Nocturne

Originally used to describe musical compositions, the term 'Nocturne' was first applied to paintings by James Abbott NcNeill Whistler (1834-1903) to describe a painting style that depicts scenes at night or dusk. It has since come to mean any painting of a night-time scene.
Whistler used the term, conscious of its musical meaning, in the title of a series of works with a "dreamy, pensive mood". He also named works using other musical terms, such as a "symphony", "harmony" or "arrangement", to emphasize the tonal qualities and the composition and to de-emphasize the narrative content. The painting commonly referred to as Whistler's Mother is more accurately called Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1. Whistler's use of the term 'nocturne' can be associated with the American Tonalism movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century which was "characterised by soft, diffused light, muted tones and hazy outlined objects, all of which imbue the works with a strong sense of mood." (as defined in the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art).
Many years ago I went to see an excellent Whistler exhibition in London and he remains a favourite artist. I also wrote about Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 in a college essay exploring the ideas of Walter Benjamin. Its not very long and I've attached it below, in case anyone is interested...

Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter's Mother
James McNeill Whistler 1871

There are times when your model doesn't show up and, rather than wasting the studio time, you find yourself taking completely unplanned photographs of someone who happens to be around - just for the practise - and you end up taking a great portrait. That is what happened to the nineteenth-century American-born artist James Whistler when he was unable to finish a painting because his young model was ill. He asked his sixty-seven-year-old mother, who was living with him in London at the time, to pose for him. The result was one of the most famous paintings in the world, and an image that is a perfect case study to illustrate the ideas discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.

As a child, 'Whistler's Mother' was one of a handful of paintings I could identify. I think I first saw it in the children's magazine, Look and Learn. Once I was aware of the image I could then appreciate the numerous visual parodies of the painting there were around, such as Ward Kimball's 1964 picture that showed the sitter watching a small TV. As Benjamin says, 'by making many reproductions [the technique of reproduction] substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence...reactivates the object reproduced [and]...leads to a tremendous shattering of tradition'. Despite, or more likely because of, the image's iconic status as a symbol of motherhood, it continues to be reproduced in many irreverent amended versions.

Many years later I had the opportunity to see the original painting as part of a major Whistler exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. Perhaps not surprisingly, it didn't have a great impact. Several rooms into the exhibition, it certainly had the biggest crowd of people gathered around it, but not so many people that you couldn't get a good look at it. And it was a decent size, so it wasn't the case that it just seemed much smaller than I had imagined. No, years of familiarity had bred, if not contempt, then at least indifference. Other paintings in the exhibition made much more of an impression, such as the infamous painting of fireworks that led to Whistler's libel case against the critic Ruskin and the series of Nocturnes of the River Thames.

Whistler was an accomplished self-publicist and the painting of his mother was exhibited frequently in the years following its completion. Almost equally important were the numerous reproductions of the image that began to appear for, as Benjamin states, 'man-made artefacts could always be imitated by man. Replicas were made by pupils in practise of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally by third parties in pursuit of gain.' To begin with these copies involved considerable effort, such as the wood engraving that appeared in the Illustrated London News in June 1872, or the many hundreds of copies that were hand-made by amateur painters. These manual reproductions served mainly to widen the knowledge of the original image, without having much impact on the public perception of the painting. It was Benjamin's so-called 'age of mechanical reproduction' that changed all that.

Following its display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1930s, the image entered into popular consciousness. Everyone knew what the picture looked like. The colloquial title became part of the vocabulary. It was used in song lyrics. It even became the nickname of a US warplane in the Second World War. As Benjamin describes it, the image had moved from having a nineteenth-century 'cult value' to a twentieth-century 'exhibition value'. The picture released from the cult of 'art for art's sake', became fair game for parody and reinvention. In the 1960s, such a process might still have needed the design skills of a Walt Disney animator, but today, with the graphical capabilities of home computers and printers, anyone can produce their own 'mother'. Indeed, there is a group on the Flickr photo-sharing website devoted to new interpretations of the image.

So it would seem that Benjamin was right. The age of mechanical reproduction has democratised the image and made it accessible to many millions of people, not only as passive consumers in a quiet art gallery but also as active re-creators of art. He believed that, 'that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.' Clearly there is some truth in that: the iconic image of motherhood is not so sacrosanct it cannot be lampooned in comedy, or used to sell televisions.

And yet.

There is a vestige of something that attaches to the original. Why else would the Boston Museum of Fine Arts spend three years negotiating with the Musee d'Orsay for the release of the painting, now worth an estimated $30million for an exhibition in 2006? As a Marxist, Benjamin would probably explain this as merely continued false consciousness.

The original work remains in the Musee d'Orsay. The copies are all over the world, from prints hanging on walls, to tea towels, mugs, jigsaws, fridge magnets, mouse mats and any other conceivable surface. There are still people who will produce a hand-made copy for you, and in the ultimate mechanical reproduction, the painting has featured prominently in a film. In Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, the eponymous hero damages the original, secretly replaces it with a print and takes the damaged painting home to hang above his mantelpiece. Interestingly, in the film the painting is shown smaller than actual size - ironically, does this mean that cinema audiences will actually be impressed if they ever see the original?

Bibliography
Benjamin, W. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1936
Dorment, R. and MacDonald, M. F. James McNeill Whistler Tate Gallery Publications 1994
MacDonald, M. F. (editor) Whistler's Mother Lund Humphries 2003

And as a final postscript, having written this in the first year of my HND, during our trip to Paris in our second year of the HND I went to the Musee d'Orsay on our last day, hoping to see the picture again, only to find it was once again out on loan.