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本帖最后由 Reader86 于 2025-8-2 01:18 AM 编辑
Mom’s Home
By Peter Schjeldahl
August 24, 2015
A detail of Whistler’s iconic portrait. The sentimental responses to it exasperated him.Courtesy Musée D’Orsay, Paris / Art Resource
A couple of weeks ago, I visited two mothers in Massachusetts. One was my own, Charlene, who lives in a retirement home in Lenox. 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. 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 work is on loan to the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, from the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris. 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 painting represents the peak of Whistler’s radical method of modulating tones of single colors. The paint looks soft, almost fuzzy—as if it were exhaled onto the surface. 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. A few of the daubs faintly echo the pink of Anna’s flesh. She wears a gold wedding ring: a spark of harmony with the muted gilding of the frame that Whistler designed for the picture. 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.
这幅画代表了惠斯勒调和单一色彩的激进方法的巅峰。颜料看起来柔和，几乎模糊，仿佛是被呼气涂抹在表面上的。在安娜手持手帕、带有蕾丝袖口的地方，有一些大胆的笔触，未经底漆的画布若隐若现，左侧的窗帘上带有日本风格的花卉图案的点缀。几处点缀隐约呼应了安娜肤色的粉红色。她戴着一枚金婚戒，与惠斯勒为这幅画设计的低调镀金画框形成一丝和谐。银灰色墙壁的某些区域下隐藏着几乎难以察觉的红色和蓝色低语，而深紫色在窗帘中隐隐燃烧，画家的签名标志——一只蝴蝶——在其中翩然悬浮。
The chromatic subtleties contribute to an unsettled feeling. 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. draft pick. 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. It took me an hour of inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the canvas. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It is the edge of a stage or a platform. Whistler is looking up at his mom.
色彩的微妙之处营造出一种不稳定的感觉。 当你注意到整体空间扭曲时，会感到更大的震动：画面中的形状水平拉伸，结果安娜被隐藏起来的腿，斜着踏在包有软垫的脚凳上，若是细看，这个解剖结构到达N.B.A.选队员的标准了。你越清楚地注意到构图的经济性——比如，右下角弯曲的木椅腿和左下角的三个对角线是为了建立地板的平面，它们表现地潦草敷衍、轻描淡写——你就越能感到，通过一些方式，你被操纵了，但不是坏事，就像一位卓越电影导演的摄影技巧一样，这些方法激发出场景比真相本身更真实的感觉。 我花了一个小时的时间才在画布底部看到一条不显眼的棕色条带。 安娜的裙子滑过它后，落到画面之外。 它是舞台或平台的边缘。惠斯勒在下面，他抬头看着他的妈妈。
“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. But he was exasperated by sentimental responses to the work. He regularly preached that subject matter should be regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. 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. 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. In this case, it’s the mysteries of motherhood. Everybody has a mother, and something close to half of everybody becomes one.
“是的，人们确实喜欢让自己的妈咪尽可能地漂亮，”惠斯勒在多年后回答朋友们称赞这幅肖像逼真，栩栩如生时说。但他对这个作品的情绪性反应感到恼火。 他经常宣扬，主题应该仅仅被视为探索唯美主义的托词。他说：“这是一张我母亲的图片，因此对我来说很有趣； 但公众可以或应该关心肖像是谁吗？” 他是在开玩笑吗？ （他很狡猾。）我们当然关心，即使达不到宾夕法尼亚州阿什兰的一个公民团体关心的程度，该团体于 1938 年竖立了一座安娜坐姿的纪念雕像，底座上刻有柯勒律治的文字：“母亲是活着的，最神圣的东西。” 无论如何，对惠斯勒问题的回答牵涉历史上少有几个艺术偶像的名单，很多人认为这个名单属于偶像级别. 《蒙娜丽莎》、《呐喊》、《美国哥特式》以及安迪·沃霍尔最好的《玛丽莲梦露》都与惠斯勒一样，萃取了立即被认可且永远取之不竭的意义的精华。在这种情况下，这就是母性的奥秘。 每个人都有一位母亲，几乎每个人的一半都成为了母亲。
I’m the oldest of Charlene’s five kids with our late father, Gilmore, an inventor and entrepreneur. 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. Her father was a postmaster in a North Dakota prairie town. 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. I don’t think we got the fancy commemoratives.” She was never much for art, she reminded me. But, having thought about the painting, she e-mailed me later that it put her in mind of her own mother, who “was born in 1875 and continued to wear rather long dresses and never cut her hair. Her opinions were a reflection of the Victorian age.” Charlene was amused to learn that, when the portrait was made, Anna Whistler was sixty-seven: “So young!”
Anna, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a daughter of the antebellum South; she was the niece of a slave owner, and, through him, the cousin of a reported nine mixed-race children. She married George Washington Whistler, a West Point graduate and a brilliant civil engineer, and they had five sons, only two of whom, James and William, survived to adulthood. She was described by a sister-in-law as “so unshakeable that sometimes I could shake her.” Beginning in 1842, the family spent six years in St. Petersburg, Russia, where George served Tsar Nicholas I as the chief engineer of a rail line to Moscow, and the artistically precocious James, at age eleven, enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. In 1849, George died, after a bout of cholera, and the family returned to America.
James followed his father’s example and his own military fantasies by entering West Point. But he proved a feckless cadet—the superintendent, Robert E. Lee, liked but despaired of him—and he flunked out in his third year. He evinced no better discipline in government jobs as a geographical draftsman. Then, in 1855, Whistler went to Paris and launched himself as an artist, a dandy, and a lover of women. He knew Courbet, Baudelaire, Manet, Monet, and Degas, and closely befriended Henri Fantin-Latour. Whistler’s first touchstone painting, “Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl” (1862), was a sensation in the epoch-making 1863 Salon des Refusés (though it was eclipsed by Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”). He was never less than esteemed in France, notably by poets and writers. (The young Proust kept as a talisman a pair of gray gloves that Whistler had worn.) It seems a pity that he took his act to London, by stages beginning in 1859, and refined his genius in the pokier precincts of British art, meanwhile lavishing rather too much of it on flamboyant combats of wit, artistic doctrine, and personal grudge with artists, critics, and patrons who, Oscar Wilde excepted, were little worth the candle. (At first a devoted fan, Wilde came to complain that Whistler spelled art “with a capital ‘I.’ ”)
“Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl”
Polarizing opinion in the London art world, Whistler pioneered the modern trope of the artist as scandalous celebrity. But he tempered his raffish ways with stratagems of genteel respectability, which his mother’s presence supported. When Anna moved in with him—her other son, William, was serving as a doctor in the Confederate Army—the artist moved his current mistress out to other quarters. He wrote to Fantin-Latour, “I had to empty my house and purify it from cellar to eaves.” The religiously pious Anna sighed at what she viewed as her son’s flaws, but she graciously hosted his friends and became positively fond of one of them, the decadent’s decadent, Algernon Swinburne.
在伦敦艺术界，惠斯勒的观点极具争议，他开创了“艺术家即丑闻名人”的现代形象。然而，他又用一套彬彬有礼的策略来中和自己放荡不羁的行径，而他母亲的到来正好增强了这种“体面”的外表。当安娜搬来与他同住时——她的另一个儿子威廉正在为美利坚联盟国军队担任医生——惠斯勒把当时的情妇搬到了别处。他在给范丹-拉图尔（Fantin-Latour）的信中写道：“我不得不把房子清空，从地下室到屋顶都要净化。” 虔诚的安娜对儿子的“缺点”叹息不已，但她还是体面地接待他的朋友们，甚至逐渐喜欢上其中一位——那个“颓废中的颓废者”阿尔杰农·斯温伯恩（Algernon Swinburne）。
Whistler’s painting of his mother overcame fierce resistance to appear in the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1872. It is unique among his portraits. Every other teases out a nuance of personality in the sitter—the works are often seductive, but never conventionally so in the way of portraits by his follower John Singer Sargent.In “Whistler’s Mother,” Anna’s blank forbearance speaks of capitulation. She will do anything for him. She is his. Such exclusive devotion is the primal dream of every mother’s son, isn’t it? ♦
惠斯勒为母亲所画的肖像，曾一度遭到皇家艺术学院年展的强烈反对，但最终在1872年得以展出。这幅画在他的肖像作品中独树一帜。他的其他肖像作品大多透出人物个性的微妙之处，常带有诱惑意味，但从不如约翰·辛格·萨金特那样在传统意义上“讨好（俗气）”。而在《惠斯勒的母亲》这幅作品中，安娜那空洞的忍耐透露出的是一种屈从。她愿为他做任何事。她是属于他的。这种无条件的奉献，难道不是每一个“妈妈的儿子”最原始的梦想吗？
Published in the print edition of the August 31, 2015, issue.
Peter Schjeldahl was The New Yorker’s longtime art critic until his death, in 2022, at the age of eighty. He joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1998.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/moms-home |
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