National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Temporary Exhibition: “2008 Presidential Scholars in the Arts: Works in the Literary and Visual Arts”

The National Portrait Gallery is proud to host “2008 Presidential Scholars in the Arts: Works in the Literary and Visual Arts.” This temporary exhibition runs through July 13, and showcases the work of some of the nation’s most talented high school seniors, in the fields of cinematic arts, photography, visual arts, and writing. The Scholars are selected by The Commission on Presidential Scholars based on accomplishments in many areas: academic and artistic success, leadership and involvement in school and the community. .

This exhibition is presented by The Commission on Presidential Scholars, the Presidential Scholars Foundation, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA). The Taylor Foundation is proud to fund the exhibition.  

In this blog post, we highlight one of the young artists, Jennifer Liu of Highland, Maryland. Her piece “Adopted Suburbia: Laundry Day” (above) hangs in the exhibition. In her artist’s statement Ms. Liu writes:

Spawned from the vision of post–World War II families, the suburban lifestyle has always strived to be a man-made utopia. In the modern day and age, suburbia tends to consist of a landscape of cloned houses, obscenely green lawns, and shopping complexes that stretch beyond the horizon. With inhabitants either cooped in their sport utility vehicles or attached to the television screen or computer monitor, one can say that this is a cultural wasteland.

There are many ways, however, to entertain oneself in an average American suburban setting. I have discovered that my everyday encounters with my overactive imagination, sculpted by years of commercials, cartoons, and sugar have commingled together to fabricate my own suburban paradise.

At a young age, Jennifer Liu enjoyed the many processes of making art. From painting and photography to making music and movies, she has always taken the initiative to try something new. During high school, she began to take more art classes and became more involved with her art. As a junior, Jennifer entered a countywide student film festival and received first place for her short film. She has also been recognized as a Maryland Distinguished Scholar for Talent in the Arts and is a 2008 NFAA youngARTS Silver Award winner in photography.

A graduate of River Hill High School, Jennifer is still experimenting with different mediums. Many of her latest works include installations created from everyday materials, serving as an environment for her performance-based pieces. These performances are then documented using photography or video. Jennifer plans to attend Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore this coming fall.

Adopted Suburbia: Laundry Day/Jennifer Liu, 2007/Digital Color Print, 36 x 24in

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

Sherwood Anderson: All for Art

The portrait of Sherwood Anderson on view in NPG’s Edward Steichen exhibition was taken for Vanity Fair by Steichen in 1925; Anderson biographer Kim Townsend records that as a great moment for Anderson, he was recognized by the magazine as “America’s most distinctive novelist.”

Born in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876, Anderson was the third of seven children. His father, Irwin McLain Anderson, was a Civil War veteran and a poor businessman, whose efforts to provide for his family led them to Clyde, Ohio. Anderson would always associate the town with his father’s inability to secure a steady means; later, in his writing, Anderson would replace Clyde with the fictional town of Winesburg.

Despite faulting his father for the family’s struggles, Anderson would carry a few faults of his own into four marriages. His first marriage, to Cornelia Platt Lane in 1904, provided Anderson some small happinesses—and three children—but he suppressed his desire to write while working as a copy writer and an executive in a series of businesses. Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Marion, Anderson experienced a breakdown of sorts. The following account is from Irving Howe’s biography, published in 1951:

On November 27, 1912, Anderson told his secretary, “My feet are cold and wet. I have been walking too long on the bed of a river.” A few minutes later he left the factory. He walked out of the town, and for four days he aimlessly wandered about until, on December 1, he was found in Cleveland by a pharmacist.

Although his marriage to Cornelia would survive almost another four years, it would do so only by the most sparse definition of survival. Anderson immersed himself in his writing, and he found much success. Also, his influence on the next generation of writers was great; Anderson boosted the careers of both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Kim Townsend writes:

From Hemingway’s perspective, Anderson was a man who could help him get there. Anderson did not help him much with his writing. In a few years Anderson would tell his other great protégé—William Faulkner— that he would gladly help him find a publisher for his book as long as he didn’t have to read it. Though he read more of what Hemingway wrote, Anderson helped him, as he would help Faulkner, mostly by his example. He represented professional success, he could say how you achieved it, he could say what you did to maintain it.

Anderson’s stories were well received into the 1920s, and to this day, his novel Winesburg, Ohio is a staple of the American literature classroom. Sherwood Anderson died in March of 1941 in Panama, just as he was beginning research for a work on South America. He is buried in Marion, Virginia, near his home, Ripshin.

References:
Irving Howe, Sherwood Anderson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951).
Kim Townsend, Sherwood Anderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Sherwood Anderson, 1926/Edward Steichen/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired in memory of Agnes and Eugene Meyer through the generosity of Katharine Graham and the New York Community Trust, The Island Fund

Second Portrait Competition Launches

The online entry form for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 sprang to life on Monday, June 2. Hundreds of American artists have been e-mailing us this spring, asking questions about acceptable subjects, sizes, media—you name it! One of the many fascinating aspects of this competition—the second in the series—is for viewers to be exposed to the tremendous variety of portraiture created today. We hope to receive works of all kinds: art crafted with traditional media and using traditional formats; works made using traditional media in unusual ways; and also those made with time-based media and mind-stretching combinations of materials and images. Our goal is to find works of art that answer the question “What is today’s portrait?”

 

Check back soon. We will keep you posted on the numbers of entries received and the approaches that today’s artists are using to explore the dynamic art of twenty-first-century portraiture, reinvented now, just as it has been by artists from Goya to Chuck Close.

 

     Don’t forget, the entry form shuts down on July 31, 2008.

 

 

Curator's Journal: Sid Hart on "Herblock’s Presidents: 'Puncturing Pomposity' "

When I was asked to blog about my Herblock show, “Herblock’s Presidents: ‘Puncturing Pomposity.’” at NPG, I wondered what I could say about an exhibition on America’s greatest political cartoonist. The cartoon is a visual medium. How do you convey its meaning in words? It’s sort of like being a music critic; it really works only after you have heard the music. So, I suggest you first visit the exhibition's website, and then come back to the blog.

Herbert Block (the contraction “Herblock” was devised by his father) had the longest duration of any political cartoonist in American history (maybe, world history, but I never checked that out): from 1929, when he got his first full-time job working for the Chicago Daily News, until his death in 2001. He worked for the Washington Post from 1946 until his death, and there he became the most influential political cartoonist in America, as well a major factor in making the Post a nationally important newspaper. As a reward for his contributions to the Post, Block was given complete editorial independence, rare for a political cartoonist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes and shared a fourth with the Post for its coverage of the Watergate crisis.     

Focusing on Herblock’s cartoons of American presidents, the exhibition complements NPG’s permanent exhibition “America’s Presidents.”  Herblock made cartoons of presidents from Herbert Hoover to George H. W. Bush. “Herblock’s Presidents,” however, covers just those from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton. Herblock made few cartoons of Hoover, and those that he did were not particularly incisive; he also made very few of George W. Bush.

Also, we decided to select only negative cartoons for the exhibition: in Block’s own terms, it was the negative cartoons that “punctured pomposity” and had the most constructive effects. In one of his twelve published books, Block told the story of a schoolteacher giving a lesson on kindness to animals and asking her pupils to give examples of such kindness. One little boy told of finding a stray kitten and adopting it. A little girl found a bird with a broken wing and nursed it back to health. Then a little boy raised his hand and said he had encountered a bully kicking a dog. He went over and beat up the bully, making sure he would not kick another dog. This, for Block, was the ultimate function of a cartoon: to take on the big bully. With the presidents, he does just that.

We looked at more than 14,000 of Herblock’s cartoons and picked 40 for the exhibition and Web site. In addition, the actual exhibition at the NPG contains 128 additional images in digital format—all dealing with the presidents. I think you’ll like this exhibition if the American presidency interests you, and if you like to see a master cartoonist at work.

- Sid Hart

The Cinematic Cool of Douglas Fairbanks

Douglas Fairbanks, the dashing actor whose magnetic presence radiated palpably off the silent screen, roared through the 1920s in a swirl of glamour, energy, and charisma as the leading actor of Hollywood. Born in 1883 in Denver, Colorado, Fairbanks, with his interminable energy, bounded from occupation to occupation until he landed on the Broadway stage in New York. After his first hit theatrical run in 1907, Fairbanks headed back west to conquer the new media juggernaut—Hollywood. Tanned and swarthy, Fairbanks created the swashbuckling title roles in The Gaucho (1927), The Black Pirate (1926), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and the legendary The Mark of Zorro (1920).

He was famous for his stunts that seemingly defied the laws of physical science: vaulting over burros, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, flying over the city of Baghdad on a magic carpet. As Fairbanks’s fans eagerly embraced this image of the handsome rakish scalawag, the actor was proving his business acumen in Hollywood.

In its early years of churning out anonymous pretty faces and uncredited actors, the major Hollywood production studios pocketed the profits from every single film they released. Appalled by the minimal salaries paid to actors starring in pictures and the lack of control Hollywood players exerted over the distribution of their films, Fairbanks and his wife, Mary Pickford, the first of America’s sweethearts; Charlie Chaplin; and director D. W. Griffith left their respective studios and formed United Artists in 1919. Fairbanks was also later honored by becoming the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which presents the Oscars) in 1927.

An exuberant personality,Fairbanks dominates this poster for his 1927 motion picture, The Gaucho, his last silent film. Fairbanks’s swarthy, grinning face is highlighted by the glow of a campfire, and a cowboy hat is rakishly fixed atop his head. The Argentine mountain range of the Andes rolls behind him, and Fairbanks in miniature rides his rearing horse, waving the bolas, a double-weighted lariat touted as an exotic new piece of weaponry in the film’s press campaign. The frenetic lines of the bolas echo lazily in the trail of smoke that drifts from the cigarette perched in Fairbanks’s mouth. Glamorous and the epitome of early cinematic cool, this image captures Fairbanks at his finest.  For more posters see the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture."

Douglas Fairbanks Sr., 1883-1939 / Ullman Manufacturing Co. (1888-1946) / Color lithographic poster, 1927 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution