Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon
Ed. Margaret F. MacDonald (Lund Humphries £16.95)

If proof was ever needed of the American penchant for motherhood (and apple pie), it abounds in the story of James McNeill Whistler’s iconic painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother. Although scholars consider it a major milestone in the development of modernist aesthetics, a snowballing PR campaign during the painting’s tour in 1930s USA succeeded in rebranding the image as the quintessential symbol of American motherhood.

The painting is now on another rare outing from its Paris home, on view in Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery as part of the Whistler Cententary celebrations (where it could be argued that the artist is being rebranded as a true Scot). To coincide with its appearance, Margaret F MacDonald of The Centre for Whistler Studies has edited a scholarly book devoted to the portrait and its subject.

Six liberally illustrated chapters, written by art historians from Britain and America, chart the impact of Whistler’s mother, the woman, and Whistler’s mother, the painting. Starting with a fact-filled description of Anna Matilda Whistler’s life and an in-depth study of the painting itself, MacDonald follows with a detailed account of the work’s financial history, its owners and its borrowers.

The American-born granddaughter of a Kintyre man, Anna McNeill married railroad engineer George Washington Whistler when she was 27, inheriting three step-children and producing another five of her own, the artist being the eldest, the last three dying young. The family spent six affluent years in St Petersburg, which ended when George died of cholera in 1849. The young widow returned to the United States where she lived until 1863, when she followed her artist son to London. Anna was deeply religious and wore mourning clothes for the last 32 years of her life.

Whistler’s career reached an impasse during the late 1860s, when he was desperately striving to make his artistic breakthrough. It was when a model failed to appear one day in 1871 that he decided to paint his mother, standing up. Anna valiantly stood for three days, but then admitted defeat, and over the next three months the seated portrait took shape. MacDonald examines the colours Whistler used, the brush sizes, the canvas and his technique. She reveals the changes the artist made to the composition and she studies the clothes Anna Whistler was wearing, assembled to convey “a sort of conspicuous modesty”. The author cites a miriad of possible (but unprovable) influences on the composition ranging from the Neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova to the Scottish photographer D.O. Hill.

The painting’s history over the next two decades was chequered; it escaped rejection from the Royal Academy by a hair’s breadth, was very nearly burned in a fire, and was almost seized by creditors in 1874. It was used several times as security for loans, and was declared as one of Whistler’s assets during bankruptcy proceedings in 1879. It was not until 1888 that the artist could claim complete ownership again, and in 1891, after concerted lobbying, the painting was bought by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.

The second half of the book builds on this mountain of information with a more lateral approach. In the most readable of the essays, Kevin Sharp, of the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, tells the story of the painting’s historic tour of America in 1932-4. It was the first painting ever to be lent abroad by the Louvre and the loan was largely dependent on the delicate state of international relations at the time. Huge media hype made the painting into “an American holy icon”, allowing “motherhood to trump modernism”, by promoting the maternal theme at the expense of the painting’s crucial formal qualities. During the painting’s stay at the World’s Fair in Chicago, “no mother-loving event was too absurd for Fair organisers to promote or too trivial for Chicago journalists to describe in earnest detail.” The press also took an increasing interest in security arrangements (still the most effective bait for journalists), to the extent that by the end of the tour, gallery attendants were being issued with rifles.

Despite the protestations of Sharp (and indeed of Whistler himself) against the promotion of motherhood as the painting’s primary concern, Professor William Vaughan of Birbeck College, University of London, seems to have succumbed. His essay explores the relationship between artists and their mothers from Dürer to Tracey Emin, with frequent reference to Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He groups a diverse range of works into this one genre, and also discusses the work of artists whose mothers are conspicuously absent (for example that of Andy Warhol, whose mother once proclaimed “I am Andy Warhol”). Vaughan’s essay sits uneasily after Sharp’s, and it conveys the distinct impression of work in progress.

Rounding off the book with a menagerie of illustrations is Martha Tedeschi’s survey of Whistler’s mother in the context of popular culture. With a plethora of charicatures, advertisements, cartoons, greetings cards, and modern art, Tedeschi demonstrates how instantly recognisable, and therefore pliable, the painting has proved to be, grouping it as a cultural icon along with the Mona Lisa, Munch’s The Scream, and Botticelli’s Venus. Perhaps most insightfully of all, she draws comparisons between Whistler’s composition and the ageing, formal studio photographs of the time. “The portrait’s visual connection to family photographs,” she says, “was largely responsible for the rapidity with which the picture became accepted as an archetype of motherhood.”

MacDonald’s book is neither an academic tome nor a coffee-table book. On the one hand it painstakingly plots Anna Whistler’s life in meticulous detail, irritatingly sprinkled with French quotes whose translations are buried in the end notes, but on the other it is beautifully illustrated, easily readable, and imaginative in its approach.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 20.07.03