Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish
How Whistler’s Mother Looks To People in the Southern Hemisphere, 1886
Oil on canvas
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MASTERPIECE #3069
“Whistler’s mother- the return trip.”
She had planned on a few weeks of biking/
But the temperatures had been spiking/
“The ride was a beast !”/
She said, headed back East./
California was not to her liking !
Info, or links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here, here (archived if necessary), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (can be read in full for free on Fridays), here, here, here (Google translated), and here, perhaps in addition to what’s in his Wikipedia page (Google translated Danish Wikipedia page has more).
/// Frederikke is Hammershøi’s mother.
His and Whistler’s resemble each other. /
They both sat in profile
for a very long while,
barely breathing. (They thought they would smother.)
/// Still, the differences here are apparent.
Just one painter’s behavior’s aberrant.
Both moms hated the sight
of her “bad side”— (the right).
Vilhelm hated his feminine parent.
/// And they don’t just face opposite ways.
There’s the question of where they can gaze.
At framed art on the wall—
or at nothing at all.
Frederikke is bored to malaise.
/// Vilhelm’s painting stirs up few emotions.
Though I can’t come up with better notions
than Steve Melcher’s words,
I’m one of those nerds
who’s determined to go through the motions.
/// “His Arrangement in Grey and Black 1,
painted by James, her dutiful son.
Where my mom sits all day—
wall’s half black and half grey;
an arrangement he’d never have done.”
/// With the poison still fresh in her tummy,
Norma sat in her chair like a dummy.
In a few years her flesh,
(with no way to stay fresh),
dries ‘til Mrs. Bates looks like a mummy.
/// Her son Norman treats Mother with care.
From her bed she is brought to this chair.
As her face became “prunier,”
Norman grew even loonier.
Raids her wardrobe for outfits to wear.
/// Mother Hitchcock sits still in the gloom
of her son Alfred’s projection room.
After “Psycho” was done,
her reaction was… none.
So he had her returned to her tomb.