This Ain’t Your Whistler’s Mother-Traipsing Through The National Gallery Of Art In Sunnier Pre-Shutdown Times-James McNeill  Whistler’s “The White Girl,” Symphony In White Whatever Hustle They Are Pulling Now With The Title 

By Laura Perkins      

Some people apparently, at least in the art world have a hard time moving on, letting things go. That is the case with one Arthur Gilmore Doyle (hereafter Doyle since I utterly refuse to buy into the late 19^th fashion among the bluebloods and their wannabes to set themselves apart from the plebian Tom, Dick and Harrys with the three-name moniker to prove I think that they were not illegitimate, foundlings or could trace their genealogy back to the “Mayflower”). Doyle has been my upscale upstart nemesis since I took on this assignment under duress (when my longtime companion Sam Lowell balked on the assignment to pursue other interests I was “ratted out” by Leslie Dumont for having taken a couple of art classes and gone to an art museum making me candidate number one against the rest of the field here).

First Doyle challenged my assertion that the famous, or infamous, Madame X (Madame Guiteau) of John Singer Sargent’s (ditto on the trifecta names) The Portrait of Madame X where she flouted her stuff was a tramp, originally, I said a whore, but we are being a little more high-toned now working against a blue-blooded scion. I replied, taking up way too much time away from my commentary on John White Alexander’ Isabella and the Pot of Basil at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (see, Archives, January 15, 2019) in my second foray, that all the documentation, all the memoirs and biographies not basically done by her press agents, then or now, pointed to her sleeping her way up the food chain into French high society. And with all regard to the #MeToo movement today what of it. History is replete with woman who have used their beauty to get ahead in the world, professional beauties who we hope don’t have to do so in the future. Doyle to the contrary argued showing his knowledge of the class as well as sex line, that if Sargent painted the woman, she must be as pure as the driven snow or he would not have truck with tramps, whores, professional beauties. We have gone over that so enough said except I still find it strange that neither he or anybody else wanted to spill their bile over my comment about Madame’s horrendous bird-like nose. Apparently that was a sign of beauty back then although today nothing by sorrow for her ghastly condition.                      

Now Mr. Doyle, seemingly with plenty of time on his hands indicative of the leisure class has after reading my screed on Alexander’s Isabella challenged my claims to be an art critic, that I am a disgrace to the profession for stating that this Isabella was some kind of doped up John the Baptist-initiated cultist for being sexually aroused by her murdered lover’s head (having been done in in by her fearful brothers) in that so-called pot of basil. Doyle apparently had not read the fine print or was so bilious about my take on Madame X that he “forgot” that I am not an art critic, not a member of the art museum curator, art gallery owner, high-end art collector, or art journal fraternity which runs the art world. I have already mentioned that I took this art assignment under duress when Greg Green approached me after hearing what Leslie Dumont has said about my art “resume.” I took this assignment with the understanding that I would following my muse, my art muse, and pepper my comments with ideas, with my take, which would not be found in the vocabularies of the curators, gallery owners, collectors and journal editors. And they have not.     

What has made Doyle’s temperature rise this time, why he felt the need to foul up cyberspace was my comments about dear Isabella’s drug problem and about her devotion to that bizarre “head in a pot” cult (or platter, bowl, in hand I have seen many variations on how the severed head was handled but they all shared that fetish to worship at the shrine with sensual, sexual desire hence bizarre). He challenged my assertion based on Sam Lowell’s expertise that the plants in the jar were not harmless if symbolic basil but poppies, the stuff of opium and heroin. Sam rechecked the plants at my request and asserted that definitely the plants were poppy. Here is where the class and sex issues totally go over Doyle’s head. Like with the purity of Madame X argument he believes that Alexander would never stoop, his word, to painting some twisted dope fiend hung up on a bizarre cult. That could be left to those Frenchman of the day who made their money by titillating the plebes. Doyle seems to have been oblivious to among other things in high Victorian times sniffing dope, snuff boxes, mixing up lanadum was an everyday occurrence to get through the day, especially but not exclusively by women. What about it though if it got them through the day, or through their sorrows. Beyond that I cannot educate the man, nor will I.

On to finally Whistler’s Woman in White, Symphony in White, Number 1, The White Girl or whatever name some curator or high-toned art critic wants to put on one of James McNeill Whistler’s great mood painting in order to argue that the model is either the Madonna, a whore, no, a tramp, somebody’s kept woman, a streetwalker or a nymphomaniac. I will stop there although I have not run out of names for the poor gal depending on the theory being presented. Some Earth mother thing connected with the Pre-Ralphelite Brotherhood being the most popular, although the most ludicrous since her lips are not nearly Angela Joie-full enough for Rosetti and the brethren, a sure tip off Whistler was in some deep opium funk when he created this piece and messed up the lips. Or ran out of ruby red paint. What it is not though is Whistler’s mother, oh, excuse me Symphony in Gray and Black if we want to humor the guy in his funk, and in his bogus “art for art’s sake” hustle like some preternatural colorist (meant to bring in big bucks from unknowing but rabid collectors looking for something for the wall above the fireplace mantle with cachet).

Let’s get real though this is not a down at the heels shop girl who didn’t know the score, didn’t know a certain truth that would forever haunt her image, her reputation.   It took about my fifth time down at the National Gallery of Art in sunnier times when it was open, now closed by government shutdown to figure what was going on here. The deep symbolism which puts Brother Whistler right in vortex as the precursor of the Surrealist movement of the next century. Maybe as one art critic speculated this was a tip of the hat to the coming storm in Whistler’s America, the gathering storm when they had painter’s bloc.  Doyle is not going to like my comments on this one any more than my sexual suggestiveness regard three-name moniker Singer and Alexander and Madame X and Isabella respectively. This portrait has nothing to do with first communion-like virginity, bride of Christ or lost innocence after the Edenic fall, far from it.

What this painting is though is a homage to the Whole of Babylon, the queen bee of courtesans which is how Whistler saw his model, his girlfriend what did they call their relationship in polite society then, yes, consort. Don’t be fooled like all the high-brow Victorian art critics with their handy snuff boxes and be taken in by the white dress, the too skinny red lips, the white curtain, that very convenient white rose. That is all show. That is for the gullible art collectors and museum patrons. The key is the wolf’s head, and I am surprised nobody else has caught the naked symbolism. Although I don’t read or speak Aramaic there is a clear reference in the Book of the Dead according to the Babylonian history scholar James Cee about the wolf’s head and the Whore of Babylon. That the wolf’s head and fur were both an advertisement for a high-born courtesan and as an aphrodisiac for her clients. Nice work, James. For those who have me written down as some Freudian sexual reference cretin or frustrated post-menopausal matron well go to work. As for Doyle when he comes out of his dead faint after reading this give it your best shot. Give it your best shot.