National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Orson Welles and the 70th Anniversary of War of the Worlds

On Halloween night of 1938, Orson Welles brought to the airwaves the now-classic H. G. Wells’s fantasy War of the Worlds (1898). Many tuned in late, missing the announcement that the program was fiction. As viewers listened to aliens taking over Manhattan, panic set in, and Welles had to interrupt the broadcast to assure listeners it was not real.

Orson Welles is pictured here in a radio studio, at about the time he produced The War of the Worlds. This portrait is on display in the "20th Century American's" exhibition, on the museum's third floor.  

Join us on Friday, October 31, at 1:00 p.m. as National Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson discusses Orson Welles and plays some selections from War of the Worlds. This day marks the seventieth anniversary of the Halloween radio broadcast that panicked America. The event is free and open to the public; please meet in the museum’s F Street Lobby.

In this blog post, Henderson tells us more about Orson Welles and his historic broadcast. This article is excerpted from her book, On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting. You can listen to the War of World's broadcast, on this blog post, from the Smithsonian's "Around The Mall" blog. 

Orson Welles first appeared on radio in 1934–1935, in NBC’s “The March of Time,” a kind of dramatized newsreel for radio sponsored by Time magazine. Even before Welles became well known, his ability to take on roles requiring any accent or age made him one of the most sought-after actors on radio; he once said that by 1935 he never earned “less than $1,000 a week as an unnamed, anonymous radio actor.” In 1937 he was chosen to be Lamont Cranston, the millionaire playboy who foiled evildoers by night in the adventure serial “The Shadow.” (Q: “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?” A: “The Shadow knows…ha-ha-ha!”)

Welles’s theater work brought him into contact with John Houseman, and in late 1937 he and Houseman took over the tiny Comedy Theatre and ensconced their drama troupe in the newly renamed Mercury Theatre. The company enjoyed such success that Welles persuaded CBS to hire them to present a series of plays adapted from masterpieces.

Wells’s work with the Mercury Theatre would be his most innovative effort on radio. Here he created—as director, writer, and actor—the quintessence of what imaginative radio drama could be. With a cast that included Agnes Moorhead, Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, and Welles, the “Mercury Theatre on the Air” premiered on radio with Bram Stoker’s Dracula on July 11, 1939.

Programs based on Treasure Island, A Tale of Two Cities, The 39 Steps, Jane Eyre, and others followed in weekly sixty-minute installments. In September the “Mercury Theatre” moved into its regular time slot, opposite the hugely popular “Chase and Sanborn Hour,” starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy; Bergen usually pulled in about 35 percent of the audience, while the “Mercury Theatre” would average 3.6 percent.

And so the stage was set for one of the most bizarre events in broadcast history.

For the Halloween program on October 30, 1938, H. G. Wells’s 1898 fantasy, The War of the Worlds, was scheduled. But chief Mercury writer Howard Koch considered the book so antiquated as to be laughable and set busily to work rewriting. Orson Welles joined him in the final rewrite, and somewhere along the line the key modernization occurred: use of the present tense and the addition of staccato-like news bulletins to plot the course of the Martians’ progress toward Manhattan.

The god of serendipity then joined the fray, ordaining that millions of listeners would twirl their radio dials immediately following Bergen and McCarthy’s opening monologue. As Bergen introduced a new and unknown singer, thwack! went dials all over America. When they tuned to the Mercury’s play, many failed to realize that it was, indeed, “play.” They had missed Welles’s warning at the beginning that it was all make-believe, and panic set in.

John Houseman later suggested that the public was made especially susceptible because the Munich crisis had taken place only a month earlier. Jitters grew as the horrific creatures were described pushing their way from Grover’s Mill to midtown Manhattan. Forty minutes into the program, CBS realized that all was not well, and at the break—with New York fictionally suffocating in poisonous black smoke—an announcer said, “You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and ‘The Mercury Theatre on the Air,’ in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells.”

For the last twenty minutes, Welles narrated the denouement, with the Martians being killed by Earth’s bacteria—but by then, the damage had been wrought. As broadcast historian Erik Barnouw has pointed out, the event, although a high point in radio’s Golden Age of drama, was “in many ways a reenactment of The Fall of the City: men had rushed to prostrate themselves before an empty visor.”

An unrepentant Welles later said that the hoax was possible because of radio’s emergent importance: “The radio was believed in America. That was a voice from heaven, you see. And I wanted to destroy that as dramatically as possible.” Though the little practical joke had exploded out of hand, all that he had actually intended was an appropriate Halloween offering: “the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush saying boo.”

Orson Welles/Unidentified artist, c.1938/Gelatin silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Free Film Screenings at NPG: Black and White . . . and Reds All Over!

Visit the National Portrait Gallery in October to see three classic black-and-white films connected by the “red scare” of the 1950s:

   © Warner Independent Pictures

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
Friday, October 3, 7:00 p.m.
David Strathairn stars as the newsman Edward R. Murrow in this dramatization of Murrow’s 1954 showdown with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Directed by George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck was nominated for six Oscars. American University history professor Robert Griffith will introduce the film. 

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Wednesday, October 8, 7:00 p.m.
Based on the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel, this 1941 film noir stars Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade, who must cut through a web of deceit, greed, and murder to obtain a priceless statuette of a falcon. The Maltese Falcon marks John Huston’s directorial debut. Historian David Ward of the Portrait Gallery will introduce the film

On the Waterfront (1954)
Wednesday, October 15, 7:00 p.m.
Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint star in this 1954 drama about violence and corruption on the docks of New York. On the Waterfront is directed by Elia Kazan and scored by Leonard Bernstein. The film won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best actor, and best director. Portrait Gallery senior historian Sidney Hart will introduce the film.

All screenings are located in the museum’s Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. They are free and open to the public; no tickets are required. Doors open at 6:30; seating is first come, first served. More information on NPG's events page.

Portraits of Edward R. Murrow, Joseph McCarthy, Dashiell Hammett, and Marlon Brando are on view now at the National Portrait Gallery. You can learn about these figures and their portraits as part of the regular Thursday-evening Face-to-Face portrait talks this month.

Joseph McCarthy, Roy M Cohn, Ralph Flanders (cropped)/Unidentified Artist,1954/Gelatin silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Caption for Good Night, and Good Luck image: © Warner Independent Pictures. No other uses are permitted without the prior written consent of owner. Use of the material in violation of the foregoing may result in civil and/or criminal penalties.

Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront/Anselmo Ballester,1954/Color photolithographic halftone poster/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portraits Alive! Tours by Teen Ambassadors Bring NPG’s Collection to Life

Come to the National Portrait Gallery and see the 2008 Portraits Alive! Teen Ambassadors breathe life into portraits of Martha Graham, Coretta Scott King, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rita Hayworth, Jean Grae (above), and other notable American figures.

These students from Washington–area high schools signed up to work with NPG educators to learn about museum careers and museum theater. In this ten-week-long program, each student chose a work from the Portrait Gallery’s collection, performed historical research on the sitter, wrote a script, and perfected a solo performance featuring that sitter. To see the students’ impressive work, take the Portraits Alive! museum tour. Remaining dates are Tuesday, August 19, through Thursday, August 21, at 2:15 p.m., and Friday, August 22, at 1:00 p.m. Meet in the museum’s F Street Lobby.

In this blog post, we focus on Martha Graham, as interpreted by Lauren Walker, a rising sophomore at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She performs alongside a 1938 portrait of Martha Graham on view in the NPG exhibition “Bravo!” Below is the script that Walker wrote for her performance:

As Martha Graham (passages in quotations are from Graham’s autobiography Blood Memory):

“I am a dancer.” Unlike most dancers, I don’t live in order to dance; I dance in order to live. Dance is life and without life there is death. My name is Martha Graham, and as you know, I am a dancer. Although simpler in its meaning but yet complex in its expression, I am a mover. Ever since I was a child, I have always been fascinated with movement and the way humans use their bodies to express how they feel. This fascination of movement and the human body I got from my father; he was a physician who worked with the human nervous system. The one thing he used to tell me that directly related to his profession was that “movement never lies.”

I was born and spent half of my life in a town in Pennsylvania called Allegheny. The portion of my life that I spent there was completely bland and colorless. It was so overly religious in its attitudes that dancing was seen as a sin. So in 1909, when my family and I moved to Santa Barbara, California, it felt as if I had escaped from the harsh regulations of Allegheny. In Santa Barbara, there were no rules against dancing or free expression. In Santa Barbara I felt free for the first time in my life.

I had a fascination with dancing and the body because “the instrument through which dance speaks is also the instrument through which life is lived.” The body is a vessel and it should be treated with care and respect. I had such a tremendous fascination, that it was no surprise I started a dance company in 1926. This was very important for me because I could now achieve much more than I ever could by working for someone.

I received inspiration for my choreography from everything, but I received most of it from my ancestral roots and sharp, angular movements.

A Night of Hip Hop at NPG, Thursday July 24

Please join us on Thursday, July 24, for a series of hip hop themed events at the National Portrait Gallery in celebration of the exhibition "RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture." WKYS (93.9) FM's DJ EZ Street starts spinning tunes in the Kogod Courtyard at 2pm, and a cash bar opens at 5pm. At 7pm there will be a free screening of DJ Spooky’s film New York is Now, featuring a discussion with the artist moderated by Martin Irvine immediately following. More information on the event is available here.

The night also includes a 6pm Face-to-Face talk by guest co-curator Jobyl A. Boone, about Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Ice-T (shown at right) in “RECOGNIZE!.” This portrait is part of a group of portraits originally commissioned from Wiley as part of VH1’s 2005 Hip Hop Honors awards show. The exhibition features four of the six VH1 Hip Hop Honors awardees from that year, as well as two other recent portraits by the artist.

In February, NPG curator Brandon Fortune had the opportunity to sit down with Kehinde Wiley, and ask him some questions. You can listen to the complete interview, and see more portraits by Kehinde Wiley here.  

KW: I completed the Hip Hop Honors body of work in 2005, and that commission came as a bit of a different part of my practice.  Generally what I try to do with my practice is to find models from the street—complete strangers who don’t necessarily fall into that typical portrait sitting-set. Which is to say that most of the great portraits from the past that I really admire in paintings have to do with people who are very powerful and wealthy, and who use the portrait as a very important social occasion of having their picture put down in time. 

In my work I’m actually taking very chance moments, and turning that into a heroic moment—taking possibly the complete opposite of what those original works were based on, and turning an entire lifetime of power and dominance in world in on its face, and actually taking an entire moment of absolute chance and making that the big picture.  

When I was invited to do the Hip Hop Honors paintings, it was opportunity to move almost in a different direction, but I think in the same direction in some really crucial ways. By using the language of portraiture and the way that has evolved over time, into how to describe someone heroic and how to describe someone powerful—and then taking possibly the most celebrated individuals in black American popular culture—I’m allowing the language of heroicism to then be drawn in that idiom.

BF: How has the culture of hip hop impacted you and your art?

KW: The culture of hip hop is something that ‘s impossible ultimately to define. I recently have been doing a number of trips to in some ways take the cultural temperature of black American presence through out the world.  And you see it responded to in places like Brazil—in places like West Africa, Turkey, China, India, Thailand—all of which I’ve spent time this summer simply going through and asking these sorts of questions surrounding black American culture and its presence in the world.

And what I have seen, so increasingly, is that black American culture is as varied globally as it is right here at home.  And so when I try to create a response to a question around what hip hop is, and how it fits into my personal practice, it’s global.  And that’s one of the reasons why you see my shows having characters of all corners of the globe.

I’m embracing the fullness of a culture that began as political act, an act of reformation and confirmation of who we are in the world—in the South Bronx, in the 70s.  And now its gone on so successfully that you’ll be in the streets of Tokyo and Dakar and see elements of that reverberated.

BF: What’s next for you on the exhibition schedule?  Could you share that with us?

KW: This coming fall, and this summer actually, I’ll be launching the first of my West Africa paintings.  I’ve created a new series of paintings that has me traveling across the world, looking at world culture, youth culture—a demographic between the ages of 18 – 35.  A very specific group that’s consumed with American consumption, that’s consumed with the fabrication of American popular culture, that’s consumed with the absence of painting as a dominate language within popular culture. 

And what I’m trying to do is to go to places like Dakar in Senegal, places like Lagos in Nigeria. Increasingly, I’m looking at models within that demographic and asking them to choose their favorite moments art-historically, to have them monumentalized in paintings.  That show opens this summer at the Studio Museum in Harlem. 

AREK/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, 2007/Montana spray paint on Sintra panel/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

Ice T/Kehinde Wiley, 2005/Oil on canvas/Private collection, courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery/© Kehinde Wiley

Herblock, Drawn from Memory: Curator's Conversation Event at NPG, June 27

The political cartoons of Herbert Lawrence Block (1909–2001), who was known by the pen name “Herblock,” appeared in American newspapers for more than seventy years.  His particular interest in depicting American presidents is featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition “Herblock’s Presidents: ‘Puncturing Pomposity.’”

The upcoming event, “Curator’s Conversation: Herblock: Drawn from Memory,” will focus on the life and work of one of the nation’s greatest political cartoonists. NPG senior historian Sid Hart will lead a conversation with three Pulitzer Prize winners: reporter Haynes Johnson, historian Roger Wilkins, and cartoonist Tony Auth. No reservations are required; seating is first come, first served. This event takes place at NPG’s Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium on Friday, June 27, at 7:00 p.m. More information is available here.

In this blog post, Sid Hart, curator of the exhibition, discusses one of the pieces, a cartoon Herblock drew of Nixon, published in the Washington Post on October 24, 1973 (shown above):

Events in the Watergate crisis moved so rapidly and dramatically on the weekend of October 19–21 that Herblock drew two cartoons to cover them. Tape recordings made in the Oval Office were the object of a jurisdictional struggle involving Congress, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and the White House. The tapes might determine if President Nixon was complicit in the 1972 break-in of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex, and whether he had interfered with the FBI’s investigation of this crime. Nixon argued that the tapes were protected by executive privilege and national security; the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his claims but preferred that the parties reach an accommodation.

On October 19, Nixon agreed to give Congress a personally written summary of the tapes relating to Watergate, and give unlimited access to Senator John Stennis (D-MS), who would verify the accuracy of the summaries. Nixon ordered Cox fired, but the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the charge. Instead, Nixon had the solicitor general fire Cox, and the whole affair was known as the “Saturday-night massacre.”

Herblock used this cartoon to bring back one of his most powerful graphic metaphors—the bloodhound that had been tracking Nixon since 1954—to illustrate that Nixon’s offering would not satisfy justice. The bones Nixon tossed to the dog represent his aides who had been forced to resign.

For more on Herblock visit the online exhibition, and see the previous blog post "Curator's Journal: Sid Hart on "Herblock’s Presidents: 'Puncturing Pomposity'"

October 24, 1973: "Look—Nice Tapes—Okay, Boy? Okay?"/ Herbert Lawrence Block/Pencil on paper/Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
© The Herb Block Foundation

Free screening of Dog Day Afternoon at NPG, Tuesday, June 24

Dog Day Afternoon (1975), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino, is based on a 1972 bank robbery that had captured media attention at the time. Pacino’s performance as Sonny Wortzik, an unemployed Vietnam veteran, earned him his fourth Oscar nomination in consecutive years and the Best Actor award. His energetic portrayal of Sonny, critic Gene Siskel said, “made me believe the unbelievable.” 

The poster for this film is on view in NPG’s new exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture.” In the poster, Al Pacino’s likeness looms large over a gathered crowd of police officers, FBI men, and other onlookers. Pacino did seem larger than life at the time. Portraying complex characters with a subtlety and intensity few others could match in such films as The Godfather, Serpico, and The Godfather II, he was the prototypic male star of the 1970s, bringing a sense of tough realism to his roles.

A conversation with One in Ten executive director Margaret Murray follows the free screening.

This film is part of NPG’s Reel Portraits film series. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., film begins at 7:00 p.m.; seating is first come, first served. Screenings and lectures for this series are all located in the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. More information is available here.

For more on posters, see the previous blog entries “The Cinematic Cool of Douglas Fairbanks” and “Curator’s Journal: Wendy Wick Reaves on “Ballyhoo! Posters and Portraiture.”

Dog Day Afternoon/Al Pacino/Unidentified artist, 1975/Color photolithographic poster with halftone/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Curator's Tour and Book Signing: Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer, June 22

Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869–1933) was a leading New York portrait photographer who attracted to her studio the important writers, artists, politicians, and actors of the period. On Sunday, June 22, at 2:00 p.m., the National Portrait Gallery’s associate curator of photographs, Frank Goodyear, will give a tour of the NPG exhibition “Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Photographer.” After the tour, he will sign copies of the book that accompanies the exhibition. Meet at the exhibition's entrance on the 2nd floor; more information on the event is available here.

In this blog post, Goodyear discusses Ben Yusuf’s 1898 self-portrait that hangs in the exhibition:

One of the signature works in the new exhibition “Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer” is an 1898 self-portrait. Although Ben-Yusuf was principally a commercial photographer who attracted to her studio the leading cultural and political figures of the day, the subject she photographed most often was herself. During her career, she created no less than ten self-portraits, each different from the other in terms of dress, pose, and mood. 

Turning the camera on herself provided an opportunity to experiment with both the art of portraiture and her own feminine persona. These self-portraits gave the British-born photographer—a young single woman recently settled in New York City—a much-needed identity, one that would lessen her sense of displacement and attract attention to her art.

Rendered in a narrow vertical format, this image is striking for the costume Ben-Yusuf wears and the pose she adopts. Both mark her as a bohemian woman. Unlike more conventional dresses of the period, Ben-Yusuf’s long gown is strikingly form-fitting. Her dark coat and hat are equally modern in fashion, and the manner in which she arranges her long necklace and holds her fur muff at her side suggests a desire to push forward—if not to break free from—stylistic traditions. This likeness makes clear how conscious Ben-Yusuf was of her public appearance and how deliberate she was in casting herself among those women who looked to transgress traditional boundaries of femininity.

Reviewers greeted her photographs with enthusiasm. In Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Notes, critic William Murray singled out this self-portrait for praise. It was Ben-Yusuf, though, as much as the portrait itself that prompted Murray to comment that the subject “appears before us scintillating with all the qualities of mind and person represented by the much abused French word—chic.”

Twenty-eight years old when this portrait was created, Ben-Yusuf was indeed coming into her own as an independent woman and a fine art photographer. This self-portrait acts to announce her arrival in the New York art world and anticipates her engagement with the many subjects who would visit her studio in the years ahead.

- Frank Goodyear III

For more on Zaida Ben-Yusuf visit the online exhibition, and read about the research and genealogical detective work that went into creating the exhibition, in a previous blog post "Curator’s Journal: Frank Goodyear on Zaida Ben-Yusuf."

Portrait of Miss Ben-Yusuf/Zaida Ben-Yusuf, 1898/Platinum print/National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution

The Fighting Lady

In January of 1945 a new documentary, The Fighting Lady: A Drama of the Pacific, was released to the American public. Immediately popular, it was ultimately awarded the 1945 Oscar for Best Documentary and a 1946 New York Film Critics Circle Special Award.

Produced by the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit under Commander Edward J. Steichen, The Fighting Lady was filmed primarily by a group of motion-picture cameramen headed by Lieutenant Commander Dwight Long, USNR. Although Steichen was primarily a still photographer, he was listed as the director since he was the commander of the unit. The Fighting Lady is the only motion picture he ever directed. Learn more about Edward Steichen in the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition "Edward Steichen Portraits," on view until September 1, 2008.

Steichen had served as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Service during World War I, and came out of that war as a pioneer in the field of aerial photo interpretation. In 1942, at the age of 62, he was considered by virtually everyone to be too old for further active service.

But Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford, one of the Navy’s pioneer aviators, wanted to document the new warship of the Navy—the fast aircraft carrier—in action. The battleship, long the queen of the fleet, was being quickly usurped by this extremely flexible newcomer.

Specifically, Radford wanted dramatic action photos of the Navy’s carrier operations for use in publicizing this new form of warfare and attracting new recruits into its ranks. Steichen, as one of the foremost photographers of the time, could very well be the one to deliver them.

So with a medical waiver for his age in hand, Steichen became Lieutenant Commander Edward J. Steichen, USNR, and one of the most noted combat photographers of World War II.

The Fighting Lady gave wartime audiences, for the first time, a dramatic “you are there” look at the daily life on one of the new fast Essex-class fleet carriers then attacking Japanese installations all over the Pacific. The current PBS documentary Carrier is a direct descendant of this landmark documentary.

See The Fighting Lady and discuss the film with Jack Green of the Naval Historical Center on Friday, May 30, at 7:00 p.m. in the McEvoy Auditorium at the National Portrait Gallery, Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. The event is FREE and open to the public.

Katharine Hepburn at NPG! Performance this Monday, May 12

On Monday night, May 12, the National Portrait Gallery's Cultures in Motion program will present Hepburn Herself, a stage presentation produced by NPG’s Jewell Robinson and featuring DC actress Helen Hedman as Katharine Hepburn.  The first performance in March was viewed by almost three hundred people and included a discussion afterwards with Robinson, Hedman, director Michael Kramer, and writer and adapter Warren Perry.  This Monday’s show will also conclude with a production discussion. 

Among the superlatives Katharine Hepburn claims are the four Academy Awards which are on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s “One Life” exhibition "KATE: A Centennial Celebration."  Miss Hepburn had a total of twelve nominations over her career, and many critics believe she also deserved Oscars for her unforgettable performances in The Philadelphia Story and The African Queen.  Her story begins with the beginning of Hollywood and concludes with curtains drawing over the most celebrated career in cinema history. 

A partial list of actors with whom she appeared is a roll call of the greatest actors in the history of film:  Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, John Barrymore, Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier, Sidney Poitier, and, of course, Spencer Tracy.  That all the arts contain legions of adults who operate their lives like pretentious children is a certainty; Kate Hepburn did not suffer such behavior, and she was, per biographer Charles Higham, “disgusted by the tawdry ostentation of Hollywood.”

Katharine Hepburn was both gutsy and vocal. She performed a stunt which involved falling into the dirty Venice canal waters during the filming of Summertime; this resulted in a case of conjunctivitis which never left her. Once from the stage during a performance she lectured an audience member who dared to take a flash picture. Another time, she hit a truck driver for revving his engine behind the theatre.

It is lucky for her admirers that she took the time to write two autobiographical works.  The most sensitive subjects in her life- the death of her brother Tom and her love for Spencer Tracy- we discover about her through her own words.  Her large number of biographers far exceeds the number of interviews she granted; throughout her days, she liked being liked, but she treasured her privacy.  It is that quality which most keenly separates her from today’s starlets, as she felt a great dignity about keeping her passions, friendships, and family to herself, and it is precisely that dignity which is, perhaps, the most outstanding of her superlatives.

Photograph by Nekisha Durrett

Monday’s performance is free, but seating is limited.  For reservations please call 202-633-8520 or email NPGPublicPrograms@si.edu.  Additional info on the performance is available here.   

Katharine Hepburn/Everett Raymond Kinstler, 1982/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery; gift of Everett Raymond Kinstler/© 1982 Everett Raymond Kinstler

Face-to-Face Portrait Talk on Thelonious Monk, this Thursday, April 17

April is Jazz Appreciation Month! To help celebrate, Reuben Jackson, archivist at the National Museum of American History, will discuss Thelonious Monk and his portrait at NPG on April 17 from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Meet in the F Street lobby, and we will then walk to Monk’s portrait. For information on getting to the National Portrait Gallery please see our visit page.

This talk is just one of NPG’s Face-to-Face portrait talks that occur every Thursday. If you can’t attend the discussion, you can view Monk’s portrait on your own, in the “Bravo” exhibition on the third floor mezzanine. 

Pianist/composer/bandleader Thelonious Monk was one of our greatest philosophers. His compositions (classics such as “Pannonica” and the alternately lyrical and pensive “Monk’s Mood,” among others) are aural canvases pulsing with humor, depth, beauty, and originality.

Monk’s writing and his still-undervalued pianistic prowess personify a line from poet Patti Smith: “the sea of possibilities” This is where the best of hip hop and the world of Thelonious Monk intersect. At its best, hip hop is a pretension-free multitasker—part drummer, part messenger, and not afraid to address the alpha and omega of existence. (Visit NPG’s “RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture” exhibition for more on hip hop)

Then, of course, there are the sartorial and linguistic connections. The so-called “be-boppers” (the 52nd Street crew!)—of which Monk was considered a part, were as known for their “hip” vernacular and clothing as, say, The Wu Tang Clan. But what, if anything, does a hat, a smoke-filled room, or a pair of Reeboks, tell us about someone’s art?

—Reuben Jackson

Thelonious Sphere Monk/Boris Chaliapin, 1964/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, gift of Time magazine