Original subtitles

Whistler's Mother.

A face that's launched a thousand quips. A face you could never imagine whistling.

She's a real old biddy.

She's the saint of old biddies all over the world.

I don't want to be scathing, but, I mean, she's the ideal mother.

She's silent, she doesn't move - what could be better?

What could be more prone to icon-making than this image of the mother?

"There's not a word No, not another

"That means so much as just this - mother."

You can just envision the person who gave this to their mother.

James McNeill Whistler's portrait of his mother is more than a painting.

It's the beginning of American image-making.

She's every bit as much an American icon as Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley.

Yet buried beneath the affectionate parodies and odes to motherhood

lies a radical masterpiece.

The critics who first saw her were genuinely shocked

by the ruthless artistic aims of the son who painted her.

The world's most famous American painting has visited America, but never lived there.

It resides in France, at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

Here, the old lady sits,

among paintings by her eminent contemporaries Monet and Manet.

She is an unmissable attraction,

especially for American visitors.

Actually, she reminds me of my grandmother.

She's a little more stark than the women of today, a little sterner and more controlled, I think.

She's comfort. Security.

Knowing that she's there, doesn't change over the years.

She looks staid. Formal. Conventional.

And it's easy to think of the painting the same way.

Yet in 1872, it seemed outrageous.

Even in the wording of its title -

Arrangement In Grey And Black, No 1 -

Portrait Of The Artist's Mother.

To call a portrait of your own mother, first and foremost, Arrangement In Grey And Black,

is an extraordinarily provocative thing to do.

I'm intensely conscious that it's of this woman

who means a great deal to the artist,

and then you bounce back again,

and you see it again as this severe Arrangement In Grey And Black.

That's, I think, why Whistler put in those two titles.

He wanted to set that perpetual motion off,

and, my goodness, how well he succeeds!

Anna Matilda McNeill was a cultivated and deeply religious Southern gentlewoman.

She disapproved of dancing, and observed the Sabbath strictly.

She created the possibility of the great painting in 1834,

by giving birth to her first child, James, in the industrial town of Lowell, Massachussetts.

Years later, Whistler was asked why he had been born in Lowell.

"I wanted to be near my mother," he replied.

By the age of 14, James Whistler knew he wanted to be a painter.

He asked his father for his blessing, but received only a sermon on being useful.

His father died shortly afterwards,

leaving Anna a single mother with two sons and little money.

She was certainly an intelligent, well-read woman. She was enterprising, well-connected,

managed to figure out how to bring up her boys on a tiny income.

She was remarkably capable.

Jimmy, as Anna called him, was the most trying of her children.

Where she was dutiful, James was flighty. She nicknamed him "my own dear butterfly".

Hoping to instil some discipline, she sent him in his father's footsteps

to the ferocious West Point military academy.

Why didn't you shine those shoes? I didn't have time, sir.

James constantly broke the West Point rules.

His recorded misdemeanours included laughing in the ranks,

being late for dinner and growing his hair too long.

To Anna's dismay, he was kicked out.

She then found her son work at the United States Coastal Survey,

where at least he could draw maps.

But his mind was always wandering,

to the further exasperation of his loving mother.

She was sensitive to his artistic nature. She was sympathetic to his artistic ambitions.

But she always felt the need to make sure that Whistler worked hard -

good Protestant work ethic -

and that he didn't disgrace the family.

After only three months at the Coastal Survey, James resigned.

Now 21, he determined to break free of his mother's suffocating care, and study art in Paris.

Anna reluctantly let him go, and he left America, never to return.

His destiny now was to become a great artist, and a bohemian.

For Whistler, this meant girls.

Can-can dancers like Finette, who danced at the famous Bal Bullier.

And friendship with young radical artists of the day,

such as Henri Fantin-Latour and Edouard Manet.

It's very important that Whistler fell in

not with the conservative, academic artists,

but with the most radical, most progressive artists

in 19th-century France.

The painters he knew were breaking with the convention of painting biblical or classical subjects,

and depicting ordinary human life in the raw.

In this emerging movement, Gustave Courbet was the leading figure.

Courbet did actually initiate a great revolution in French 19th-century painting.

He wanted something that actually took life more seriously.

He had a great feeling for the countryside, and for working people,

and something of that rubbed off on Whistler.

This idea of getting at the heart of the matter,

and banishing anything superfluous,

was very much to his liking.

Whistler's etchings show this French influence.

And so, too, does his first major picture - At The Piano.

The composition is defined by the horizontal dado and vertical picture frame -

a formal layout, anticipating the portrait of his mother.

It was altogether too modern for the Parisian salon,

and they rejected it.

Wounded by this setback,

Whistler in his turn spurned the orthodoxies of Paris

and crossed over to a less stuffy art establishment in London.

Taking rooms in Chelsea, Whistler fitted in perfectly with other bohemians

such as Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,

who famously kept a menagerie in his back garden.

A social butterfly, dandy and wit,

Whistler was also prickly and argumentative -

characteristics Rossetti remarked upon.

"There's a combative artist named Whistler,

"who in every respect is a bristler

"A tube of white lead And a punch on the head

"Come equally handy to Whistler."

He was very irreverent.

I do think that he had little time

for what the establishment thought of as the right way to behave,

both in life and in art.

Flouting convention, James was living with his mistress,

the beautiful Jo Hiffernan.

Jo was muse and model for the painting that made Whistler notorious, The White Girl.

This work took no account of Victorian tastes.

Like the portrait of his mother,

it was about colour and arrangement.

It didn't tell a story.

Rather the contrary, for Jo's blank expression baffled the critics.

So they invented their own narratives - it was a young woman after her bridal night.

It was a portrait of a ghostly spirit.

Jo Hiffernan wrote to a friend,

"Jim says that the old duffers may reject it altogether."

She meant the Royal Academy - and Jim was right. They did.

But in 1863, it was accepted for exhibition in Paris,

along with Manet's Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe. It was a sensation.

People came to the Salon de Refuses simply to laugh at The White Girl.

The White Girl was also a success in London,

but Whistler was, right from the beginning, an American.

He knew how to capitalise on notoriety,

and he hired men with sandwich boards,

with "Go to see The White Girl - it's the great scandal of the Royal Academy."

What we have to remember about Whistler

is that in his day, he was an intensely controversial figure.

The nearest equivalent I can think of nowadays is somebody like the Chapman brothers,

or Damien Hirst, or Tracy Emin -

people who, whatever they do,

it causes a fuss. It causes a furore.

Whistler detested the Victorian affection for cautionary tales and sickly sentiment.

He would have loathed this tear-jerking portrait of a recently-widowed father

tending his wife's grave,

or this Dickensian dramatisation of a legal dispute.

Whistler's art, by contrast,

drew on the abstract harmony of colour and form,

a point he emphasised by giving his work musical titles like Nocturne

or, in his mother's case, An Arrangement.

"Art should be independent of all emotions, such as devotion,

"pity, love, patriotism and the like.

"And that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies'."

Whistler was a progressive artist

because he was trying to encourage his audience to look at paintings for their abstract quality,

for the way the paint is handled and the way he has constructed the composition.

In the middle of this notoriety and high-living came a bombshell

that would change his life and his art.

His mother was coming to town.

Fleeing the American Civil War,

Anna abandoned her homeland to live with James in London.

Whistler was living with the Chelsea aesthetes -

Swinburne, who was into sado-masochism,

Rossetti, who was into drugs. They all had mistresses.

It's very, very hard to imagine how you could transgress the rules

of middle-class propriety more thoroughly than Whistler had done.

And into this milieu sails Anna Matilda Whistler, the puritan southern lady.

In a letter, Whistler wrote,

"All of a sudden, my mother arrives from the United States.

"Well! General upheaval.

"I had a week or so to empty my house and purify it from cellar to attic."

Out from his Chelsea home went everything offensive to his mother - including his mistress, Jo,

banished to make way for the aged and religious parent.

Whistler's private life had to be carried on very surreptitiously,

either around the corner with Jo or perhaps in the studio with the chambermaid.

She must have been a bit of a stumbling block to his flamboyant lifestyle.

His mother was very religious.

She was a devout evangelical

who, when she came to England, worshipped in the local Church Of England church.

But a puritan, I would say.

She disapproved of all kinds of social pleasures,

and of extravagant dress.

She represents austerity and propriety, and really,

a lot of virtues that didn't come naturally to her son.

A friend of the Whistlers gave an insight into Anna's character,

and the way she and her son maintained a wary give-and-take.

"Last Sunday I lunched at 2 Lindsay Row, and very pleasant it was,

"to all but the gentlest of dear old despots.

"A good many people came. Cigarettes came out and cocktails appeared,

"and things became very cheerful.

"However, she took a Christian revenge, for when all had departed,

"she inflicted on her devoted son two psalms, a chapter and a prayer."

Anna governed the living quarters, but the studio belonged to James.

On one side of the wall pious Anna said her prayers.

On the other, decadent James drew nude models,

made love to Jo, and even seduced a maid, who bore him a son.

On the surface, anyway, they were on pretty good terms.

One wonders, of course, was that really the case?

What was going on beneath the surface?

Surely, the relation of any mother and any son,

at least in Freudian terms, has to be fairly fraught.

Five year of fraughtness passed,

but by now, what was really troubling Whistler was his art.

His infatuation with Courbet's realist approach had evaporated,

as he wrote to his friend, Henri Fantin-Letour.

"Courbet and his influence was disgusting.

"It's not poor Courbet who I find repugnant, any more than his work.

"It's that damned realism.

"I'm sure I will make up for the time I've wasted,

"but what a punishment."

It's the old story of sons killing fathers.

Whistler needed to do that, he needed to assert his own personality.

We're looking at a painting here

which is quite removed, in many ways, from what Courbet would achieve,

but at the same time, I think, underlying it there is still a debt.

Now in his early 30s, Whistler was struggling to find a style.

He retired to his studio, and for three years studied the old masters,

experimenting with different techniques.

He was laying down deeper foundations for his masterpiece,

yet its creation came about by chance.

"If the youthful Maggie had not failed Jimmy as a model,

"he would have had no time for my portrait."

In a letter to her sister,

Anna records how her son turned the absence of a model

into an opportunity to begin a new painting.

"He is never idle, so I was not surprised at his preparing a large canvas,

"late though it was in the evening.

"But I was surprised when, the next day, he said to me,

" 'Mother, I want you to stand for me.

" 'It is what I have long intended and desired to do - to take your portrait.' "

So, one autumn day in 1871,

Anna modelled for her beloved Jimmy.

He started to paint her standing,

but she was a woman of 67,

and after a few days she found the strain too much.

Chance had intervened again.

Obliged to paint a seated figure,

Whistler found himself dividing up the picture space

in ways he had never tried before.

The most radical decision was to divert his mother's gaze away from her son.

This is a portrait, actually, about the spiritual distance

between the son and the mother.

And immediately you start thinking along those lines,

I think the portrait really starts to take off.

That makes you realise how brilliant the decision was on Whistler's part

to put her in this pose,

because it raises all those issues in our minds

and makes us meditate not only on their relationship,

but on our relationships, maybe, with our parents.

Anna's wintry profile is set against the grey distempered walls of Whistler's studio.

The painting shows us his authentic colour schemes and interior design.

Whistler's taste in decoration

was for the simple, the elegant, the restrained,

and this was very extreme in Victorian life.

Whistler represented something very, very modern,

the way nowadays we might think of a minimalist interior, a white cube.

The austere backdrop springs from a surprising source -

Japanese decorative arts.

On the floor is a tatami mat,

and the wall-hanging is a Japanese fabric or kimono.

Whistler's fascination with Oriental art arose in Paris,

where he bought Chinese porcelain.

His paintings of the time display these objects.

But even more important was his discovery of Japanese artists like Hoku-san,

and their notion of perspective.

What Japanese prints did

would give him a way to somehow reconcile

the three-dimensional Western pictorial space

with the two-dimensional decorative picture space of the Japanese print.

And I think it was in this picture he first managed to do it,

with great success.

Even Whistler's signature shows an Oriental influence.

From 1869, he stopped signing his name,

and developed a butterfly logo based on the letters JW.

This was no accident.

His mother called him "my own dear butterfly".

Near this signature hangs one of Whistler's own etchings.

The outlines are blurred,

but they unmistakably represent Black Lion Wharf.

On first moving to London, Whistler had begun to record the city's vanishing docklands

in a series of etchings known as the Thames Set.

For two months he worked in this decaying and dangerous part of the city,

producing twelve etchings, of which the best was Black Lion Wharf.

When the Thames Set was published, it got wonderful reviews,

establishing Whistler's reputation as an etcher and draughtsman.

But the layout of this particular piece also anticipates the arrangement of Whistler's Mother.

The mother reflects the profile figure of the boatman in Black Lion Wharf.

It provides the clue to the construction of the mother.

I think that she, too, is paying homage in some way to this print.

I'm looking at the weave of the canvas, which is very pronounced,

and coming through the paint film,

and wondering whether it's to do with the way that he painted it,

or to do with things that have happened to it in its lifetime,

because a lot's happened to it.

Phillipa Abrahams is an artist and conservator.

Her expertise will help reveal how The Mother was painted,

and with what materials.

The way the paint is applied is very thick and thin,

and it looks as if he's brushed it on, rubbed it off.

I mean, it gives a rather attractive hazy sort of atmosphere.

Back in London, Phillipa has been searching for the kind of canvas Whistler chose for this work.

I'm using this kind of canvas because it's as close as I've been able to get

to the original canvas, which was possibly hemp.

It has quite an uneven weave, and will hopefully give the texture

that Whistler would have liked.

As a student in France, Whistler absorbed two lasting lessons from his teacher,

the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre

that black was the basis of all tonal compositions,

and that the palette should be set out before the canvas is touched.

Then, with a canvas primed grey,

he began to draw the outline of the portrait.

At the research and restoration centre of the Louvre,

x-rays show the minute adjustments Whistler made to key elements of the structure.

It's just fascinating to see his handwriting in the brushstrokes.

There seems to have been a bit of a struggle

to establish the line of her thighs

and the line of her legs going down to her feet.

There's lots of alterations that went on.

I can understand why it was really difficult,

because she's perched on this chair,

and what makes the pose possible at all

is the fact that she's got a footstool raising her legs

enough to be reasonably comfortable.

There are photographs of Anna

where she seems to be wearing a dress very similar to this one.

It's nice to speculate on what her undergarments would be like.

She looks so strict, but underneath she's got a corset.

Was it a racy sort of corset? Probably not.

But one that was supporting.

Plus she's quite an old lady, and her figure's shot to pieces,

and the corset would have created a shape.

He would map out his composition very quickly - the whole composition, as he wanted it to be,

not inch by inch as if it were a jigsaw puzzle that he was gradually filling in.

He'd paint the whole image.

Once the image was in place, Whistler mixed what he called his sauce -

heavily diluted colours which allowed him to cover the canvas extremely quickly

with layer on layer of paint.

He wanted a paint that would be of a creamy sort of consistency,

that you could scrub around a lot.

It's interesting to make the sauce and see what it could've been like.

Because it's a black dress, there's a lot of black in it.

And I'm going to include a little bit of red,

to warm it up, and also cobalt blue,

which enhances the black.

Then you've got to get the consistency right,

so I'm going to pop it in a jar,

and then I'm going to add the oil.

This is linseed oil.

It's just like salad dressing.

And then mastic varnish.

Crazy.

And then, this is like the vinegar. This is the turpentine going in.

Only experience can actually tell you the right amounts.

Whistler attacked the canvas, according to one sitter,

"like a fencer fighting a duel".

His friend, the Parisian dandy, Compte Robert de Montesquiou,

left us a wonderful description.

"The sketch is a positive onslaught on the canvas -

"one or two hours of fevered madness.

"And the sittings! Long sittings!

"Sometimes, in three hours,

"he'd only put 50 or so strokes on the canvas."

He would use very long brushes

because he could get quite a distance away from his subject...

..and...

..having loaded his brush with sauce,

he would be looking at his subject and then he would take a run at it!

I'm not going to run but...

That's great!

So you have some distance...from it.

Whistler's pupil, Walter Sickert, dated the change in his master's methods to the mid-1860s.

In Sickert's belief, Whistler was replacing sound French methods

with a flimsy, self-made technique that might prove disastrous.

There was too much turpentine going into it, I imagine,

which was diluting the stickiness of the paint.

So although it would've looked lovely when he first painted it,

quite soon, within weeks probably,

it would've started to sink and look matt.

But in order to revive those blacks and greys,

he would've applied more mixture of oil, varnish,

and, unfortunately, turpentine, as well.

He didn't quite know what he was doing. It's an experimental painting

and the oil seeped into the canvas - he didn't prepare the canvas very well.

It could sometimes take Whistler years to complete a picture,

but Anna's portrait may've been finished in four weeks - an amazingly short burst of work.

Anna tells us she endured her sittings by prayer,

and by observing her son's moods.

"It was a mother's unceasing prayer while being the painter's model

"that gave the expression which makes the attractive charm.

"At one or two difficult times I heard him ejaculate,

" 'No! I can't get it right! It's impossible to do it perfectly!'

"I observed him trying again, and - oh, my grateful rejoicing -

"as my dear son would exclaim,

" 'Oh, Mother! It is mastered! It is beautiful!' "

"And he would kiss me."

Anna herself declared the portrait a great success

and one of James's favourite paintings.

Whistler did privately believe it to be a great work

but simply said, "One likes to make one's Mummy as nice as possible."

We are dealing with a portrait, but another kind of portrait -

maybe a new kind of portrait -

which is portraying a mood, which is his mother, maybe thinking, praying,

and maybe praying for her son also,

which is a very difficult subject, and a very intellectual one.

I think that it is a very bold picture.

In aesthetic terms,

Whistler was trying to paint a purged picture.

He was trying to cast aside everything with which, I'm sure

he thought, Victorian painters in England cluttered their work.

There's nothing in it that is unnecessary.

That everything that might actually distract attention

from what he wants to focus on has been ruthlessly eliminated.

About its intended focus, James was quite clear.

"Take the picture of my mother -

"Arrangement In Grey And Black -

"now, that is what it is.

"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?"

Certain that the public would see the picture at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1872,

there was a shock awaiting James.

The Hanging Committee disliked the picture intensely.

Its austerity was an affront to the Victorian aesthetic.

It took a friend's intervention to prevent a humiliating rejection.

I think you have to try to visualise

what a Royal Academy exhibition looked like.

What the Victorians liked were portraits of animals and children.

If a portrait, a picture, was of a mother, then it had to be very sentimentalised.

Here was a portrait of the artist's mother

yet it was almost in black and white.

There was no upholstery,

there was no decoration, there was no sentimentality.

It would've stood out like a sore thumb.

The portrait was widely denounced,

with critics taking particular exception to its subdued tones.

"Why should this face fall so short of the vitality of nature?

"Why should the greys and blacks be so unmeaning

"and so drearily smoky?"

Yet the portrait caught the imagination of the public.

Reproductions sold by their thousands.

Mother was well on her way to becoming a domestic fixture in Europe and America.

It was something that was desirable for the parlour

because it had a kind of domestic virtue to it.

It seemed to symbolise piety, frugality -

some of the puritanical virtues which were in fact true of Mrs Whistler.

This is Mother as moral authority.

Mother as goodness.

Mother as passive. An asexual,

or post-sexual, let's say.

I think that is, in some way,

the root of the popularity.

The mother figure has been sanctified by being

torn out of the maternal context.

Four years later, Anna, in deteriorating health,

left the London smog for the healthier air of Hastings.

Freed at last from his mother's constraints, James entertained in extravagant style.

His Sunday breakfasts were legendary.

And as duty gave way to pleasure, he wrote to his mother only rarely.

Six years later, Anna died.

Distraught at first,

James kept her memory alive by refusing to sell her portrait.

But by the spring of 1891, the ties were loosening.

His portrait of Thomas Carlisle had just been bought by Glasgow Corporation for 1,000 guineas -

the first Whistler painting acquired by a public gallery.

Now he aimed his mother at Paris.

In September 1891, Whistler met his friend, the poet Stephane Mallarme

at a Paris cafe.

They devised a plot to encourage the sale of the picture to the French government -

a press campaign, and an exhibition of The Mother at a Parisian gallery.

They worked up what I suppose you'd call today a lobby group to buy the picture.

Whistler very much wanted this.

By the end of October, Mother had been delivered to the Paris gallery.

On November 4th, an influential critic wrote an article

beseeching the state to purchase the painting.

On November 19th, the Minister of the Interior came to see the work.

And one day later, a letter bearing a French government seal

arrived at Chelsea.

Finally, the picture was bought for a knock down price -

4,000 francs, which is...

I mean, there's a long distance between the first offer and the actual purchase!

Initially offering his Mother for sale at 75,000 francs,

James's bargain price of 4,000 was equivalent to just £175.

More important than the money was the knowledge that his painting

would first command a place in the Musee Luxembourg,

and then, after his death, in the Louvre.

He wrote triumphantly to his brother William...

"Just think - to go and look at one's own picture hanging on the walls of the Luxembourg,

"remembering how it was treated in England!

"To be met everywhere with deference and treated with respect

"and to know that all this is a tremendous slap in the face to the Academy and the rest.

"Really, it is like a dream!"

A year after the purchase, he found The Mother sharing a room with a little-known Scots painter.

He warned the gallery director,

"If this goes on, I'm afraid I must take my mummy from your hotel."

In fact, Mummy didn't leave her hotel till 1932

when she crossed the Atlantic to appear at an exhibition

of American painting at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York.

A coup for the museum's director, Alfred Barr,

it became a huge story.

President Roosevelt's own mother

posed alongside what was now

the most important American painting in the world.

I'm very pleased to stand near this very beautiful painting.

I think that's the moment we can pinpoint when it really enters the popular realm.

It was front page news for two years in the United States.

The Depression was at its deepest and The Mother's perceived qualities

of duty and self-reliance matched the mood. After just six weeks,

50,000 visitors had seen the painting at MoMA, before it left to tour a dozen American cities.

There are pictures of boy scouts looking adoringly at it,

pictures of it being taken on and off the Brinks truck that carried it,

which emphasised that it was very valuable

and that great precaution was being taken about its security.

All of this fanfare served to make sure, if it wasn't already a household image,

that everybody would recognise it.

I've always thought of Whistler's Mother as an American icon.

I see the relentless simplicity, the Puritanism,

the virtues of self-reliance, of not being too showy.

These are the virtues of the pioneers.

It may not be the America that exists any more,

but it's the America of legend, how Americans feel about themselves deep down.

This is the one that hung on my great-grandmother's ranch.

It's very sweet because she was very close to her children

and they liked her very much.

Joni Miller has been collecting Whistler's Mothers for 30 years.

Since inheriting her grandmother's print, she's seen her collection

grow to over 150 items.

I didn't start out to do that. I collected other things -

postcards and things.

But in the end, it was the Whistler's Mothers that I couldn't resist.

Well, I do love the stamps.

It's nice to see it little, you know, the painting little,

in repetition.

I dedicate the first sheet of this new stamp issue

in honour of the memory of the mothers of America.

On the postage stamp unveiled by the Postmaster General in May 1934,

the designer had not only cropped the image, he'd added flowers.

Alfred Barr wrote a furious letter to the New York Times.

"Whistler's painting has been mutilated in a stamp

"which might have done honour to the most famous of American artists."

It's interesting because it brings out the tension

that always existed between those who admired the work

for its formal values -

because it was so simplified, so austere,

so abstract, in a way -

and then those vastly greater in number

who loved it because they...they sentimentalised it

as a portrait of a maternal figure, of a mother.

This is a classic one.

"It is a wonderful thing, a mother Other folks can love you

"But only your mother understands

"She works for you looks after you loves you... "

And then, the only thing bad she ever does to you

is to die and leave you.

# You're the tops!

# You're an Arrow collar You're the tops... #

A couple of years later Tin Pan Alley joined in the fun

through the lyrics of Cole Porter.

# ..the feet of Fred Astaire

# You're an O'Neill drama You're Whistler's mama

# You're camembert... #

Porter and wartime helped fix the portrait firmly as an American icon.

The Douglas A-26 bomber was nicknamed Whistler's Mother,

and The Whistler's Mother-in-Law was a popular dance record.

# ..No telling what Whistler's mother-in-law will do

And her image graced some incongruous consumer goods.

There's a fabulously bad paint-by-numbers set.

And there's the Jim Beam bottles

which are simply inexplicably kitsch.

There's also...an ice cream mould.

It's just as well I don't have that

because I might very well be tempted to make a Whistler's Mother bombe

and I don't know that the world really needs that.

It's become not so much an icon

but a post-icon. That's what happens to icons.

Even though it hasn't had the honour of Duchamp putting a moustache on it,

it's had the equivalent,

and I think that's what it richly deserves by now.

Whistler's Mother is still a target for cartoonists,

but as a symbol of American motherhood her time's almost up.

She's the saint of old biddies.

She is a disappearing breed, I have to say.

I think you see fewer and fewer as the world changes. As women change,

Whistler's Mother recedes further and further into history.

An old, bland, immobilised,

white, 19th-century woman

certainly no longer stands for all the range of, you know,

Chinese, black,

Hispanic, lesbian, et cetera, et cetera.

I think it's pretty past its prime as an icon.

But that's where Whistler's abstract vision saves him from looking passe,

for his ambition was to paint a formal arrangement, not an icon.

I have to remember how radical it is, how strange it must've looked

when it was first painted.

He took the biggest cliche in Victorian art - the mother -

and he did it in a way that was not only very, very beautiful

but also without sentiment, without narrative.

To this day, people don't understand how great an artist Whistler is,

in the sense that he was trying to change our definition of art.

And that's what Whistler did.

# A strange arrangement of colours

# You found your feet where you put 'em

# I'm after you, you're after me

# The things that we say the things that we see

# We've to be reminded Where did you go? #