March 2022 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

With Mother’s Day imminent it seemed apposite to take a look at an image that has been enduringly associated with motherhood, particularly in the US, since the Victorian era: the famous Whistler’s Mother. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an American painter, based primarily in England, and a leading proponent of “art for art’s sake”, that credo which considered art to have intrinsic value quite separate from any moral or didactic function. He was all about tonal harmony and saw parallels between painting and music, even entitling many of his paintings as “arrangements”, “harmonies”, and “nocturnes” — his Whistler’s Mother is only colloquially so-called and was really called Arrangement in Grey and Black.

The subject of the painting is, unsurprisingly, Whistler’s mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was living with the artist in London at the time. The story goes that Anna Whistler was only acting as a substitute because the original model couldn’t make the sitting, and although Whistler had envisioned his model standing up, his mother was just too uncomfortable to pose upright for long periods of time so insisted on sitting down.

The work was shown at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1872, after narrowly avoiding rejection by the Academy (a bone of contention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrangements” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Academy, and they insisted on adding an explanatory adjunct, “Portrait of the Painter’s mother”, to Whistler’s title. Whistler eventually sold the painting, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg and is now housed in the Musée d’Orsay.

In 1934, the US Post Office Department issued a stamp engraved with the portrait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bearing the slogan “In memory and in honor of the mothers of America”. In that spirit, this blog is written in memory and honour of my own lovely mum, and to mothers everywhere!

A few blogs back I wrote about the fantasy world of Ursula K Le Guin and recalled the appeal of browsing the array of science fiction book covers on the shelves at WH Smith’s. One of the giants of that genre – and one that I actually went to the trouble of reading – was Isaac Asimov.

Born in Smolensk in 1920, Asimov was the son of Jewish parents who emigrated to the US in 1923, and the young Isaac was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, where he helped his father run a sweet shop (a “candy store”, I suppose). It was there that he was first exposed to the classic Amazing Stories magazines that his father also stocked, and he was soon diving into the fantastic worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and writing short stories of his own.

Although Asimov’s writing career for many years played second fiddle to his professional scientific career (he became a lecturer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University), his output of science fiction was nonetheless prodigious, and eventually the glut of ideas and the success of his writing encouraged him to become a full-time author. My exposure to Isaac Asimov came in the form of his Robot series, notably I, Robot, which my memory tells me I inherited, rather than bought, probably from my Uncle Geoff.

Asimov wrote 37 short stories and six novels about robots and in fact had coined the term “robotics” in a 1941 story. He also came up with his famous and influential “Three Laws of Robotics”:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These Three Laws of Robotics, which Asimov‘s robots were supposed to obey, have resounded down the ages to the present day when the modern preoccupation with artificial intelligence toys with the idea that those laws might be breached, as they clearly were in The Terminator!

Here’s a selection of book covers that gave many an illustrator free rein to portray Asimov’s robotic world, and starting with the brilliant Terminator-like cover that I remember having.