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:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
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“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)