’m the oldest of Charlene’s five kids with our late father, Gilmore, an inventor and entrepreneur. Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood. The “Mona Lisa,” “The Scream,” “American Gothic,” and the best of Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn”s all share with the Whistler the distillation of a meaning instantly recognized and forever inexhaustible. He said, “To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” Was he kidding? (He was sly.) Of course we care, if not to the extent of a civic group in Ashland, Pennsylvania, which in 1938 erected a monumental statue of the seated Anna, on a base inscribed with words from Coleridge: “A mother is the holiest thing alive.” At any rate, the answer to Whistler’s question touches on what many have noted is iconic about history’s short list of artistic icons. He regularly preached that subject matter should be regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. But he was exasperated by sentimental responses to the work. “Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible,” Whistler allowed years later, answering friends who praised the speaking likeness of the portrayal. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It took me an hour of inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the canvas. The more you notice of the composition’s economies-such as the cavalier indication of the bentwood chair legs, at the lower right, and, at the lower left, three perfunctory diagonal strokes that do for establishing the plane of the floor-the more happily manipulated you may feel, in ways that, like the camera tricks of a great movie director, excite a sense of the scene as truer to life than truth itself. A more substantial jolt occurs when you register an over-all spatial distortion: the forms stretch horizontally, so that the length of Anna’s concealed legs, angled and descending to an upholstered footstool, suggests the anatomy of an N.B.A. The chromatic subtleties contribute to an unsettled feeling. Practically subliminal whispers of reds and blues underlie areas of the silver-gray wall behind her, and a dark purple smolders in the curtain, where the artist’s signature emblem-a butterfly-hovers. She wears a gold wedding ring: a spark of harmony with the muted gilding of the frame that Whistler designed for the picture. A few of the daubs faintly echo the pink of Anna’s flesh. There is some bravura brushwork, where Anna’s lace-cuffed hands clutch a handkerchief, with unprimed canvas peeking through, and daubed hints of Japanese-style floral patterning on a curtain that commands the left side of the picture. The paint looks soft, almost fuzzy-as if it were exhaled onto the surface. The painting represents the peak of Whistler’s radical method of modulating tones of single colors. In 1891, it became the first American art work ever bought by the French state, and it remains the most important American work residing outside the United States. The work is on loan to the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, from the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris. 1.” Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, who lived with her son, in London, from 1864 to 1875, sits in profile with an air of infinite patience, gazing steadily at, apparently, nothing. The other was the black-clad lady portrayed in “Whistler’s Mother”-the popular name of the masterpiece that James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted in 1871 and titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. One was my own, Charlene, who lives in a retirement home in Lenox. Courtesy Musée D’Orsay, Paris / Art ResourceĪ couple of weeks ago, I visited two mothers in Massachusetts. The sentimental responses to it exasperated him.
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