National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

He’s in the News and He’s in the NPG Collection . . .

His records top the columns of all of the quarterback records in the almanac. He won two consecutive NFL Most Valuable Player Awards and shared a third. And he received a Super Bowl ring after leading the Green Bay Packers to victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXI in 1997. And although he has won many games with excellent passing and smart leadership during the two-minute drill, he has also blown a few playoff games with eleventh-hour interceptions.

He holds the record for consecutive starts by an NFL quarterback and has not missed a day of work since 1992; simply put, this, one of his many superlatives, places Brett Favre in the same tier as such athletes as Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripken Jr.

He is, arguably, one of the most exciting players who ever led a football team. On Monday night, December 22, 2003, he threw for four touchdowns and 399 yards against the Oakland Raiders, a day after the death of his father. This performance is considered by many to be one of the most poignant and dramatic moments in football history.

Brett Favre can be found in the National Portrait Gallery's online collection.

Brett Favre by Rick Chapman/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Gift of Rick Chapman and ESPN/ © 2001 Rick Chapman

The Forgotten Fame of Florence Mills

Florence Mills, whose name is now almost unknown, reigned over the 1920s as one of the most popular and sensational African American performers of the Jazz Age. When she sang, her beautiful, birdlike voice momentarily transcended the era’s racial barriers and left audiences of all colors enthralled.

This striking 1924 photograph of Mills, dramatically lit by a spotlight, highlights Edward Steichen’s mastery of light. Mills is wearing a costume from Dixie to Broadway, and her face is animated. A hat conceals her signature slick bobbed hair, which was imitated by Londoners and New Yorkers alike. Mills and actor and activist Paul Robeson were the only two African Americans whom Steichen photographed for full-page spreads in America’s most fashionable magazine, Vanity Fair. This original photograph, the issue of Vanity Fair in which it appeared, and other Steichen photographs are on display at the National Portrait Gallery, now through September 1 in “Edward Steichen: Portraits.”

Mills was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896. She showed talent as a toddler, made her professional debut at age seven, and soon became a fixture on the African American vaudeville circuit. The lead in 1921’s Shuffle Along brought Mills instant stardom and success in Harlem. A year later, The Plantation Revue opened on Broadway, exposing Mills’s talents to the theatrical community at large. Demand for Mills was insatiable and far-reaching, and she performed in Paris and London for the next two years.

The revue From Dixie to Broadway, starring Mills, became the first African American musical comedy to play on a Broadway stage. Next came Blackbirds, a revue written especially for Mills, which brought her immense renown throughout Europe. The Prince of Wales saw the show more than sixteen times, calling Mills “ripping.” Poet James Weldon Johnson said of “Little Twinks,” as she was affectionately known, “She could be risqué, she could be seductive; but it was impossible for her to be vulgar, for she possessed a naïveté that was alchemic. As a pantomimist and a singing and dancing comedienne she had no superior in any place or any race” (Black Manhattan, p. 199).

Sadly, Blackbirds was cut short as the thirty-two-year-old returned to Harlem to undergo surgery for appendicitis in late 1927. She died soon after the operation. Response to her death was overwhelming, with an estimated 150,000 mourners lining the streets of Harlem during her funeral procession.

Regrettably, no vocal recordings of Mills exist, and she died too early in her career to establish an ongoing legacy with students. These factors have caused the once-bright star to fade into near obscurity. The National Portrait Gallery’s curator of photographs, Ann Shumard, was immediately attracted to this lively image of Mills when she encountered it in a photography dealer’s inventory. After researching Mills’s biography, Shumard recognized the importance of adding the entertainer’s portrait to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection and was able to acquire it for the museum.

Florence Mills/Edward Steichen, 1924/Published in Vanity Fair, February 1925/National Portrait Gallery/ © The Estate of Edward Steichen/Joanna T. Steichen

Happy 212th Birthday to George Catlin!

George Catlin, born July 26, 1796, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, went west in 1830 and spent eight years painting portraits of Native Americans. The pictorial and written record of his travels constitutes one of the most remarkable archives of the Plains Indians ever assembled.

From his Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians, Catlin records:

I have visited forty-eight different tribes, the greater part of which I found speaking different languages, and containing in all 400,000 souls. I have brought home safe, and in good order, 310 portraits in oil, all painted in their native dress, and in their own wigwams; and also 200 other paintings in oil, containing views of their villages—their wigwams—their games and religious ceremonies—their dances—their ball plays—their buffalo hunting, and other amusements (containing in all, over 3000 full-length figures); and the landscapes of the country they live in, as well as a very extensive and curious collection of costumes, and all their other manufactures, from the size of a wigwam down to the size of a quill or a rattle.

Catlin then toured Europe with these paintings over the better part of the next three decades. Shortly after his death in 1872, hundreds of his works became the property of the Smithsonian Institution.

This portrait of George Catlin, painted by William Fisk in 1849, is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. It is currently on display in the neighboring Smithsonian American Art Museum, along with a gallery of Catlin's paintings. You can browse George Catlin’s landscapes, portraits, and other works on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s online collection. 

George Catlin/William Fisk, 1849/National Portrait Gallery; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of Miss May C. Kinney, Ernest C. Kinney and Bradford Wickes, 1945

A Night of Hip Hop at NPG, Thursday July 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait of Leopold Stokowski by Edward Steichen

This 1928 portrait was taken during the second phase of conductor Leopold Stokowski’s career, that is, after his divorce from Olga Samaroff and during a period of increasing fame. The photograph is currently on view, as part of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition "Edward Steichen: Portraits."

This image is much as Stokowski liked to picture himself: large, mysterious, and with the potential for much excitement beneath the surface. Physically, he was six feet, two inches tall, and lithe, and his blond hair, swept straight back, gave him an imposing and apparition-like presence. Over and over again, biographers write of his “golden hair” and allude to him as an Apollo.

Stokowski, for his own part, was very aware of his appearance. Abram Chasins, composer, friend, and Stokowski biographer, records that in 1929, during Stokowski’s tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra, an assistant came in to prepare the conductor for an event. The maestro insisted that his hair be combed without a part and straight back from the brow, saying, “That is how a conductor should look.”

Beginning in 1912, Stokowski’s work with the Philadelphia Orchestra yielded many superlatives, although he met with the same challenges that art institutions still face today: an an integral part of Philadelphia’s cultural face, the orchestra still had to rely on private funding and ticket sales to get by. The board also questioned Stokowski’s inventive scope of programming, and often he was presented with requests to play works from the traditional canon—works by such greats as Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Stokowski, however, was unrelenting in his pursuit of new works and in his desire to expose the audience to contemporary serious music.

Chasins records an episode in which the conductor refused to back down from his intention to close a performance with the very modern and quite cacophonous Schoenberg work, Kammersymphonie Number One:

This last, very cerebral work, although not atonal, proved unbearably dissonant, and the Academy’s audience loudly voiced its displeasure during the performance. I was told that in the middle, Stokowski strode off the stage in a fury. When quiet was restored, he returned and started it again from the very beginning. At its conclusion, an intimidated audience, fearful of a third repetition, offered some dutiful applause.

Leopold Stokowski understood the importance of new media forms and, although reluctant to do so at first, eventually embraced recording technology; he assisted in the process of many advancements in recording orchestral works. One of his most well-known endeavors was his collaboration with Walt Disney in the late 1930s in the creation of Fantasia, which premiered to admiring audiences in 1940. And although Fantasia’s animation is its claim to greatness, one of the most memorable moments in the film is the entrance of Mickey Mouse’s silhouette onto the conductor’s pedestal. The equally distinct silhouette of Stokowski is seen then leaning over to shake hands with his friend Mickey, symbolizing Fantasia’s fusion of imagination and art, animation and life, and the unreal and the real.

Perhaps the best tribute ever paid to the conductor was from his friend Sergei Rachmaninoff, who said of Stokowski and his orchestral interpretations, “Stokowski has created a living thing. He knows what you want, he puts it in, and he infuses vitality into every phrase.”

Source:
Abram Chasins, Leopold Stokowski: A Profile (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1979).

Listen here and learn more about Leopold Stokowski, from NPG Researcher Warren Perry (8:03)

Leopold Antoni Stanislaw Boleslawowicz Stokowski/Edward Steichen, 1928/National Portrait Gallery/Acquired in memory of Agnes and Eugene Meyer through the generosity of Katharine Graham and the New York Community Trust, The Island Fund

 

Carlton Fisk: Tough Guy

Opening Day is still a fresh memory, but like the too-quickly passing days of a good summer vacation, the Major League Baseball season has already reached its midpoint. While most players are taking a needed breather from the season’s grind, the best-of-the-best will be playing in the All-Star Game on July 15. The National Portrait Gallery holds several portraits depicting legends from our national pastime, including this portrait of Carlton Fisk, an eleven-time All-Star. The portrait is painted by Susan Miller-Havens, and is on view on the third floor of the museum, in the "Champions" exhibition.   

A prominent baseball expert has ranked Hall-of-Fame catcher Carlton Fisk (born 1947) as the sixth greatest major-league catcher of all time, behind only Yogi Berra, Johnny Bench, Roy Campanella, Mickey Cochrane, and Mike Piazza. Fisk’s offensive statistics and his longevity are remarkable. He holds the record for the number of games played as a catcher (2,226), and is second only to Piazza in home runs hit as a catcher (351). A major-leaguer for twenty-four seasons—first with the Boston Red Sox, then with the Chicago White Sox—Fisk made the All-Star team eleven times.

Although statistics are important, Fisk is much more than the sum of his numbers. The catcher’s position in baseball is physically the most demanding, but Fisk’s longevity and his ability to come back from serious injury mark him as a tough guy even among catchers. He played the game hard, demanded a lot from his teammates, and even expected the opposition to play the game the right way.

In one memorable episode, Yankee player Deion Sanders, a talented football player who thought he could play baseball, hit a pop fly and, with Fisk yelling at him to run it out, refused to run to first base. When Sanders next came to bat, Fisk angrily told him, loud enough to hear on the Yankee bench: “If you don’t play it [the game] right, I’m going to kick your ass right here in Yankee Stadium.” The shocked Sanders later apologized.

There is one game that many fans consider the defining moment in Fisk’s career: game six of the 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox. The Sox were a very strong team that year, and the “Red Sox Nation” was hopeful that the “curse”—allegedly dooming Boston in World Series competition after it sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—would be broken. But Cincinnati had its “Big Red Machine,” boasting one of the most powerful batting lineups in baseball history.

In game six, with the Reds holding a 3-2 game advantage in the series, the game went to extra innings.  The score was tied 6-6 when Fisk led off the bottom of the twelfth inning.  He blasted a blasted a ball high and deep down the left-field line. It was unquestionably a home run, if it stayed fair.

All those in Fenway Park and watching on TV will never forget Fisk at home plate, jumping wildly up and down, frantically waving the ball to the right side of the foul pole, using all his body language and willpower to direct the ball fair. Mind may have triumphed over matter, because the ball hit the foul pole for a game-winning home run.

The “curse” would hold, as the Reds went on to take game seven and the series, but Fisk expressed it best: “The Red Sox won that series, 3 games to 4.” Susan Miller-Havens, who works out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, specializes in sports figures, and painted this portrait and three others of Fisk from video sources.

Oil on cotton duck by Susan Miller-Havens (born 1944), 1993/ gift of Peter C. Aldrich, in memory of Duane C. Aldrich of Atlanta, Georgia/ copyright Susan Miller-Havens

Portrait Competition Update

Hello! We are Maggie and Meredith, the two Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 interns, and your personal correspondents to everything portrait competition.  We are officially halfway through the call for entries, and we have answered over 400 emails and phone calls, making us all portrait competition, all of the time!

So far we have received more than 1,700 entries, and the breadth of submitted media has been absolutely amazing. Artists from all over the country have submitted not just works  in traditional media such as painting and sculpture, but also new and intriguing forms of artwork, proving that portraiture as a subject is constantly changing and evolving.

Works submitted thus far include a sculpture of a family created through drops of acrylic paint on acrylic plastic rods and a photograph of a man with tribal tattoos covering his face. Other equally inventive works include a woodblock print on canvas of a homeless man and a trompe l’oeil self-portrait painted onto a functioning chair. We have received entries from every artistic medium and school imaginable, from hyperrealistic paintings to anthropomorphic drawings.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 continues to be an incredibly exciting project to work on, and we have loved communicating with all of you.  With less than a month to go in the call for entries period, we have learned one important lesson—we do not envy the panel that has to judge this competition!

The deadline for submitting your portrait to the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is Thursday, July 31, 2008.  Visit the Web site to learn more and submit your work. 

An American in Paris, Permanently: The Death of Jim Morrison, July 3, 1971

Several Americans are interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, including dancer Isadora Duncan, author Gertrude Stein with Alice B. Toklas (together always, as in life), and, perhaps the most notorious, singer Jim Morrison, who died in Paris on July 3, 1971, under very mysterious circumstances.

The Doors, composed of Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore, hit the charts over and over again with songs like “Light My Fire,” “L. A. Woman,” “Love Her Madly,” and the dramatic and wistful “Riders on the Storm.”  Of the vision and experience of the 1960s, biographer Stephen Davis says, “No one had a clearer grasp of the complexities and ironies of the age than Jim Morrison.”

Although Morrison’s flame was bright and brief, his fame endures. Fortified by alcohol and serving as the poet/singer/raconteur for The Doors, Jim Morrison is recognized as a pillar of the first triumvirate of tragic rock stars. Along with the unexpected deaths of contemporaries Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Morrison’s death at the age of twenty-seven jarred the music world and propelled his legacy into the first pantheon of rock super-cultdom. His grave—and many, many nearby graves and tombs at the Père Lachaise—are covered with graffiti in tribute to Morrison. Resembling the walls at Graceland, with notes in dozens of languages, plus graphics, insignia and symbols drawn by Morrison’s devotees, have infected the entire district surrounding his grave; in order to prevent vandalism, administrators of the Père Lachaise were forced years ago to place a guard at the grave during hours of admission.
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