‘The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia’ Review: Mismatched Maternal Portraits

Philadelphia

In his 1911 poem “To Whistler, American,” Ezra Pound called James Abbott McNeill Whistler “our first great” American, with some artworks “Perfect as Dürer!” One of those “perfect” pictures to which Pound was referring is Whistler’s psychologically charged, life-size portrait, “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” (1871). More commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother,” it’s the lodestar of “The Artist’s Mother: Whistler and Philadelphia,” an approachable though uneven exhibition of four paintings and five works on paper at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” was first shown in the U.S., in 1881, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—only the second time pictures by Whistler (who lived in London) were exhibited in America. Curated by the PMA’s Jennifer Thompson, “Whistler and Philadelphia” welcomes “Whistler’s Mother,” which now resides in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, back to the city for the first time in 142 years. The show’s premise—artist (child) and subject (mother)—is simple. Bring Whistler’s portrait into dialogue with portraits of mothers by 19th- and 20th-century American artists associated with the City of Brotherly (and Motherly) Love.

Born in Lowell, Mass., Whistler (1834-1903) lived in Connecticut, Maryland and at West Point’s Military Academy, where his father taught drawing and Col. Robert E. Lee dismissed the cadet for excessive demerits. Whistler also resided in St. Petersburg, Russia (where his father designed a railroad for Czar Nicholas I); in Paris (where he befriended the poet Baudelaire, the Realist Courbet and fellow Impressionists Manet, Degas and Monet); and in London, which, in 1859, he adopted as his home.

“Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” depicts 67-year-old Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, who, at her son’s behest, replaced a sick model in his London studio. A striking symphony of burnished bronzes, silvers, browns, whites and blacks, Whistler’s painting exists somewhere between a moody Dutch Golden Age interior and a rigorously constructed, hard-edge 20th-century abstraction. Here, stern Anna, seated in profile, stares straight ahead, as if into a foreboding future. She is a monumental, insurmountable mass—sometimes void—of blackness. Her lap is vast. Her head, hands and feet seem disconnected, like an archipelago in an inky sea. And her legs, disproportionately elongated, extend like a spider’s. Though moored, she’s in motion. And the room is in flux.

Anna is perched precariously, as if hugging a ledge. In places the floor tilts up or dissolves, suggesting she could slide right out of the painting. In others her body drops back, penetrating the wall—now fog. Among the most prominent forms are two hanging white pictures, including, arguably, Whistler’s etching “Black Lion Wharf” (1859), which is at the center of Whistler’s painting and, at the PMA, is installed nearby. These two flat, bright rectangles muscle forward toward the composition’s front plane, bookending and competing with Whistler’s mother, who plows straight ahead, like a fully loaded barge through an icefield.

Like Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” (increasingly referred to as a “Victorian Mona Lisa”) is a portrait in which painter and sitter are inextricably fused. It has come to signify the embodiment of stalwart motherhood and puritanical ideals. But not always. Whistler’s portrait debuted in 1872 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Almost rejected by the RA, in part because of its abstract title, it was derided and ridiculed as too stoic and austere—decidedly anti-Victorian. Whistler eventually pawned the painting, which the French government acquired in 1891.

“Whistler and Philadelphia” puts “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” head-to-head with portraits by Cecilia Beaux, Henry Ossawa Tanner, John Sloan, Dox Thrash, Alice Neel and Sidney Goodman. Compelling is Goodman’s large drawing “Artist’s Mother I” (1994), in which Frances seems to have risen from her bed, as if from her tomb. Notable, too, are Francesco Novelli’s 1792 copy after Rembrandt’s etching “The Artist’s Mother Seated, in an Oriental Headdress: Half Length” (1631)—with which Whistler may have been familiar; and Philadelphia native Sloan’s warm tribute, “Mother” (1906), an etching of Henrietta, seated, holding her dog, Dixie. Neel’s “Last Sickness” (1953), the artist’s oil portrait of her elderly mother—dressed in a plaid robe, with spectacles askew and a side-eyed glance—is beautifully plaintive, astringent. It’s the portrait here most deserving to share wall space with Whistler. But even it doesn’t really belong.

A devout formalist and eloquent theorist, Whistler rallied for “art for art’s sake.” He believed that true art is expressed through the harmony of line, color and rhythm (i.e., form) and has an independent life completely free from social, political or moral functions (i.e., subject matter). Whistler exhibited his painting as “Arrangement in Gray and Black” because, he said, “Now that is what it is.” He focused viewers’ attention not on his artwork’s subject but on its dynamic composition. “Whistler and Philadelphia,” inspired by Whistler’s mother—instead of his art—is antithetical to everything for which Whistler stood.

“Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1” has more in common with a Mondrian abstraction or a grisaille Cubist portrait by Braque than with Tanner’s and Beaux’s sentimental Whistler pastiches. It doesn’t take Pound—who likened Whistler to Abe Lincoln—to know which picture outshines the rest. The proverbial 6-year-old child could tell you. When I was at the PMA, I watched one point up at Whistler’s iconic portrait and demand, “Let’s look at that lady!” Unfortunately, his father whisked him into an adjacent gallery.

—Mr. Esplund, the author of “The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art” (Basic Books), writes about art for the Journal.