Five Artists Who Paid Homage to Their Mothers in Surprising Ways

A Beaux Arts article examines five artists who created intimate portraits of their mothers, revealing complex relationships and hidden messages. James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) depicts his mother Anna Mathilda McNeill with cold rigor, using a palette of grey to black. The painting, criticized at the 1872 Royal Academy exhibition, was acquired by the French state in 1891 for the Musée du Luxembourg and transferred to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986. Vincent van Gogh, in Arles in 1888, received a black-and-white photograph of his mother Anna Cornelia Carbentus from his sister. Bored by the colorless image, he painted Portrait of the Artist's Mother using green, blue, yellow, and soft pink tones. Suzanne Valadon's La mère de l'artiste (1912) depicts her mother Madeleine Valadon, a single mother who raised Suzanne in Montmartre. Madeleine later cared for Suzanne's son Maurice, but her alcoholism influenced him. Michel Journiac, a French body art figure, used cross-dressing in his 1972 photographic series, including himself dressed as his parents Robert and Renée Journiac, challenging Freudian identifications of homosexuality. Louise Bourgeois's monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999) at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao honors her mother Joséphine Bourgeois, a tapestry restorer. Bourgeois associated the spider with protective guardianship, reflecting her grief after losing her mother at age 21.