Before Monkey Jesus there was Whistler’s Mother. One writer reflects on a childhood haunted by Bean’s art restoration efforts.
There is an image I still find terrifying after almost 30 years.
Picture the scene: you are five years old. Aside from a candle powdered with grey dust, your VHS tapes now fill the two lowest shelves of the pine cabinet, which smells resinous, faintly sweet. Make your selection. After you put the tape in and fast-forward through the ads – the big and little road safety hedgehogs singing ‘King of the Road’, a trailer for The Borrowers, etc. – lo, it begins: Bean (1997).
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The film revolves around Rowan Atkinson’s tweedy pinball of id, Mr. Bean, being sent to the U.S. as an ‘expert’ to oversee the unveiling of ‘Whistler’s Mother’ – that is, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) by the American painter James McNeill Whistler. After Bean sneezes on the painting and tries to remove the snot with an inky handkerchief, he inadvertently applies lacquer thinner. And as Bean shakes with worry, jowls wobbling as if his skin is elasticated, Whistler’s mother’s face spumes and dissolves into abstraction. Five-year-old me is squiggling in his beanbag with fear I cannot account for.
Usually held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, this year Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 travels to London (the city in which it was painted and first exhibited) on loan to Tate Britain, and I’m marking the homecoming with an exorcism of that cartoon face – the one that Bean draws in place of Anna Whistler’s, whose eyes seem to stare directly at me, then, and now. I want to look the painting in the face again and see what, exactly, it did to me.
Am I alone in finding this face scary rather than funny? It has the exaggerated features – large, circular eyes and a phallic, Pinocchio-esque nose – of caricature, not that it resembles Whistler’s mother. Could there be an element of time-honoured misogyny at play: the idea that old women are grotesque (á la Quentin Metsys’ Ugly Duchess), disgusting enough to be laughed at? Certainly, that would be consistent with Bean’s climactic speech, when he says even though Anna ‘was a hideous old bat who looked like she had a cactus lodged up her backside, [Whistler] stuck with her’.
Caricature, or self portrait? The huge ears feel masculine. The big bald head looks like a bean. Yet
to me, it looks like Bean hasn’t attempted a reproduction or a self-rendering, he has just drawn a face. One that looks back at the viewer with these lopsided Salad Fingers-esque eyes that, because of the sloppy linework, appear bloodshot or sleep-deprived.
It’s scary on another level too. As a child, I was surely supposed to identify with bungling Bean, and here he is in Big Trouble. Children spend their lives being told not to mess with things, and Bean’s quivering lip before he unveils his mishap is undeniably childlike. He knows he’s cornered, even as he tries to pass off his outrageous smudge, and he’s scared of the consequences.
So do I find the face frightening in itself or because it anthropomorphises the abstract concept of transgression, taboo, debasement, fucking up? Is that all a bit lofty? The film’s final gag is that – having replaced the original with a poster – Bean has hung the botched masterpiece over his bed back in England, where it smiles wonkily down on him every night, decade after decade; a kind of hapless haunting.
Whistler himself might not have been too horrified. After all – so the story goes – the painting was supposed to feature another face entirely, but when the original model didn’t show, he asked his mother to pose for him instead. As its actual title suggests, the artist saw the work as an exercise in colour and composition, and no doubt his mother’s mourning cap and laced cuffs added some interesting monochromatic textures to play around with. In fact, alongside the Japanese-style floral pattern on the curtains and yawning swathes of minimalist tones, Bean’s daring reintroduction of the raw canvas might well have been greeted with approval… Fine, that’s a stretch – but Whistler was definitely irritated by the public’s overly sentimental response to a piece he’d seen as a technical testing ground rather than a hymn to motherly love.
Nonetheless, the painting has been beloved by the United States since the early 1930s when it first showed there at the Museum of Modern Art before touring to major cities across the country. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the image for a three-cent Mother’s Day postage stamp, issued in a vast print run. By the time of World War II, ‘Whistler’s Mother’ had entered everyday language, even providing the nickname for a bomber. In the same period, bandleader Woody Herman recorded a popular dance number titled ‘Whistler’s Mother-in-law’, opening the floodgates for an irreverent cultural afterlife.
Some jokes were about what she could be looking at off-canvas. In others, the sheer stillness of the seated figure seemed to invite intervention, viewers compelled to coax her into motion – and no doubt, her demure Victorian mores are a foil for Rowan Atkinson’s physical comedy. Before Bean’s monstrosity, Donald Duck’s cartoon face replaced Anna’s, after being shot through the wall by snapping cable suspenders in 1941’s Early to Bed. Half a century later, The Naked Gun 2 ½ (1991) sees Lieutenant Frank attempt to sand a tattoo of her silhouette off Dr Meinheimer’s buttock. All this to say, it wasn’t just the makers of Bean who thought meddling with her would be funny. But scary? Just me…?
I wish I could say that some trusty art history had set me straight. That while the Victorians weren’t on board with Whistler’s rule-bending, multiple generations of filmmakers were delighted to push it even further; that with Bean centring her as plot device, the ultimate matriarch’s meme stock went through the roof. But just as Bean uses a bottle of laxative to spike a museum security guard, sometimes the cure is also the poison. Artists, vandals, perfectionists, beware: a benign, beany head hangs over us at night. This is the face given to the realisation that nothing is fixed, that meaning can be scrubbed out, that at any moment you might be the person who ruins everything – and I’m not sure we ever grow out of that.
