CULTURE

WHISTLER’S MOTHER MOVED OUT

Apparently, if you sit in one chair long enough, even if it’s in your own home, somebody will come along and move you out. 

You at least have to get up long enough to write the mortgage check and pay the real estate taxes. 

The case in point is the removal of the color plate of Whistler’s Mother from the newly revised edition of the standard textbook The History of Art by H. W. Janson.  Who has ever been though a course in art history who has not meandered through the tome’s copious visual documentation?

Since the first edition, the famous, but now apparently dismissible, portrait by the American artist, Whistler, of his mother, idling away rather stiffly in a black chair, has merited entrance between its hallowed covers.

In justifying the excision, the editor of the new edition noted the exigencies of limited space.  There was only room for some 1450 illustrations, she averred.  So Whistler’s Mother went MIA, or missing in art.

Next thing you know, the Flatiron Building will get tossed out of the section on architecture.  After all, it’s been there for a very long time and an awful lot of buildings have gone up since art students began to lug home the first edition of Janson’s tour d’art.

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