National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

William Faulkner, born September 25, 1897

Today is the 111th anniversary of William Faulkner's birth.

William Faulkner is one of eleven Americans to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In Gustaf Hellstrom’s presentation address to the Swedish Academy in 1950, he said, “Faulkner . . . is not fascinated by men as a community but by man in the community, the individual as a final unity in himself, curiously unmoved by external conditions. . . . But Faulkner has one belief, or rather one hope: that every man sooner or later receives the punishment he deserves and that self-sacrifice not only brings with it personal happiness but also adds to the sum total of the good deeds of mankind.”

In his acceptance speech, Faulkner summarized what he believed to be the condition of man:

"I decline to accept the end of man.  It is enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.  I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.  The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Faulkner’s novels include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust, novels that tell the story of the American South many decades after the Civil War.  Faulkner’s South struggles to reinvent itself as an economically and culturally viable region, and the families of his imaginary town seat of Jefferson, within the equally imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, are families whose respective sagas reflect their collective fight against poverty, change, and loss of legacy.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897, and died on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner's former home "Rowan Oak" in Oxford, Mississippi (photo by Warren Perry).

Faulkner's grave (left) in St. Peter's Cemetery, Oxford, Mississippi. He is buried next to his wife, Estelle (photo by Warren Perry).  

William Cuthbert Faulkner/Robert Vickrey,, 1964/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine   

Edwin Booth: Accomplished Actor and Brother of John Wilkes

As part of the National Portrait Gallery’s regular series, “Face-to-Face,” program assistant Maya Foo presented a talk on Edwin Booth, a famous nineteenth-century actor and the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Abraham Lincoln. “Face-to-Face” takes place every Thursday evening at NPG from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., each week spotlighting a different portrait in the museum galleries.

One of the leading tragedians of his time, Edwin Booth was born into a family of actors and first played minor parts in productions featuring his father, Junius Brutus Booth. After honing his craft in theatrical companies on the West Coast, Edwin Booth returned east in 1857, where a series of triumphant appearances secured his reputation and launched a long and respected career.

Unfortunately, Booth’s success in the theater was punctuated by profound personal tragedy. In 1863, the sudden death of his beloved wife left him to care for their young daughter, Edwina (pictured). Two years later, his brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, driving Edwin into temporary retirement. His career revived, however, when he returned to the stage in 1866, and shortly thereafter he opened his own handsomely appointed theater in New York.

This 1864 photograph of Edwin Booth and his daughter Edwina was taken by the Mathew Brady Studio and produced as a carte de visite—a sort of trading card and celebrity collectable. The portrait is on view in NPG’s “American Origins” exhibition, on the museum’s first floor. 

The next “Face-to-Face” portrait talk is this Thursday, September 25, when NPG historian David Ward will discuss Robert Frost. 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 Maya Foo's Face-to-Face talk on Edwin Booth (10:30)

Edwin Booth and daughter Edwina/Mathew Brady Studio, 1864/Modern albumen print from wet plate collodion negative/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Ernie Pyle: World War II Journalist

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 regular series, NPG historian Jim Barber discussed this 1944 bronze bust of World War II journalist Ernie Pyle. This sculpture, by Jo Davidson, is on view in the exhibition “20th-Century Americans” on the museum’s third floor.

During World War II, John Steinbeck noted that there were two conflicts being reported in the press. The one getting the most attention was about grand strategy and generals, and the other was the war of the common soldier. No journalist told that latter story more poignantly than Ernie Pyle. His chronicling of the enlisted man’s discomforts, terrors, and heroism touched civilians and G.I.s alike. By 1944, he was as much a war hero as any combat medal winner.

When Pyle died while covering the taking of the Pacific island Ie Shima, soldiers marked the spot with a sign declaring that they had “lost a buddy.”

The next Face-to-Face portrait talk is this Thursday, September 18, when NPG researcher Warren Perry will discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald.  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 Jim Barber's Face-to-Face talk on Ernie Pyle (9:04) 

 

Ernie Pyle/Jo Davidson, 1944/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Dr. Maury Leibovitz

Ernie Pyle/Milton J. Pike , 1943/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rolland White

Anne Catharine Green: A Colonial Lady at the Newspaper Helm

Precious few are the portraits of colonial newspaper editors, that blessed band who did so much to pave the way toward American independence.

Of equal rarity are images of the handful of colonial women who rated distinction on their own merit. On two counts then, Charles Willson Peale’s depiction of Anne Catharine Green (c. 1720–1775)—editor of the Maryland Gazette and public printer to the province of Maryland—is a portrait of unusual interest. This portrait is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the museum’s “American Origins” exhibition on the first floor. 

Born in Holland, Anne Catharine Hoof married former Benjamin Franklin apprentice Jonas Green in 1738. She moved with him to Annapolis, where he became printer to the province and in 1745 revived the defunct Maryland Gazette. Her husband’s printing office (the site of an archeological dig in the 1980s) was behind their dwelling, which still stands on Charles Street. Mrs. Green, in addition to bearing fourteen children (six of whom lived to grow up), was a participant in her husband’s business affairs, capable of carrying them on should the need arise.

Jonas Green died on April 11, 1767, and his widow, noting that she was “almost destitute of Support,” told subscribers to the Gazette “I flatter myself, that, with your kind Indulgence and Encouragement,” she would continue the newspaper and stood ready to print advertisements. Fulfilling her husband’s contract with the government, she saw to it that the Acts and Votes and Proceedings of the Maryland Assembly was finished, as promised, by the last day of April. (A year later, she would be awarded the contract in her own name.)

The widow Green began her tenure when the colonies were in political ferment over the Townshend duties imposed on glass, lead, painter’s colors, paper, and tea; death ended her task a month before shots rang out on Lexington Green. In addition to providing national and foreign news, she gave space to all parties in local controversies, undeterred by a threat to wreck her press. Looking beyond polemics, she instigated a “Poet's Corner” and, despite the torrent of political happenings, managed to wedge in essays on topics such as the advantage of a liberal education.

Anne Catharine Green’s obituary, published in the March 30, 1775, edition of the Maryland Gazette, identified her as the widow of the late Mr. Jonas Greene, lauding her only as a wife and mother: “She was of a mild and benevolent Disposition, and for conjugal Affection and parental Tenderness, an Example of her Sex.” But Charles Willson Peale—showing her not with a book or a flower or needlework, but rather with her newspaper in hand—indicates that she was a professional woman as well.

Anne Catharine Hoof Green by Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), oil on canvas, 1769. Gallery purchase with funding from the Smithsonian Collections Acquisitions Program and gift from the Governor’s Mansion Foundation of Maryland

KATE: Hail and Farewell!

The National Portrait Gallery’s “One Life: KATE, A Centennial Celebration” is closing soon, so be sure to see the exhibition before September 28, its final day. In this blog post, NPG’s Amy Henderson, curator of “KATE,” bids farewell to this centennial celebration of Katharine Hepburn’s birth.

Katharine Hepburn was right—she was absolutely fascinating. She proved that again and again this year as “KATE” was visited by throngs of enthusiastic audiences. People clearly enjoyed seeing her four Best Actress Oscars, but I think they were particularly drawn by the wonderfully affectionate portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler (above) that Hepburn deemed her “favorite.”

The ratty red sweater also had its fans, who understood with me that that well-worn personal artifact lent the exhibition something “real” of her spirit. And I was delighted to see how carefully visitors read the labels, most of which used Hepburn’s own words and resonated with her personality.

Oh, did I mention the color red, her favorite color?! The exhibition was a red showcase of Kate Color, instantly drawing the visitor onto the Hepburn stage.

One of the things that touched me most was a young student from Duke Ellington School of the Arts who used “KATE” as her selection for the Portrait Gallery’s 2008 Portraits Alive! program this summer. Chelsea Harrison, a marvelously talented actor, suffused herself into Hepburn’s personality and created a jaw-dropping characterization that left her audience (me among them) in awe. You could almost hear Hepburn chortling somewhere, saying “See? I told you I was fascinating….”

 

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

Dorie Miller: Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

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 James Barber discussed a poster portrait of World War II navy hero Dorie Miller. You can see this portrait in the museum's exhibition, “Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture” through February 8, 2009. 

Born on Columbus Day 1919, Doris “Dorie” Miller grew up in Waco, Texas, where he played fullback on the high school football team. In September 1939, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a mess attendant, third class.  The following January he was assigned to the battleship USS West Virginia and soon became the ship’s heavyweight boxing champion. Miller was aboard the West Virginia at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. He was assigned to help carry wounded sailors on deck to safer locations before taking control of an unattended antiaircraft gun, which he loaded and fired at enemy planes until he ran out of ammunition.

For his bravery, Dorie Miller was awarded the Navy Cross, becoming the first African-American sailor to win this high honor. In 1942, he was recruited to go on tour to sell war bonds, and his name and face became well known. Miller, later a messman on the USS Liscombe Bay, was killed when the aircraft carrier sank in the Pacific in November 1943.

This 1943 poster of Miller by David Stone Martin was based on a photograph and was used by the Navy as a recruiting poster.

For more on posters visit the online exhibition for “Ballyhoo! Posters As Portraiture” and view the audio slideshow below, narrated by the exhibition’s curator, Wendy Wick Reaves. 

Dorie Miller/David Stone Martin, 1943/Color photolithographic poster with halftone/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rachel Carson: Biologist, Writer, Ecologist

In a 1962 Life magazine profile of Rachel Carson (1907–1964), the former government biologist claimed “no wish to start a Carrie Nation crusade” with the publication of her new book, Silent Spring. A private and soft-spoken individual, Carson possessed a temperament wholly different than that of the famous hatchet-wielding temperance leader.

Yet in envisioning a future where the sounds of spring are absent, Silent Spring provoked a heated controversy about the unrestricted use of chemical pesticides. Her writings—and later congressional testimony—would lead not only to the banning of DDT and other poisonous agents, but would precipitate broad changes in the public’s understanding of and appreciation for the delicate relationship between mankind and the natural environment.

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s portrait (above)—published alongside Carson’s Life profile and recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery—shows the fifty-five-year-old Carson behind a microscope at her Silver Spring, Maryland, home. Although it was her lyricism as a writer that made her books national best-sellers, Carson was always proud of her work as a scientist.

In 1936, when she accepted her first full-time job, as a marine biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she was one of only two female professionals at the agency. Throughout her career, Carson remained dedicated to field research and ever curious about the natural world around her.

Although she was an acclaimed writer before the publication of Silent Spring, having won a National Book Award in 1951 for The Sea Around Us, it was her investigation into the harm of man-made pollutants in Silent Spring that placed her at the center of a national battle between the chemical industry and a growing legion of environmental supporters.

Likening the effects of pesticides to those of atomic radiation, she stated, “I wrote the book because I think there is a great danger that the next generation will have no chance to know nature as we do—if we don’t preserve it the damage will be irreversible.” Adversaries soon lined up to contest her findings.

Despite fifty-five pages of scientific endnotes, many characterized her as a “hysterical woman” and accused her of lacking scientific credentials; a former Department of Agriculture secretary even labeled her a Communist. Yet President John F. Kennedy took notice and called for a further investigation of the issues the book raised. Before a Senate subcommittee, Carson reiterated that environmental pollution is one of the “major problems of modern life.”

A subsequent special report confirmed her findings and helped pave the way for dramatic changes in the use of pesticides. DDT—developed during World War II and widely used in domestic agriculture—was eventually banned in the United States, in 1972.

 “It’s always so easy to assume that someone else is taking care of things,” Carson reflected about her experience. “People say, ‘We wouldn’t be allowed to use these things if they were dangerous.’ It just isn’t so. Trusting so-called authority is not enough. A sense of personal responsibility is what we desperately need.”

While Carson never anticipated becoming a nationally renowned figure, her search for truth highlighted the ecological impact of new technologies and provoked others to action. Tragically, Carson died of breast cancer only eighteen months after Silent Spring’s publication.

Two of Rachel Carson’s portraits are currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery: a photograph (top) by Alfred Eisenstaedt on display in the "New Arrivals" exhibition, and a portrait bust (above) in the "20th Century Americans" gallery, by Una Hanbury.  More on Rachel Carson can be found at RachelCarson.org.

Rachel Louise Carson/Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1962/Gelatin silver print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Rachel Louise Carson/Una Hanbury,1965/Bronze/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Everett Dirksen: Forgotten Civil Rights Champion

June 10, 1964, was a dramatic day in the United States Senate. For the first time in its history, cloture was invoked on a civil rights bill, ending a record-breaking filibuster that had consumed fifty-seven working days. The hero of the hour was minority leader Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-Ill.).

Dirksen, who had little support among Chicago’s black voters and who had been picketed at his home by rights activists, took pains to point out that he was “no Johnny-come lately” to civil rights legislation. During his sixteen years in the House of Representatives, he had voted for anti-poll-tax and anti-lynching measures. In the Senate he had sponsored or cosponsored scores of bills dealing with civil rights. But as an omnibus civil rights bill began to near passage in the House early in 1964, Dirksen, a pragmatic legislator and a consummate compromiser, realized that its provisions were too drastic for passage in the Senate.

In February, when he entered the hospital, afflicted with a bleeding ulcer, he took his dog-eared copy of the House bill with him, poring over it line by line and drawing up a list of conciliatory changes. During the spring, with the help of legal experts, he began to rewrite the bill, suggesting almost seventy amendments, many technical but others of substance. “I have a fixed pole star,” he said in April. “This is, first, to get a bill; second to get an acceptable bill; third, to get a workable bill; and, finally, to get an equitable bill.”

In the beginning, Dirksen could only guarantee that twelve to fourteen of his thirty-three Republicans would join with floor manager Hubert Humphrey’s solid forty-one Democrats, leaving the total short of the sixty-seven votes necessary to shut down the southern Democrats. “The key,” said majority leader Mike Mansfield, “is Dirksen.” Dirksen himself acknowledged, “Getting cloture is going to be as difficult as hell.” He went to his members one by one, pleading with them, appealing to their moral sensibilities, reminding them of past favors, and warning of more civil unrest, exercising his beguiling talents to their fullest effect.

By June 10, the stage was set. The Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert C. Byrd, sat down after speaking for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, and Senator Richard Russell of Georgia summed up for the southern opposition. Senator Dirksen then took the floor. “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come,” he said, quoting Victor Hugo in his basso profundo voice. “The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”

Dirksen produced twenty-three Republican votes to make a total of sevemty—three votes beyond the necessary two-thirds to break the filibuster (the final tally was 71–29). Swift passage of the civil rights bill followed, and the House, rather than argue, accepted the Senate version. On July 2, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law a bill that banned discrimination in public facilities, provided voting rights protection, and established equal opportunity as the law of the land.

Time magazine noted when Dirksen appeared on the cover of the June 19, 1964 issue, “it is Dirksen’s bill, bearing his handiwork more than anyone else’s.” That cover, by Robert Vickrey, the accomplished painter in egg tempera, is part of the Time collection of artwork that was presented to the National Portrait Gallery in 1978.

Everett McKinley Dirksen/Robert Vickrey, 1964/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Phelps Fever: Portrait of Michael Phelps at NPG

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. . . .It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Michael Phelps! Olympic superhero Michael Phelps accomplished what he came to Beijing to do: he became the first athlete to win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad.

His dominance was unprecedented, and even otherworldly—perhaps he was born on the planet Krypton? Well, Baltimore, actually, in 1985. Five of Phelps’s wins were in individual events, and he broke seven world records overall. Counting the six gold and two bronze he won at Athens in 2004, Phelps has now collected a total of sixteen Olympic medals.

To help celebrate this historic athletic achievement, a large chromogenic print of Phelps, taken by photographer Ryan McGinley, has been installed on the first floor of the National Portrait Gallery’s north wing. McGinley photographed the members of the 2004 United States Olympic swim team for a special edition of the New York Times Magazine; this photograph of Phelps was featured prominently. It will be on view at NPG through January 2009. 

Physically, the 6’4” Phelps is unique: he has an incredibly long arm span of 6’7” that boosts propulsion, an elongated torso that eliminates drag, and size-fourteen feet-flippers that allow him to undulate through the water like a wave.

For the moment, Phelps says that “every day it seems like I’m in sort of a dream world,” but his longer goal is to continue “to raise the bar a bit more in the world of swimming.”

Michael Phelps/Ryan McGinley, 2004/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Lyndon Baines Johnson, born August 27, 1908

August 27, 2008, marks the one-hundredth birthday of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One after the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, and served as chief executive during one of the more trying times of the republic.  This presidential portrait of Johnson was painted by artist Peter Hurd in 1967; it is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the "America's Presidents" exhibition. 

Known for his up-close and abrasive tactics of persuasion and administration, Lyndon Johnson’s management style was not dissimilar to his lifestyle. At his ranch in Texas, LBJ enjoyed strong-arming guests into going deer hunting; among those guests were John F. Kennedy and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, neither of whom enjoyed his outdoor excursion with the big Texan.

Late in his administration, the nation seemed to be coming apart in front of him, and Johnson decided to forego running for a second term, telling America his decision in his famous “I shall not seek, and I will not accept” speech of March 31, 1967. Johnson died at his home near Stonewall, Texas, on January 22, 1973.   

"Johnson’s legacy will continue to be a matter of historical debate. But whatever future biographers may say about him, I am confident that his impact on the country beginning in the 1930’s and lasting until the end of the 1960’s, when he left the national scene, will be remembered as considerable."

Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President

"May 18 [1961]—Kitty and I arrived in Bangkok about 4 P.M. in moist and incredible heat. . . . At six, I had a meeting with the State Department officials accompanying the Vice-President. The situation is full of despair. The Department people are at their wits’ end with Johnson. Johnson’s people are similarly furious with the Department. Johnson, in the Department’s view, won’t adhere to schedule; he identifies diplomacy with a campaign tour; and he is oblivious to the necessities and niceties expected of any visitor from abroad. In the opposite view, he has been loaded with an excessive schedule by people who are more concerned with protocol than performance, are not very efficient and do not appreciate a forthright approach to people. Evidently, I have some work cut out for me."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years

"When we arrived in Cleveland [during the presidential campaign of autumn 1964], I went up to LBJ’s room. The president was lying on one of the beds in his suite, and Jack Valenti was there as well. They were talking about how Lady Bird’s train-trip campaign swing through the Southern states was going. Something displeased the president while I was in the room, and I became an awkward witness to a scene I wouldn’t soon forget. He suddenly turned on Jack and laid him out savagely , the unpleasantness exacerbated by being delivered in front of a relative stranger. It was quite callous and inhuman, something I have never witnessed before or since. I had heard about LBJ’s temper but had never seen it in action; Jack, however, was used to these tantrums and remained unflustered while I squirmed. I escaped as quickly as possible."

Katharine Graham, Personal History

"In his address to the joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States. He revealed an amazing understanding of the depth and dimension of the problem of racial justice. His tone and delivery were sincere. He rightly praised the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation. He declared that the national government must by law insure every Negro his full rights as a citizen."

Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson

"Because of Vietnam, we cannot do all that we should, or all that we would like to do. We will ruthlessly attack waste and inefficiency. We will make sure that every dollar is spent with the thrift and with the commonsense which recognizes how hard the taxpayer worked to earn it. We will continue to meet the needs of our people by continuing to develop the Great Society. . . . Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam."

Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union Address, January 12, 1966

"The liberal distrust of LBJ’s domestic policies was not fatal. The Waterloo came over Vietnam. LBJ got the full blame for this war, although what he did was to carry out and implement the policies of his predecessor. And he got no credit for the liberal domestic programs."

Walter Trohan, Political Animals

Lyndon Baines Johnson/Peter Hurd, 1967/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist/Frame conserved with funds from the Smithsonian Women's Committee

Elvis and Isaac: The Memphis Music Legacy

On August 16, 1977 the eyes of the world turned to Memphis, Tennessee, as the news broke that Elvis Presley was dead at the age of forty-two. This portrait of Elvis is on view in National Portrait Gallery's "Bravo!" exhibition, and was painted by artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan, during the years 1976 to 1988.  In a 2006 letter to NPG, Mr. Cowan told of the portrait:

It wasn’t until the early 1960s when I was asked to open the first portrait-painting studio at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.  It was then that Elvis walked in—put his hands across the door and said, “You can’t get away from me this time. . .and I’ll wear whatever you want!” I started drawing him that night on a blank 48 inch, circular canvas that was adandoned when you told me he preferred the full-length size.  When the full-length painting was finished, Elvis came by and personally carried the four-foot by seven-foot painting across Las Vegas Blvd to his room at the Aladdin Hotel where he always stayed. . . .

After Elvis died…I was able to restore and repair the circular Elvis portrait.  As you can see, I added the red shirt and blue sky to make it different from the Graceland painting. . . .I’ve heard from clients who have seen the portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery that it gets great attention.  For that I am very happy. 

Last week, as legions of Elvis fans gathered in Memphis for the thirty-first annual candlelight vigil outside of Graceland, the world had already been reminded of the power of Memphis music with the passing of Isaac Hayes on August 10.  A multiple Grammy winner, Hayes also won an Oscar for the soundtrack of the 1971 blacksploitation film Shaft.  Most recently, he endeared himself to a new generation, voicing the role of “Chef” on the animated series South Park.   

The impact of Memphis music on the world scene cannot be overestimated; Memphis, Tennessee is to music as nineteenth-century Paris is to art.  In 2000, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History installed a permanent music exhibition in Memphis in the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum; NMAH curator Charlie McGovern noted that “it’s the first time the Smithsonian has created an entire exhibition and turned it over to the community where it began.”  The exhibition, “Rock ‘n’ Soul: Social Crossroads,” is a narrative of Memphis music history and is located at the historic corner of Beale Street and Highway 61.  A later study by the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum declared that city name Memphis is mentioned in more song lyrics than any other city on earth.    

There is no such thing as a single, stylized Memphis sound; Memphis music stretches across all the disciplines of modern music and occupies space in rock and roll, country and western, rhythm and blues, rap, hip-hop, and pop.  Among the names Memphis claims are the Box Tops, the Gentrys, Charlie Rich, Otis Redding, the BarKays, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T and the MG’s, the early Sun Studio artists, Aretha Franklin, and WC Handy.  Both Led Zeppelin and REM have recorded at Memphis’ Ardent studio, which also serves as home base for ZZ Top. 

Listen here and learn more about the Memphis sound, from NPG Researcher Warren Perry (8:30)

For more on the Rock 'n' Soul museum, be sure to see their website.

 

Elvis Aron Presley/Ralph Wolfe Cowan,1976-1988/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of R.W. Cowan   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethel Merman: Queen of the American Musical Stage

In this blog post, Amy Henderson, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, discusses Ethel Merman, and her 1971 portrait by artist Rosemarie Sloat.  The portrait is currently on view at NPG, in the "Bravo!" exhibition, on the museum’s third floor mezzanine.

It was one of the most riveting moments of my life—the day I strolled into my office and found myself face-to-face with Ethel Merman. The Queen of the American Musical Stage was not there to visit me, needless to say, but to pay homage to the larger-than-life portrait that hung on my wall. The portrait was enormous, more than seven feet high, and depicted La Merman outfitted in fringe and toting a gun for one of her best-known roles, as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Dressed this day in a subdued suit and with her hair swirled into a light brown cloud, Merman stood enraptured by the painting.

There were tears in her eyes when she turned to me as I tiptoed into the room, trying not to interrupt—well, actually, I was trying not to jump up and down and scream “Wow!! You’re Ethel Merman!!!” Her voice was soft as she said, “I love this picture.” But it was definitely The Voice.

It was the same voice that had catapulted her to overnight stardom in the Gershwins’ 1930 Broadway musical, Girl Crazy. When she sang “I Got Rhythm” on opening night, she stopped the show: “I held a high C note for sixteen bars while the orchestra played the melodic line—a big, tooty thing—against the note. By the time I’d held that note for four bars the audience was applauding. . . .” They kept applauding, and she did several encores. “When I finished that song,” she recalled, “a star had been born. Me.”

Her vibrant personality and clarion voice reverberated through Broadway’s greatest years, and America’s leading composers adored her. Cole Porter once said, “I’d rather write songs for Ethel Merman than anyone else in the world,” and songwriters from the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne agreed. Merman thought it was because she was always true to the lyrics—“I sing honest. Loud, but honest.”

Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun was a defining role for her, providing the anthem that became her signature song, “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Opening at the Imperial Theatre on May 16, 1946, Annie Get Your Gun ran for 1,147 performances. Twenty years after Annie’s premiere, Merman starred in a highly successful revival at Lincoln Center. She became so closely identified with the role that when her portrait was painted for a 1971 Gallery exhibition, “Portraits of the American Stage,” she chose to be depicted as Annie Oakley.

Artist Rosemarie Sloat was selected to paint her, and she began by sketching Merman in her dressing room at the St. James Theatre after a matinee performance of Hello, Dolly! Sloat reported that she was extremely cooperative—“She’s a warm, wonderful woman and she talks constantly.”

For the portrait, Sloat used her palette knife to layer stars, spangles, and fringe with hills and valleys of paint. And to create the filigreed curtains and embroidery effect for the Annie costume, she squeezed swirls and gobs of acrylic directly from tube onto canvas. The three-dimensional metallic texture showcases the brassy Merman stage personality—so much so that Merman suggested the portrait be used as the cover illustration for the Annie Get Your Gun cast recording.

Indeed, Ethel Merman was so fond of this portrait that when she heard that a search was on for a donor, she bought it herself and presented it to the National Portrait Gallery. It is the only life portrait of Ethel Merman ever done.

Ethel Merman/Rosemarie Sloat, 1971/Oil and acrylic on canvas/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ethel Merman

Herein Hangs a Tale: The Bache Silhouette Book

In the 1920s, Alice Van Leer Carrick, the pioneering authority on American silhouettes, came upon an album kept by William Bache (1771–1845) as a record of his work and expressed her delight in “turning the pages of this century-old treasure-trove of nearly two thousand shadow portraits.”

There she found images of Chancellor George Wythe, President Thomas Jefferson, and Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, as well as “hundreds of other profiles of everyday people, less well-known, but equally well cut; all of them vivid and interesting.” This duplicate book of 1,846 images, which had long remained in the hands of Bache descendants, came to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery’s Curator of Prints and Drawings Wendy Wick Reaves and was acquired in 2001.

Research on Bache—first heard from with his patented physiognotrace (a profiletracing apparatus) at Baltimore in 1803 and who subsequently traveled to Virginia, New Orleans, Cuba, and New England—is ongoing. Research on the scores of men, women, and children who seized the opportunity to have their shadows cut is also under way, and many of them have stories evocative of the era in which they lived.

Bache identifies number 361 in the album as “Col Butler"(shown on right): Thomas Butler, a Revolutionary War soldier and Indian fighter, and an officer in the U.S. Army. He was—when he gave up a few minutes of his time and one dollar to secure “four correct likenesses” of himself from Bache—in trouble because he refused to cut his hair and give up his queue.

On April 30, 1801, the commanding general of the army, James Wilkinson (Bache number 216), had issued an order requiring all military men to crop their hair, and Butler was among the many conservative officers who chose to ignore a decree that not only infringed on personal preference but also carried with it an association with the radicals of the French Revolution.

Butler, a law student before he became a professional soldier, pronounced the order “impertinent, arbitrary and illegal.” He was court-martialed in 1803, found guilty, and reprimanded. When he was subsequently transferred to New Orleans, General Wilkinson hoped that, in the interest of preventing “trouble, perplexity and further injury to the service,” Butler would “leave his tail behind him.”

Butler arrived in New Orleans on October 4, 1804, his pigtail intact. He was arrested and in February formally charged with “willful, obstinate and continual disobedience.” An indignant Butler continued to insist that he considered the order to crop his hair “an arbitrary infraction of my natural rights.”

A military tribunal was convened on July 1, 1805, and from St. Louis, Wilkinson instructed the commanding general at New Orleans to make those who would sit in judgment of Butler aware “that the President of the United States, without any public expression, has thought proper to adopt our fashion of the hair cropping.” (Bache shows Jefferson in 1804 with a dangling queue.)

On September 7, while awaiting the final outcome of his trial, Butler died at his nephew’s plantation a few miles above New Orleans. He told his friends he wanted his queue displayed at his funeral. “Bore a hole through the bottom of my coffin right under my head,” he directed, “and let my queue hang
through it,—that the d---d old rascal [Wilkinson] may see that, even when dead, I refuse to obey his orders.” There was no evidence that this was done, but thanks to William Bache, Butler’s pigtail has remained in full view down through the ages.

Various Sitters/Ledger book of William Bache, with associated pieces, c. 1803-1812/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; partial gift of Sarah Bache Bloise

Book Review: Literary Circles of Washington by Edith Nalle Schafer

In the National Portrait Gallery Bookstore, a find for the sight-seeing literati…

Sure, Washington is a political town, but the District of Columbia has also hosted many amazing American writers and some bizarre moments in America’s literary history. 

Ezra Pound, for example, one of the creative forces who shaped twentieth century American poetry, was sympathetic to the fascist powers ruling Italy in the 1930’s and during World War II.  While self-exiled in Italy, Pound spoke out against America during the war and was captured by the American military during the occupation of Italy.  He was eventually returned to the United States, put on trial for treason and found to be insane.  Ezra Pound was kept in the asylum at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital here in the nation’s capital from 1946 to 1958.  Schafer records, “The persistence of [Pound’s] literary friends… eventually won his release and he returned to Italy.  From the deck of the Cristoforo Colombo in Naples harbor, Pound gave the fascist salute and told Italian reporters, ‘All America is an insane asylum.’”

Edith Schafer’s Literary Circles of Washington is an economically written (seventy-five page) account of Washington DC’s role in the history of American literature.  Schafer includes, when possible, the street addresses of the writers and the locations of many noteworthy episodes, including Ezra Pound’s period of institutionalization.  Schafer’s work is a fine tourist’s guide to these local markers, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s home in Georgetown, of which she writes, “Here’s a tidbit to ponder at 3106 P Street.  There, Elinor Wylie rang the doorbell of her friend Katherine Anne Porter, saying she intended to kill herself and Porter was the only one she wanted to say goodbye to.  Porter responded, ‘Well, goodbye, Elinor,’ and closed the door.’”

Schafer tells us that the Willard Hotel has seen such guests as Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson, while local cemeteries serve as the final resting places for Dashiell Hammett (Arlington), F. Scott Fitzgerald (St. Mary’s in Rockville), and Henry Adams (Rock Creek).  Complete with maps and drawings, Literary Circles of Washington is a useful field guide and a nifty volume of anecdotes.  

Samuel Dashiell Hammett's gravestone, Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia

F. Scott Fitzgerald's gravestone, St. Mary's Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland

The gravestone of Henry Adams, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC

Portrait of Frank O’ Hara by Larry Rivers

            © Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Early in the morning of July 24, 1966, a summertime party at a beach house on Fire Island, Long Island, began to break up. As the revelers started to drift home, the poet and art curator Frank O’Hara (1926–1966) walked out onto the beach and was hit by a speeding dune buggy. He died the next day.

Frank O’Hara’s greatest memorial is his Collected Poems, but he also quickly received an artistic homage from his friend and collaborator, artist Larry Rivers. From 1957 to 1960, Rivers and O’Hara had worked together on a project called Stones, a lithographic marriage of the visual and the verbal.

For his memorial portrait of O’Hara, Larry Rivers created this work, called Frank O’Hara Reading, which is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. The piece used a characteristic technique of collage and multimedia, verbal and visual, in way that evoked his dead friend’s own poetic technique. Rivers took his central image of the poet from Fred McDarrah’s photograph of a 1959 reading; the black-and- white picture is colored and includes images of Leroi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, and Ray Bremser, who were also at the event.

O’Hara had had some minor successes as a poet during his lifetime, but he was best known in New York City’s cultural world as an instigator: bridging the worlds of art, poetry, and society; sparking ideas; initiating projects; and stoking creative energies through his charismatic personality. A friend and collaborator of artists of the New York School, O’Hara was dubbed “the poet among painters,” but he was generally seen as only a minor figure in a circle that extended from Jackson Pollock to Larry Rivers.

Yet when O’Hara’s literary executors Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery cleaned out his apartment, they were astonished to find file after file overflowing with poems. Ashbery introduced The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara in 1971 by saying that it would surprise everyone—“and would have surprised Frank even more”—to discover a volume of nearly five hundred pages.

Ashbery accounted for this in O’Hara’s method: “Dashing the poems off at odd moments—in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people—he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them.”

O’Hara was not an occasional poet or an amateur: he was deeply committed to his art, but he believed poetry was an instantaneous act, one that occurred between “two people, not two pages.” What O’Hara’s poetry needed to spark him into life was the city: the cacophony of daily life in all its ordinary glory. O’Hara made it a point to write a poem every lunch hour, based on his purposefully aimless walks around New York, and he had published a book called Lunch Poems in 1964.

Superficially, his poems were about nothing much in particular, and with characteristic modesty he called them his “I do this, I do that” poems. But O’Hara’s quirky eye for the telling detail turned these ephemeral jottings into art; his seductively deceptive lines would build to a moment of recognition or an emotional punch.

In his portrait of O’ Hara, Larry Rivers created a curving stream of words caught between two blue embankments made of construction paper. In the midst of life and art’s river, the print quotes the opening lines of “To a Poet,” a work that O’Hara wrote, with characteristic generosity, to praise an emerging writer named John Wieners.

O’Hara limns the young poet’s ecstatic discovery of his art and then his perfection of it:

Two years later he has possessed
     his beautiful style,
the meaning of which draws him further down
     into passion. . .

“Drawn down into passion”: It is almost as if O’Hara was writing about himself.

Frank O’ Hara/Larry Rivers, 1967/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/© Larry Rivers/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

The Reinstallation of Grant and His Generals

As visitors walk through the intertwining hallways of the National Portrait Gallery, they often come upon Grant and His Generals by Ole Peter Hansen Balling—the largest work in our collection. This portrait measures 10 x 16 feet and weighs 450 pounds! So exactly how did it get to its current location in the stairwell?

While the building underwent more than six years of renovation, Grant and His Generals was safely housed in an offsite storage facility. When it was time for the painting to be returned to the building, much of the space was still under construction. To move the painting in, a large crane was used to hoist it from Seventh Street onto the second-floor portico, and then into the building. A platform extending beyond the portico served as the landing point. Here, an NPG employee used a rope to help guide the painting onto the platform.

Grant and His Generals was meticulously reinstalled in its current location on the curved wall of the second-floor stairwell. First, a large scaffolding unit was built in the stairwell. Next, a tapeline was made on the wall so that the exact placement could be achieved.

Once all preparations were made, the painting was uncrated, hoisted by numerous people, and moved into place. The original aluminum strips that secured the painting to the wall were reattached, and the original custom-made curved frame was reinstalled. Grant and His Generals was then covered in plastic to protect it from dust until the National Portrait Gallery reopened on July 1, 2006, after being closed for renovation.

A large crane hoists Grant and His Generals from Seventh Street onto the second-floor portico.

Grant and His Generals by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, oil on canvas, 1865, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Mrs. Harry Newton Blue in memory of her husband, Harry Newton Blue

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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