National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Student Responses: Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix

This column is part of an occasional series in which Washington-area university students discuss works on display in the National Portrait Gallery.

This blog post is written by Jamielyn Smith, a graphic design student at George Mason University. She writes about this 1970 poster of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The poster is on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture,” on the museum’s second floor.

Smith’s article is reprinted here, with her permission—it was originally published in Writing for Designers, the class blog of GMU’s graphic design course AVT 395-4. Writing for Designers covers many topics in graphic design, and includes more student-written articles about the “Ballyhoo!” exhibition.

You might think that a poster featuring Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, two of the most recognizable 1960s rock icons, would include the flamboyant colors and embellishments associated with their music. There is, however, absolutely nothing psychedelic about the L&S Productions poster entitled Winner? Created in 1970, the year Hendrix and Joplin both died of overdoses at the age of twenty-seven, Winner? presents a critical look at the drug-filled lifestyles led by these rock legends. As part of the National Portrait Gallery’s “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” exhibition, this piece displays its message with a fairly basic graphic palette of three colors, three photographs, and one word repeated twice.

Located on the back wall of the show room, Winner? stands out due to its simple, effective design. Contained within a red and yellow elliptical pill shape are photographs of Joplin and Hendrix. Both musicians are performing, their eyes closed and faces half covered. A sharply focused photograph of Joplin fills the red, top half of the composition, with the word “Winner?” centered underneath her image. An upside-down, softly focused photo of Hendrix appears underneath, on the yellow, bottom half of the pill—the word “Winner?” is also upside down and placed with his image.

The orientation of the photographs allows the poster to be flipped, while maintaining its imagery and purpose. The clever presentation symbolizes how easy it is to go from the top to the bottom. The careers of Hendrix and Joplin were at an all-time high in 1970, but everything ended in an instant because of their addictions. Along with the passing of Jim Morrison, their deaths helped bring the potential downside of drug use to the public’s attention. Furthermore, the elliptical shape means that the pill could continue to flip, representing the continuous cycle of drug abuse.

The restricted color palette and simplicity set this piece apart from the other posters in the exhibition, particularly the ones that also depict musicians and iconography from the 1960s. Posters from this era are usually colorful and saturated with surreal imagery, optical illusions, and kaleidoscopic swirling patterns. This complete lack of white space makes the viewer feel overwhelmed with imagery. They also feature hard to read, warped, organic typography. Therefore, it is especially shocking to see the king and queen of stoner rock in such an austere context.

Although this poster was created almost forty years ago, the message it communicates is still relevant today. The poster’s clean design references the 1960s in a subtle way that makes it appealing to contemporary viewers. Likewise, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix continue to inspire modern audiences with their music. There is no question that Winner? is timeless.

 

Winner?/Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin/L & S Productions, 1970/Color photolithographic halftone poster/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/© 1970 L & S Productions

Closing Exhibition: Herblock’s Presidents

The National Portrait Gallery's exhibition “Herblock’s Presidents: ‘Puncturing Pomposity’” is closing soon, so see it while you can. The exhibition’s final day is this Sunday, November 30. 

The political cartoons of Herbert Block (1909–2001) appeared in American newspapers for more than seven decades under the pen name Herblock. He achieved his greatest prominence as the editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post, where he worked from 1946 until his death in 2001. The exhibition contains Block's original drawings of presidential cartoons from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton.

In this blog post, the National Portrait Gallery’s Warren Perry interviews Sidney Hart, curator of the exhibition. Hart is the NPG’s senior historian. The interview is excerpted below:

WP: Do you have a favorite one or two cartoons in the exhibition?

SH: There are three or four that we have that he did on Nixon and Watergate. I don’t know how many he did on Watergate, there may be twenty, thirty, forty or more. Block, in a sense, was waiting decades for the Watergate crisis. In his view, he had finally caught Nixon for what—as Block perceived it—Nixon really was.

And we have the cartoon, that we used as a signature cartoon for the exhibition, with a bloodhound—this is Block and his use of metaphor, the bloodhound is representing justice, or the law going after criminal activity.  And the bloodhound, which is huge, is following this little figure of Richard Nixon. And Nixon has audiotapes in his hand, representing the tapes from the Oval Office.

Many of the tapes discussed Nixon’s attempt to deal with the Watergate crisis, which were incriminating in the sense of Nixon trying to cover-up the original Watergate break-in. And Nixon had already thrown these bones to the bloodhound, and the bones each have the name of a White House aide who had been forced to resign. So Nixon had given up these bones, or aides, in order to save himself. And then he’s trying to throw some of the tapes to the bloodhound to get him off the track, so he can somehow escape this crisis. But of course the bloodhound is on his trail and is relentless.

WP: Among the Block cartoons, you can see how they are divided up into some that are blatantly targeting faults he finds inside administrations. Then there are others that are just funny, for the sake of poking fun at politics—which is one of the great American pasttimes. Which couple do you think are among the funniest?

SH: There’s one of Jimmy Carter, and it has to do with the economic crisis. This is interesting in a sense, because some people have tried to make comparisons between that economic crisis and our financial crisis today. At this point, thank goodness, that crisis is still worse, and maybe our crisis won’t reach that level.

We’re talking about a situation which unemployment, I think, was as high as ten percent—it was double-digit. Inflation was at least 12 percent; interest rates were over more than 20 percent. And we had what we call “stagflation,” in which you had inflation and the economy was not growing. It was a bad economic situation that had begun during the Nixon years and continued really to the early 1980s.

And Block has Jimmy Carter—it’s a hospital scene—and Carter is looking at this chart, and the sick patient is the economy. And the caption is something to effect of “frankly I have no idea what I’m doing.” And seeing that caption, I think you just laugh out loud. Because it’s a pathetic Jimmy Carter—maybe a trifle unfair, since nobody really had a clue what to do with economy. But Block was concerned about going after the biggest guy on the block, and the biggest guy on the block was often the president.

The other cartoon, and I can’t remember the caption, but again it’s the economy, and this is Gerald Ford. And they’re in this handbasket, and they’re heading downward, and it’s the economy. It’s a perfect depiction of “to hell in a handbasket.” Nobody knows really what’s going on with the economy. Ford has tried various gimmicks and nothing is working.

I remember looking at both those cartoons—the Carter one and the Ford one. And they’re not particularly vicious in any way. Block had done far more violent cartoons. You just see the captions—I was working with a graduate student who was assisting me in terms of selecting these—and we both saw these cartoons and just started laughing. They were just funny.

Listen to the entire interview with historian Sid Hart (14:54)

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

"I'm Going To Give It To You Straight—I Don't Have Any Idea What I'm Doing."/Herbert Lawrence Block, April 27, 1979/Pencil on paper/Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C./© The Herb Block Foundation

"We're Moving Right Along."/Herbert Lawrence Block, November 1, 1974/Pencil on paper/Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C./© The Herb Block Foundation

John F. Kennedy Remembered: May 29, 1917 — November 22, 1963

The murder of John F. Kennedy forty-five years ago this week is one of the most tragic and memorable events in American history. Biographer Robert Dallek writes, “Kennedy’s death shocked the country more than any other event since the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. . . . Kennedy’s sudden violent death seemed to deprive the country and the world of a better future.”

The National Portrait Gallery has several portraits of Kennedy in its collections—this 1963 portrait was painted by artist Elaine de Kooning, and is on view in the "America’s Presidents" exhibition.

Although Kennedy was only slightly less than three years into his presidency when he was killed, the images of his administration have great resonance. Most Americans are familiar with at least a handful of those iconic moments—the youthful Kennedy being sworn into the presidency, the chief executive at work as John Jr. plays beneath the desk, the silhouette in the window of the Oval Office, the horrible and searing moments of the drive through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Kennedy’s tenure in office includes honor as well as debacle. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine during the Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the defining moment of his foreign policy, while the Bay of Pigs invasion always evokes the same word: fiasco. However, such institutions as the Peace Corps and the space program continue to represent his legacy. The Kennedy presidency is also defined by his commitment to America and by the commitment he wished Americans to make to their country; the summation of his inaugural speech is among the most-quoted passages in our written and spoken heritage.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy/ Elaine de Kooning,1963/ Oil on canvas/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Student Responses: Veronica Lake

This column is part of an occasional series in which Washington-area university students discuss works on display in the National Portrait Gallery.

This article is written by Maria B. Havrilla, a freshman at Catholic University of America. She writes about this 1940s “stand-up” poster of actress Veronica Lake—an advertisement for “Woodbury Matched Make-up” that was designed for drugstore windows. The poster is on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture,” on the museum’s second floor. 

My visit to the National Portrait Gallery was for a school project; I was instructed to choose a portrait I felt was significant and to discuss that portrait. Browsing through the Portrait Gallery, I found what I thought was the perfect portrait: the 1945 “Woodbury Matched Make-up” ad featuring Veronica Lake. Lake seems to display a calm seductiveness that is still sought-after in today’s commercial media. She broke some boundaries with her portrait, yet she still characterizes women of both yesterday and today.

Lake is the epitome of beauty and grace in this portrait; she draws the viewer in with her seductive and secretive stare. Her dress further hints at her sex appeal, and her complexion is flawless. Her looks are those of a good hometown girl with a flirtatious love of pushing the limits, while the blond locks framing her face give the illusion that her look is effortless. Veronica Lake depicts the ever-evolving modern woman.

Throughout history, portraits and paintings of women reflect the times. Portraits also bear some influence on the future. Women in such images as the Mona Lisa are shown to be worthy of attention and affection as well as admiration; they should not just be seen as mothers and wives. Something similar can be said for Veronica Lake; she made history by letting her hair fall about her face and by daring to show her pretty skin.

This image, from the period just after World War II, is a picture of a classic beauty who is showing her sensuous side, something not typical or always accepted for that day. Taking the standards of beauty and grace to another level, she says to the viewer that women should be confident and prepared to step out of tradition and into a bold new sensuality. Veronica Lake was an icon of her time and continues to be a legendary icon for breaking the norm, pushing women to become more interested in non-traditional roles in society.

“Woodbury Matched Make-Up” /Veronica Lake/Unidentified artist, c. 1945/Color photolithographic halftone poster stand-up/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

145 Years Ago Today at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

- President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

For more on Lincoln, visit “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln” at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition runs until July 5, 2009, and is part of a yearlong Smithsonian-wide celebration of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. 

Abraham Lincoln /Mathew Brady, 1864/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait of George C. Marshall by Thomas Edgar Stephens

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents “Face-to-Face,” a portrait talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this regular series, NPG Director Martin Sullivan discussed this portrait of George C. Marshall by artist Thomas Edgar Stephens. You can see this portrait in the “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition on the third floor.

George C. Marshall was, according to one expert observer, the “perfect” soldier. Endowed with a quick mind, a good memory, and a superb sense of strategy, he did not particularly relish war. Yet as chief of staff during World War II, he proved to be a masterful orchestrator of military mobilization. In 1945 President Harry Truman remarked that millions of Americans had served the country well in that conflict, but it had been Marshall who “gave it victory.”

As capable in peace as in wartime, Marshall later became Truman's secretary of state, and it was he who unveiled in 1947 the American aid program for rebuilding Europe’s war-ravaged economies. Ultimately named the Marshall Plan, this venture became one of the greatest triumphs in the entire history of American diplomacy.

Listen to Martin Sullivan’s Face-to-Face talk on George C. Marshall (34:41)

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, November 20, when Francis Flavin speaks about Henry Inman’s portrait of Sequoyah. The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

George Catlett Marshall/Thomas Edgar Stephens, c 1949/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of Ailsa Mellon Bruce, 1951

Student Responses: Loïe Fuller

This column begins an occasional series in which Washington-area university students discuss works on display in the National Portrait Gallery.

This article is written by Abbey Stickney, a graphic design student at George Mason University. She writes about this 1893 poster of performer Loïe Fuller by French artist Jules Chéret. The poster is on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture,” on the museum’s second floor.

Stickney’s article is reprinted here, with her permission—it was originally published in Writing for Designers, the class blog of GMU’s graphic design course AVT 395-4. Writing for Designers covers many topics in graphic design, and includes more student-written articles about the “Ballyhoo!” exhibition.

As a graphic designer, I found the “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery very worthwhile. It gave credibility to design as an art form, as the show was surrounded by the elaborate oil paintings of famous musicians, presidents, and just plain wealthy people. To have posters displayed in such close proximity to these wonderful works of art makes the general public really look at design, possibly for the first time. It makes these people notice the composition, the color choices, and the mood of the piece as they would a painting by Rembrandt.

Among the vast array of posters on display, one in particular grabbed my attention. Maybe it was the simplicity of the composition, or maybe it was the woman herself. The poster was a celebration of life and color set against the black background of a stage curtain. The wild red hair of the pale woman was thrown back, and she was draped in a sheer golden gown. One of her legs was kicked up, and she appeared to be suspended in the air with her dress floating in circles around her, as if she has just completed a spin in the air and is now returning to earth.

The woman’s name was Loïe Fuller, and she was an American performer who was quite popular in Paris around the turn of the century. Fuller was a master showman who pioneered the use of colored stage lighting and used enormous silk costumes to exaggerate her movements on stage. She characterizes the art nouveau movement, as her flowing costumes appeared on stage like flowers and other objects found in nature. Fuller was also the first person to bring modern dance to Europe and present it as a true art form.

I feel this poster has captured the essence of Fuller’s performances. She appears here free and full of life, just like her performances were, I would imagine. You can even faintly see the colored stage lighting in the background. The only text on the poster is the name of the performer, La  Loïe Fuller (at the top), and the place where she will be performing, the Folies-Bergère (at the bottom), a Paris opera house where nudity was not uncommon. The text type is red and has an organic feel to it that coordinates well with the image. With its rough, cut-out look, it appears to be handmade.

I think that it is very appropriate that this poster show was in a portrait gallery. Posters give the viewer more information than other portraits do: they tell the viewer not only about the person or people shown, but about the time in which the poster was created, the poster’s intended audience, and even the location in which the poster was to be displayed. This proves that not only are posters—and consequently graphic design as a whole—art, they are a seamless balancing act between both giving the viewer information and giving the viewer something that he or she wants to stop and look at. That is what good design does.

"Folies-Bergère La Loïe Fuller"/Loïe Fuller/Jules Chéret, 1893/Color lithographic poster/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Anne Sexton’s Awful Rowing Toward Self-annihilation

                         © Rollie McKenna

Anne Sexton loved applause and hated herself. The cloak of confessional poetry was wrapped about this personality skeleton not just for Anne Sexton, but also for many of her contemporaries. Among Sexton’s published collections are To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1966), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975).

This 1961 portrait of Sexton, by photographer Rollie McKenna, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the recently opened exhibition “Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs.”   

The confessional movement arrived in the mid-1950s and in its number we count some of the great voices of the twentieth century—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne Sexton. Called “confessional” because the movement emphasized cathartic discourse, Sexton and Plath placed their fragile emotional conditions on the block from the beginning, and in their respective words there seemed to exist a race conducted to see who could die first. When Plath finally succumbed to stove gas in February of 1963, Sexton wrote:

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief!—
how did you crawl into,
crawl down into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long…

In Oedipus Anne, Diane Hume-George writes, “I feel I am overhearing a pathetic competition between suicides, one accomplished and one potential, full of petty jealousy and masquerading as an eulogy.” This quest to share in death is part of the confessional element here; however, there is also a cry for attention. Adds Hume-George, “Although Sylvia’s Death is ostensibly ‘for Sylvia Plath’ it might have been more accurately dedicated ‘for myself on the occasion of Sylvia’s death.’”

Sexton would affirm her commitment to life occasionally, as in her 1966 poem Live, where she states flatly:

The poison just didn’t take
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
Repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
The dream, the excitable gift.

These lighter moods would not last in her words, and eventually pleas for attention and themes of desperation would permeate her works. Maxine Kumin writes, “Anne basked in the attention she attracted, partly because it was antithetical to an earlier generation’s view of the woman writer as poetess and partly because she was flattered by and enjoyed the adoration of her public.” Reacting to a childhood wherein she felt rejected and unwanted, Sexton was, Kumin notes, the “intensely private individual” who “bared her liver to the eagle in public readings where almost invariably there was standing room only.”

Anne Sexton equaled Sylvia Plath in death in 1974 when she was able to coax enough carbon monoxide into her system to complete the task at which Sylvia Plath had previously succeeded.  Sexton’s poetry is monumental in its visceral and passionate exploration of the modern American feminine psyche; it is tragic because its central themes are tied to the destruction of its creator.

Listen to Anne Sexton's poems Silvia’s Death, Just Once, and Said The Poet To The Analyst as read by Jennifer Sichel, a researcher at NPG

For Further Reading:
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Diane Hume-George, Oedipus Anne (University of Illinois Press, 1987).

Anne Sexton/Rollie McKenna, 1961/Silver gelatin print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna / © 1961 Rollie McKenna

Portrait Competition Update

The jury for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 met at the National Portrait Gallery offices on October 24 to choose the semifinalist works. Portraits in nearly all visual arts media were carefully reviewed, and the jury members were struck by how much extraordinary work they were able to see, and how many artists they were discovering for the first time. 

At the end of a long day, a group of approximately 100 portraits were selected to be brought to Washington for final review next spring.  The jurors were Wanda Corn, professor emerita at Stanford University; Kerry James Marshall, artist, Chicago; Brian O’Doherty, artist, New York City; Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for the New Yorker; and three members of the NPG staff:  Director Martin Sullivan, Deputy Director and Chief Curator Carolyn Kinder Carr, and Curator of Painting and Sculpture Brandon Fortune.

See our last update, and visit the competition's Web site for more information. The exhibition of finalist work will open at the Portrait Gallery on October 23, 2009. 

New Exhibition: The Mask of Lincoln

In the two-hundredth year since his birth, Abraham Lincoln remains as much a puzzle as he was to his contemporaries. “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln,” a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, shows the changing face that Abraham Lincoln presented to the world as he led the fight for the Union. 

The exhibition opens today, and runs until July 5, 2009.  It is part of a yearlong Smithsonian-wide celebration of the bicentennial, exploring the life and times of the nation's most mythic and transformative president.

Warren Perry, a researcher at the National Portrait Gallery, spoke with NPG historian David Ward, curator of the exhibition. The interview is excerpted below.

WP: What are your favorite objects in the exhibition?

DW: Warren, one of the great things about the Portrait Gallery is that we have a really excellent selection—probably the best in the United States—of Lincoln images   My favorite image is one that a lot of people will know, which is the cracked plate photograph by Alexander Gardner, which was taken on February 21, 1885 (shown above). 

In the course of removing the plate from the camera, Alexander Gardner cracked it, so it was in two pieces.  And he could only create one image from it.  And it’s really this wonderfully evocative picture of Lincoln at the end of the war, where he’s tired, he’s worn out, his eyes are deep-socketed. And yet he has this small smile on his face, which is one, a smile of satisfaction, but it’s also a mysterious smile. We never really know what Lincoln was thinking, and that’s why I called this show “The Mask of Lincoln.”

WP: There are a lot of photographs, daguerreotypes—these non-painted objects, real images of Lincoln.  How many objects are in this exhibition?

DW: There are thirty portraits of Lincoln in the exhibition.  The majority of them are daguerreotypes—photographs as we know them now. There’s several drawings, a printed document, one oil painting actually, a miniature. 

Lincoln came of political age in the era of photography, with photography becoming a popular and inexpensive democratic art.  And he realized, early on, that it was possible to use photography for political purposes as well as personal purposes—not just to reveal a likeness to your loved ones, or to a small group of people. But it was a way of commanding political power by disseminating your image in carte de visites and other larger pictures—such as the cracked plate that I just mentioned—larger images of yourself, essentially bill-boarding your political brand

WP: He played to the greatest and newest medium of his age.

DW: Exactly, Lincoln loved technology, and in that way he was quintessentially American.  He was a working man—he worked with his hands and had a fascination with technology.  He’s the only president ever to have received a patent for one of his inventions.  During the Civil War he was intimately involved with the development of new technology, whether it’s in rifles, balloon surveillance, and telegraphic communication. 

And he, technically, was very interested in photography.  He had his picture taken a lot, from the photographers who lived and worked just down the street, actually, from the National Portrait Gallery.  He would drop in and have his picture taken by Gardner, Brady, or one of the others. 

And this was a commercial transaction for the photographers.  Lincoln wouldn’t have to pay for the pictures, but they would then sell images, that they would display to the public. And Lincoln was very involved in, again, disseminating his image through the course of his political career. 

Listen to the entire interview with historian David Ward (10:28)

For more on Lincoln, see the online exhibition for “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.” If you visit the exhibition in person, be sure to take the cell phone audio tour, or download the tour to your mp3 player before you visit.  

Abraham Lincoln/Alexander Gardner, 1865/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part IV

The final installment in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

George Washington (left) won the first race for the presidency in 1789 without opposition, gaining the office with sixty-nine electoral votes; he did not claim a political party affiliation during that contest. The only other election in American history in which no candidate had party ties was in 1824. This election would eventually be decided by the House of Representatives and would result in John Quincy Adams’s sole term in office.

More presidents were born in October (six) than any other month.

More presidents were born in Virginia (eight) than any other state.

The Oval Office has only been around for a century. Designed for William Howard Taft, it brings the presidency closer to the operations of the executive offices in the west wing. President Reagan spoke to the nation about the space shuttle Challenger tragedy from the Oval Office, and President Bush addressed America the night of September 11, 2001, from there also.

According to the White House Web site, it takes 570 gallons of paint to cover the exterior of the presidential residence. Also, the White House residence has thirty-five bathrooms.

Fourteen vice presidents have become president.

All three presidents buried in Tennessee (Jackson, Polk, Andrew Johnson) were from the Carolinas.

              © The Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Co.

Richard Nixon (right) was born farther west (Yorba Linda, California) than any other president.

The strongest independent candidacy of modern times was that of H. Ross Perot in 1992. Perot received no electoral votes, but harvested more than 19,700,000 popular votes, more than half of then–President Bush’s popular vote that election; the 1992 winner, Bill Clinton, received almost 45,000,000 votes, far from a popular majority. Perot gathered almost 19 percent of the popular vote in that election. The closest non–major party candidate to that election day performance was also H. Ross Perot (he ran as the Reform Party candidate his second time out), who took more than 8,000,000 votes, or about 8.5 percent of the popular vote, in 1996.

Two dutiful early cabinet members: Joseph Habersham of Georgia served as postmaster general for George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts held three separate offices in George Washington’s cabinet—postmaster general, secretary of war, secretary of state—and then went on to serve as the first secretary of state under John Adams.

Sources:

Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/facts.html

George Washington (Lansdowne portrait)/Gilbert Stuart, 1796/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery; acquired as a gift to the nation through the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation

Richard Nixon/Norman Percevel Rockwell, 1968/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; donated to the people of the United States of America by the Richard Nixon Foundation/© The Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Co.

Portrait of Joseph McCarthy by George Tames

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents “Face-to-Face,” a portrait talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this regular series, NPG historian David Ward discussed this photograph of Joseph McCarthy, taken in 1954 by George Tames. You can see this portrait in the “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition on the third floor.

On February 9, 1950, a little known junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, proclaimed that he had a list of 205 Communist Party members who worked in the State Department with the full knowledge of the secretary of state. McCarthy’s speech came shortly after the Communist takeover in China, the U.S.S.R’s successful detonation of an atomic bomb, and suspected spy Alger Hiss’s conviction for perjury.

For many, McCarthy’s charges explained why the West was experiencing setbacks, and made him a formidable political force. It marked the beginning of demagogic red baiting and made the term "McCarthyism" synonymous with hysterical anti-Communism. McCarthy had no evidence for his accusations and was censured by the Senate in 1954; "McCarthyism" would be remembered for its corrosive effect on America’s ability to deal effectively with real Communists abroad and at home.  Sitting to McCarthy’s left is Roy Cohn, lead investigator for McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee.

Listen to David Ward's Face-to-Face talk on Joseph McCarthy (33:27)

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, November 6, when National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan speaks about the temporary installation "Four Indian Kings."  The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn/George Tames, 1954/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Frances O. Tames/ © The New York Times/George Tames

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part III

The third in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Elections, the White House, and odd facts

The middle name of Warren G. Harding (right) was Gamaliel. He was named after the wise man on the Sanhedrin in Acts 5: 34–40. Unfortunately, Harding was not so wise, and he trusted corrupt individuals who eventually brought scandal and shame to his administration.

Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth President of the United States, was the only president born on the fourth of July, although three presidents have died on that day—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and James Monroe in 1831.

Before becoming president, Herbert Hoover never held an elected office except in college.

FDR succumbed to death, not in the presence of his wife of forty years, Eleanor, but in the company of one of his longtime mistresses, Lucy Mercer.

The S in Harry S Truman’s name did not stand for anything.

After being supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe and before becoming president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) was president of Columbia University.

John F. Kennedy was a best-selling author (Why England Slept) at the age of twenty-three.

Lyndon Johnson picked fruit, washed dishes, and worked as a janitor before and while earning his bachelor’s degree from Southwest State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas.

The National Archives and Records Administration maintains a Web feature as part of its site, which describes the historic meeting between Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon. It can be found here.

Gerald Rudolph Ford was named Leslie Lynch King at birth.

Rather than be inaugurated as James Earl Carter Jr., our thirty-ninth president chose to take the oath of office as Jimmy Carter.

Ronald Reagan is the only president to have been divorced.

George Herbert Walker Bush played baseball for Yale; in 1947 he played in the first College World Series.

Bill Clinton (right) won the 1992 presidential election against two left-handed men: George H. W. Bush and H. Ross Perot. Clinton is also left-handed.

Like father, like son: George W. Bush was in the Skull and Bones society at Yale, as was his father. He was also trained as a pilot. Although he never played in the College World Series, he eventually became part-owner of the Texas Rangers.

Sources:

Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss

Warren Gamaliel Harding/Margaret Lindsay Williams, 1923/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Dwight David Eisenhower/Ernest Hamlin Baker,1945/Gouache on board/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased with funds from Rosemary L. Frankeberger

William Jefferson Clinton/Nelson Shanks,2005/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of The Boeing Company, Dr. and Mrs. Ronald I. Dozoretz, Charles H. and Eleanor M. Foster, Norma Lee and Morton Funger, Sam F. and June Hamra, Frank and Marylen Mann Jacobs, S. Lee and Rosalyn H. Kling, Ambassador and Mrs. Philip Lader, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. McLarty III, Ruesch Family Foundation, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, John and Laurie Sykes, Mallory and Diana Walker

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

Portrait of Dashiell Hammett by Edward Biberman

                © 1937 Edward Biberman

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents Face-to-Face, a talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this series, NPG historian David Ward discussed Edward Biberman’s 1937 portrait of writer Dashiell Hammett. This painting is on view in the exhibition “20th-Century Americans,” on the museum’s third floor.

Inspired to try his hand at writing mysteries after his years with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Dashiell Hammett met a warm reception when he published his first two detective novels in 1929. But it was the appearance of The Maltese Falcon a year later that secured him his reputation as one of America's most original mystery writers. The hard-bitten realism and crisp dialogue of that work led critics to compare its author's style to that of Ernest Hemingway.

Hammett's later books, The Thin Man and The Glass Key, drew similar accolades. In defining the main difference between Hammett's works and the far more common drawing-room detective stories of the period, one admirer observed that Hammett had taken murder "out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley," where, after all, it more generally occurred in real life.

Listen to David Ward's Face-to-Face talk on Dashiell Hammett (20:49)

David Ward will speak again at the next Face-to-Face, when he discusses the portrait of Joseph McCarthy by George Tames.  The talk is this Thursday, October 30, and runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett/Edward Biberman,1937/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/© 1937 Edward Biberman

RECOGNIZE! Last Chance To See Hip Hop Exhibition

As “RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture” draws to a close, we take a moment to reflect on the exhibition’s impact on the community.  See the exhibition while you can; its last day is this Sunday, October 26.  

It was the National Portrait Gallery's honor to be the first Smithsonian Institution museum to stage a significant exhibition with hip hop as its theme. Through visitor counts, positive comment cards, and the enthusiasm about the show witnessed daily in the galleries and in our conversations with friends and colleagues around town and around the nation, we are thrilled with the public’s positive response.

“RECOGNIZE!“ gave the National Portrait Gallery the opportunity to recognize hip hop’s important role in American life today, as it influences the fine arts as well as other elements of our visual culture from advertising to fashion to video games. It was important for us to give our visitors a sense that hip hop is more powerful and has more of an impact on our world than the media’s attention to its negative aspects might suggest.

Through hip hop happy hours, films, and family activities, to programs headlined by Nikki Giovanni and Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller, NPG attempted to maintain the spirit and enthusiasm of the exhibition through events geared to a broad public. “RECOGNIZE!” brought more diverse and younger audiences into the Gallery, many of whom visited for the first time.

Another special aspect of this exhibition was our ability to feature the work of local artists Tim “Con” Conlon, Dave “Arek” Hupp, Jefferson Pinder, and Baltimore-born Shinique Smith (right). It is sometimes difficult to give local artists the support so many of them deserve, but “RECOGNIZE!” enabled us to feature “D.C. flavor.”

As a national museum that is a destination for Americans from all parts of the country, as well as for international visitors, the Portrait Gallery was pleased with the opportunity this exhibition afforded to reflect our role as a local museum for residents of the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and L.L. Cool J (left) will remain at the museum on extended loan, reminding us of hip hop music’s relevance to American culture, and keeping “RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture” fresh in our memories. We look forward to seeing more hip hop–related displays and activities develop Smithsonian-wide, particularly associated with the National Museum of American History’s Hip Hop Collecting Initiative.

To all who visited the exhibition or one of the programs associated with it, we hope you will come back to NPG soon and often. There will always be something for each of you at the National Portrait Gallery.

CON/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, 2007/Montana spray paint on Sintra panel/182.9 x 609.6 cm (72 x 240 in)/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

No Thief to Blame/Shinique Smith, 2007-08/Mixed media installation (fabric, cardboard, carpet, paper, ink, spray paint, used clothing, found objects, and collage)

LL Cool J/Kehinde Wiley, 2005/Oil on canvas/243.8 x 182.9 cm (96 x 72 in)/LL Cool J/© Kehinde Wiley

RECOGNIZE! Graffiti Art

The National Portrait Gallery’s “RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture” is closing soon, so be sure to see the exhibition before Sunday, October 26, its final day. The exhibition features six artists: photographer David Scheinbaum, painter Kehinde Wiley, poet Nikki Giovanni, installation artist Shinique Smith, video artist Jefferson Pinder, and graffiti artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp.

 In this blog post, we focus on Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, local graffiti artists who created four large murals that line the exhibition’s main hallway. These panels, with their sophisticated lettering style and color combinations, transformed the gallery space, bringing the beats and energy of hip hop to the museum’s walls.

 Using the tags “CON” and “AREK,” Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp began writing together in 2000. Conlon brought a flair for figures to their collaborations, and Hupp excelled at quick, complex lettering. Since graffiti is performed without a public audience, a writer’s pseudonym, or “tag,” is the face he presents to the world—his self-portrait. In their artist statement, Hupp and Conlon write that graffiti is “a lifestyle, an addiction, a dysfunctional marriage of secrecy and fame, for better and for worse. Some see it as an insatiable appetite for destruction, but through this abstracted topography we find our creative vision and achieve our self-expression.”

 In January of 2007, before the opening of “RECOGNIZE!” NPG web developer Benjamin Bloom sat down with Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, and asked them a few questions. You can listen to the complete interview, and see their graffiti murals here.

BB: What makes your style your own, or differentiates it from other people?

TC (shown on right): I think, just of course, the letters—the name that you choose that’s going to separate you from anyone else. I guess style-wise, my style pretty much reflects mostly New York straight-letter style, or straight-letter wild-style. You know something that’s bar-letters, very readable, you can tell what it says—probably has a little Baltimore influence to it.

And there is some West Coast stuff that I’ve added to it, when I lived out in L.A. for a while. Some little tidbits and painting techniques I do, that I remember from out there. I’d say it’s pretty generic, but I’ve painted enough over the years so that people recognize it. Even if they just glance at it, they probably know it’s me before they read the letters. Same probably goes for Dave too.

DH (left): It’s just changed over the years. I don’t do a lot of connections. A lot of single-letter, bar-style—I want it to be readable. When it flies by I want Joe truck driver to be able to read it. You know, the average person. I don’t want it to be some wild crazy stuff that you can’t read. So usually each letter is separate. There maybe some simple connections, but just real bold bar-style letters.

I’m from Baltimore, so it’s got a Baltimore flair. But it’s got a lot of influence from a variety of people I hang with and know. I get influence from a lot of different things, and a lot of different people from all over.

BB: How do you feel about graffiti being in a museum?

DH: Well I’m glad to be alive and be in the Smithsonian. Because I guess not too long ago, you had to be dead to be in the Portrait Gallery, right?

BB: That’s true.

DH: So to be alive and be in it is good! It’s a sign of the times. Some people may say “hey you’re a sell-out.” I look at it like being a musician, and never making an album or putting a CD out. Why are you strumming on that guitar for twenty years, if you can’t make a buck, or be seen, or be heard? And this is a way to be seen and be heard. This is huge—I guess when I walk down that marble floor and through the pillars and see these huge panels affixed to the wall, I’ll be like “damn, that’s our stuff.”

For more on Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, view the audio slideshow below. Tim and Dave take you step-by-step through the creation one of the exhibition’s murals.

AREK by Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, 2007/Montana spray paint on Sintra panel/182.9 x 609.6 cm (72 x 240 in)/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

Con/AREK by Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, 2007/Montana spray paint on Sintra panel/182.9 x 609.6 cm (72 x 240 in)/Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part II

The second in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Harding through Bush 43.

Abraham Lincoln (right) is considered by many Americans to be the greatest president; it is estimated that the Emancipation Proclamation freed 3, 500,000 slaves.

Andrew Johnson was a tailor by trade.

Ulysses S. Grant’s name given at birth was Hiram Ulysses Grant; he began calling himself Ulysses Simpson Grant after a mix-up in his application and recommendation to West Point.

Rutherford Hayes was a gutsy soldier who had four horses shot from beneath him during the Civil War.

Another of the Civil War generals who went on to become president, James Garfield was a professor of Latin and Greek before serving as either politician or soldier.

Chester Arthur hired Louis Tiffany to redecorate the White House.

Grover Cleveland’s wedding to Frances Folsom (couple shown on left) on June 2, 1886, is the only wedding of a president to occur inside the White House.  Francis F. Cleveland was a beautiful woman and the marriage did much to improve Cleveland’s image; earlier, during his first run for the presidency, he had admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock.

Benjamin Harrison was the first president to put a Christmas tree in the White House and the last president to wear a beard.

The third president to be assassinated was also the second president to die in Buffalo, New York: William McKinley.  Millard Fillmore died in Buffalo after he left office.

Valentine’s Day 1884 was perhaps the most tragic day in Theodore Roosevelt’s life; both his mother and his wife died on that day.

William Howard Taft (right) is the only president other than John Kennedy to be buried at Arlington Cemetery.

Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson received his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University and taught at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan University and Princeton.  He coached football while he was at Wesleyan.

Sources:
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss
www.whitehouse.gov/president/holiday/whtree

Abraham Lincoln/Mathew Brady, 1864/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom Cleveland/Donaldson Brothers, c. 1886-1890/Chromolithograph on paper/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of John O'Brien

William Howard Taft/William Valentine Schevill, c. 1910/Oil on artist board/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of William E. Schevill

   

Portrait of Henry Wallace by Jo Davidson

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents “Face-to-Face,” a portrait talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this regular series, NPG curator Brandon Fortune discussed this bronze bust of Henry Wallace, by Jo Davidson. You can see this portrait in the “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition on the third floor.

The Iowa-bred Henry Wallace abhorred the backroom politics of the nation’s capital. But his profound concern for the public good kept him involved in that milieu for some fifteen years.

On becoming Franklin’s Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture in 1933, Wallace told reporters that if he could not help the nation’s Depression-ridden farmers, he would “go back home and raise corn.” Wallace developed the controversial policy of limiting production, paying farmers to destroy crops and slaughter livestock. His policies failed to raise prices as high as they had been, but they achieved some success and became a model for later secretaries of agriculture. He became Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940 but was dropped from the ticket in 1944.  

Listen to Brandon Fortune's Face-to-Face talk on Henry Wallace and Jo Davidson (20:38)

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, October 23, when curatorial assistant Amy Baskette speaks about J. Robert Oppenheimer.  The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Henry Agard Wallace/Jo Davidson,1942/Bronze/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. Jean Wallace Douglas, Robert Wallace, and Henry B. Wallace

Presidential Trivia for Election Time, part 1

The first in a series of blog articles on presidential trivia (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). Next week: Lincoln through Wilson.

The oldest known portrait of George Washington ((left) is at Washington and Lee University; it was executed by Charles Willson Peale in 1772.

Before the recent deaths of Ronald Reagan (2004) and Gerald Ford (2006), John Adams’s lifespan was greater than that of any other president. Adams was ninety years and eight months old at his death. Both Reagan and Ford died at the age of ninety-three.

Before Lucille Ball, Thomas Jefferson was this nation’s most famous redhead.

James Madison was president when the British torched the White House in 1814; one story has it that British Admiral George Cockburn stole one of Madison’s hats before leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in flames.

James Monroe was with George Washington at the Battle of Trenton.

John Quincy Adams served in Congress for eighteen years after his presidency.

Before Andrew Jackson (right) was seventeen years old, he:

• had joined the militia
• was captured and mistreated by British troops
• served time as a prisoner of war
• received a large inheritance which he spent on gambling and drinking.

The first American-born president was Martin Van Buren; the previous seven presidents had been British subjects at birth.

William Henry Harrison was in office for one month—March 4 to April 4, 1841. His inaugural speech of one hour and forty-five minutes, which he delivered in the cold and rain, cost him his life. Harrison contracted pneumonia, and upon his death, the presidency went to. . .

John Tyler. Tyler was the first vice president to ascend to the chief executive office.

The “K” in James K. Polk’s name stood for “Knox.”  Polk (left) was the youngest man to become president and, like so many men, the responsibilities of the office wore on him. He served one term in office and he died within three months of his successor’s inauguration.

Zachary Taylor never voted before running for the presidency.

Millard Fillmore was in the White House when the first bathtub was installed. Fillmore was presented to Queen Victoria in 1855 and she believed him to be the most handsome man she had ever seen.

Franklin Pierce attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

James Buchanan was the only president who never married.

Sources:
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents by Cormac O’Brien
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts by Isaac Asimov
American Presidents by David C. Whitney
Portraits of the Presidents by Frederick Voss

 

George Washington/Charles Wilson Peale, 1772/Oil on canvas/Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

James Madison/Chester Harding, undated/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Jackson/Trevor Thomas Fowler,1840/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Knox Polk/E. B. & E. C. Kellogg Lithography Company, c. 1846-1847/Hand-colored lithograph on paper/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald by David Silvette

David Silvette studied under his father, artist Ellis Silvette, and later with Cecilia Beaux and Charles Hawthorne. Silvette’s portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the National Portrait Gallery is not his only work in Washington, D.C. His portrait of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. can be found in the collection of the Treasury Department. Silvette executed this painting, the only known life-sitting of Fitzgerald, in 1935.  Although the writer had commissioned the portrait, he was unable to pay for it and never owned it.

The image might be characteristic of the Jazz Age myth of the expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald, professorial and sophisticated, but it is not a portrait of the personal horrors Fitzgerald was experiencing in the 1930s. The 1920s were Fitzgerald’s zenith. He published This Side of Paradise in March of 1920 and enjoyed the fame brought by this work—along with The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and his short stories—for a decade. (The Great Gatsby, which now sells more than a quarter of a million copies annually, hit the literary market with a slight thud in April of 1925.)

By the 1930s Scott was drinking thirty-plus bottles of beer a day, or, on a beerless day, a quart of gin. He smoked constantly, and his wife Zelda bounced in and out of sanitoria from April of 1930 until her death in 1948.

A combination of Zelda’s medical bills and their extravagant lifestyle compelled Scott to seek employment writing in Hollywood.  Of  Fitzgerald’s experience writing for the movies, biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes:

"During his last trip to Hollywood—a life sentence—he failed as a screenwriter. He worked on sixteen films between 1927 and 1940 as one of the highest-paid writers in the business, but received only one credit. He polished ten scripts, worked on three for less than a week, labored on ten that were either rejected or not produced, and was dismissed from three of them. It was a dismal record."

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on December 21, 1940. He is buried in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, Rockville, Maryland.

Listen to Warren Perry's Face-to-Face talk on F. Scott Fitzgerald (16:38)

The birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 481 Laurel, Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota.  (Photos by Ian Cooke)

 

The 13th annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference will be held at Montgomery College in Rockville on October 25, 2008. More information is available here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald/David Silvette, 1935/Oil on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The National Portrait Gallery Turns 40!

Forty years ago today, the National Portrait Gallery opened its doors to the public.

A national portrait gallery was an idea long in search of a building. At last in 1958 came the promise of a home in the majestic Old Patent Office (saved from being replaced by a parking facility) once it was vacated by the Civil Service Commission. Legislation formally brought the National Portrait Gallery into being in 1962 and after frustrating delays, it opened its doors to the public on October 7, 1968. “The Gallery will tell for centuries to come the story of American history,” the welcoming proclamation from the District of Columbia affirmed, “by displaying the likenesses of these men and women of all stations of life and of diverse origins.” You can learn more about the history of the Old Patent Office Building in NPG's online exhibition "Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark." 

 “After a long, hazardous pilgrimage,“ wrote Charles Nagel, the Gallery’s first director, in the initial  catalog, “we have finally come to our premier exhibition.”  Entitled "This New Man A Discourse in Portraits," the exhibition's theme was intended to be an inquiry into the nature of the American national character. The one hundred and sixty eight paintings, sculptures, and photographs were arranged, not chronologically, but in “thought-provoking juxtapositions” which sometimes  “made for strange bedfellows.”

Only thirty-five of the portraits were from the Gallery’s own small collection—the remainder were on loan from individuals and institutions throughout the country and abroad. Explained Nagel, “We’re trying to give an idea of what we’re aiming at, not of what we have.” (A fair number of the borrowed  portraits would find their way,  by gift or purchase, into the Gallery’s permanent collection. )   

In addition to “This New Man” the Gallery assembled an impressive array portraits of all past presidents of the United States—no easy task since the collection included likenesses of only 23 of the 39 men who had held the office. The prize, hung to greet guests as they ascended the stairway to the second floor, was the Gilbert Stuart Lansdowne portrait of George Washington lent by Lord Primrose. The loan request had initially been turned down, but the portrait was secured after Smithsonian Secretary Dillon Ripley asked Lord Mountbatten (with whom he had worked in South East Asia during the World War II) to intervene. (The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation made it possible for the Gallery to purchase the Lansdowne in 2001.)

Not on view was the Peter Hurd portrait of the current president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had denounced it as “the ugliest thing he had ever seen.” Johnson, miffed because the portrait rejected by the White House, had been accepted by the Portrait Gallery as a gift from the artist, had declined an invitation to speak at the opening ceremonies and declared that he wished no likeness of himself to be on view during his term in office.  The special alcove intended for the portrait of the incumbent president was filled instead by his immediate predecessor, John F. Kennedy.

“'This New Man' brings together some truly superb examples of the art of portraiture,” wrote the New York Times art critic, Hilton Kramer, “along with some of the most deplorable pictorial junk ever put on public display.”  The “truly appalling thing,” noted another scribe, was the diorama based on John Trumbull’s “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence” which looked like “handmade Barbie dolls.” (As one of his first acts, the Gallery’s second director, Marvin Sadik, took the Gallery’s one and only diorama off view.)  

That the Portrait Gallery received mixed reviews at its opening, is attributable in part to a misunderstanding of what this new breed of museum was about–it was not a gallery of art as such–although the role of the artist is part of the Gallery’s mission—but rather a place of history where the significance of the sitter—for good or for evil–takes precedence over artistic merit. That the Portrait Gallery, which Charles Nagel and many others thought had been founded one hundred years too late, has been able, over the past forty years, to acquire a collection of images worthy in both history and art, is downright amazing. 

National Portrait Gallery, 1968 aerial view.

The National Portrait Gallery is part of the Donald W. Reynolds Center, along with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (2007 photo by Ken Rahaim, Smithsonian Institution)

Presidential Politics, 1884

“As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York,” wrote Republican candidate James G. Blaine two weeks after he had lost the presidential election of 1884, “I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat.” Thanks in no small part to an explosive remark made by the Reverend Samuel D. Burchard, Democrat Grover Cleveland had carried pivotal New York by 1,049 votes and with them the 36 electoral votes that decided the election.

A week before the November 4 election, Burchard (right), minister of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church and one of a group of several hundred clergymen, greeted Blaine at his Fifth Avenue Hotel and concluded his address by calling Democrats “the party whose antecedents have been RUM, ROMANISM and REBELLION.” Blaine, looking haggard after his six-week, 400- speech tour of the West, ignored the blatant insult to Irish Catholics and expounded on the “conclusive issue” of the campaign, the protective tariff.

In high glee, the Democratic Executive Committee—which had “watching scouts” to take down every word Blaine uttered—saw Burchard’s alliterative phrase quoted in the next day’s issue of the New York World. No time was lost in splashing it on posters and handbills for distribution throughout the city.

Three days passed before Blaine (left) distanced himself from his supporter’s offensive remark. “I have refrained carefully and instinctively from making any disrespectful allusion to the Democratic party,” he protested. In a reference to his Catholic mother, he added, “I should esteem myself of all men the most degraded if under any pressure, or under any temptation, I could in any presence make a disrespectful allusion to that ancient faith in which my mother lived and died.”

It was too late. Irish Catholic voters, who tended to like the charismatic Blaine and who appreciated his propensity to “twist the tail” of the British lion, had second thoughts about straying from the Democratic fold. Blaine afterward declared that he had won “thousands upon thousands” of Irish votes in New York and would have had many more “but for the intolerant and utterly improper remark of Dr. Burchard, which was quoted everywhere to my prejudice and in many places.” He would have carried New York by ten t housand votes, Blaine insisted, “had Dr. Burchard been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or Cochin China.”

Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine/Unidentified artist, 1884/Chromolithograph/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Milton and Ingrid Rose

Samuel Dickinson Burchard/Mathew Brady Studio, undated/Glass plate collodion negative/Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Gillespie Blaine/David H. Anderson, c. 1884/Albumen silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Robert L. Drapkin

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

Robert Frost: Modern American Poet

Every Thursday evening, the National Portrait Gallery presents Face-to-Face, a talk about a selected portrait on view in the gallery. As part of this series, NPG historian David Ward discussed this bronze bust of poet Robert Frost. This sculpture, by Walker Kirtland Hancock, is on view in the exhibition “20th-Century Americans,” on the museum’s third floor.

Robert Frost was one of the few modern American poets who combined critical with popular acclaim. His best poetry was written in the 1920s and 1930s, as America was discovering its national and regional histories. Frost’s poems about rural life in New England—“West Running Brook” and “Birches,” for example—struck a chord because they were readable, yet imbued with larger questions about human nature, mortality, and man’s fate.

Frost liked to play the naive rustic, but he was a dedicated craftsman and America’s last great formalist poet. Criticizing modern poetry, he said that writing poems without structure was like “playing tennis without a net.”

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, October 2, when NPG historian Sidney Hart will discuss Robert Kennedy. The talk runs from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Visitors meet the presenter in the museum’s F Street lobby and then walk to the appropriate gallery.

Listen to David Ward's Face-to-Face talk on Robert Frost (36:18)

Robert Lee Frost/Walker Kirtland Hancock, 1969 cast after 1950 original/Bronze/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist