In Popular Culture
- Mentioned by Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder's 1966 film The Fortune Cookie. Impersonates painting pose to his estranged wife
- A painting of Whistler's Mother is seen in multiple episodes of The Simpsons.
- In "Rosebud", it's seen in Mr. Burns' bedroom .
- In "The Trouble with Trillions", the painting can be seen when Mr. Burns gets arrested by two IRS agents.
- It can also be seen in "The Burns and The Bees" when Mr. Burns' shoots an arrow at the picture in the "Billions Club".
- In Bean, the portrait of Whistler's Mother is used as a plot device by having Burt Reynolds purchase the painting for $50,000,000 (USD) and return it to America. Within the story, Mr. Bean ruins the painting by using paint thinner and surreptitiously replacing the painting.
- Part 6 of Don Delillo's "Underworld" is titled "Arrangement in Gray and Black."
- John Lennon's album "Shaved Fish" features a cover for his song "Mother" which shows him in the position of Whistler's Mother.
- In the musical Anything Goes by Cole Porter, Reno Sweeney refers to Billy Crocker as "Whistler's mama."
Read more about this topic: Whistler's Mother
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is clear that in a monarchy, where he who commands the exceution of the laws generally thinks himself above them, there is less need of virtue than in a popular government, where the person entrusted with the execution of the laws is sensible of his being subject to their direction.”
—Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (16891755)
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)