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Pop Quiz Trivia: Classic Hollywood

In need of some old-fashioned Hollywood glamour? Join us at the National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday, May 30, at 6:30 p.m. for our collections-inspired adult trivia game, Pop Quiz, in the Kogod Courtyard.

This month’s theme is “Classic Hollywood.” We will test your knowledge on actors and actresses in our collection who were active during the Golden Age of Hollywood. For example, did you know that Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, along with forty-four celebrities from the 1920s and 1930s, were parodied in a short cartoon by Tex Avery?

The Courtyard Café will be open, and snacks and beverages will be available for purchase.

Here is a sneak peek at the 10-point bonus question for this month’s Pop Quiz trivia:

Marilyn Monroe is best remembered for her roles in The Seven-Year Itch, Bus Stop, The Misfits, Asphalt Jungle, and All about Eve. Monroe has been ranked number six on the list of the most influential female American Screen Legends by AFI. Monroe has become immortalized as a pop culture icon.

Along with police officer James Dougherty and baseball player Joe DiMaggio, what famous American playwright was Monroe married to?

A: Arthur Miller

B: William Inge

C: Tennessee Williams

D: Sam Shepard

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery. The next Pop Quiz is Time (Magazine) Marches On, on June 20 at 6:30 p.m.

 

Clark Gable / Unidentified artist / Color photolithographic poster with halftone, 1944 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Beverly Jones Cox

Marilyn Monroe / Unidentified artist / Color halftone poster, c. 1955 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Stonewall Jackson and the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was a warrior. Prior to the Civil War, he had taught the science of war at the Virginia Military Institute. As a leader of warriors from the beginning of the Civil War until his death in May 1863, Jackson was intelligent and respected. He had earned his nickname “Stonewall” at the first Battle of Manassas, where his troops held the field at a pivotal point in the battle.

Jackson was also a spiritual man. He believed in the holiness of his cause, as evidenced in his letter to the Reverend Dr. Francis McFarland in July 1862. Only weeks after his tactical successes in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, Jackson wrote, “Please continue to pray for me and for the success of the troops entrusted to me. It cheers my heart to think that many of God’s people are praying to our very kind Heavenly Father for the success of the army to which I belong.” Jackson continued, imploring the reverend, “I trust that you will under God’s direction do what you can in securing the prayers of His people for the success of our arms” and noted that his trust was “in God for success.” And although he did so when his hand was forced, Jackson did not believe in fighting on Sunday.

Stonewall Jackson, warrior and Christian, was a simple man on the surface, but his way of war was anything but simple. In the spring of 1862, Jackson and his troops punched and hammered away at the Union army. The recalcitrant Jackson eluded the federals sent to subdue the Shenandoah Valley, and he simultaneously provided a diversion that occupied northern troops who were needed in General George McClellan’s attack on Richmond. Historian John S. Salmon describes Jackson’s dramatic impact on the southern war effort:

During a period of about five weeks, Jackson and his 17,000-man “foot cavalry” defeated three Federal armies totaling 52,000 troops. He inflicted about 7,000 casualties while suffering about 2,500. He and his men marched roughly 650 miles and fought several battles, Jackson upset Lincoln and McClellan’s plans, made his name famous throughout the country, and aided the Confederate defensive effort at Richmond. Luck and skill had combined to give him a brilliant strategic victory.

 At Kernstown, Front Royal, Winchester, and Port Republic, Stonewall Jackson’s efforts breathed new life into the Confederacy, which had suffered recently in the West at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, and Shiloh. With speed, resilience, and knowledge of the Shenandoah Valley terrain, Jackson further proved himself to be one of the South’s most capable and courageous generals.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Thomas Jonathan Jackson / J. W. King, copy after:  George W. Minnis / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; given in memory of Lieselotte Richardson

Thomas Jonathan Jackson / H. B. Hull / Sixth-plate daguerreotype, 1855 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:
Letter of Thomas Jackson, July 31, 1862, to the Reverend Dr. Francis McFarland, from the Virginia Military Institute digital archives, cited at http://www.vmi.edu/archives.aspx?id=9317

John S. Salmon, “Land Operations in Virginia,” in Virginia at War: 1862, ed. William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007).

May 18: Happy Birthday to Brooks Robinson and Reggie Jackson

Other than their May 18 birthday, Reggie Jackson (1946) and Brooks Robinson (1937) also share the spotlight in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  In the 1960s and 1970s, baseball experienced an era of unprecedented talent, and players like Jackson and Robinson electrified the environment both in the field and at the plate.  Though each man brought something different to the game, they are both remembered for their tenacious play and for many magical moments on the diamond.

Brooks Robinson (above) earned his nickname, the human vacuum cleaner, by gloving balls hit above him, at him, or to his right or left.  His dramatic, diving catches were feats of timing and athleticism, and he was also a danger to opposing teams when he swung a bat.  Over twenty-three seasons with the Baltimore Orioles, Robinson had a .267 batting average and hit 268 home runs. 

In the 1970 World Series against a powerful Cincinnati Reds team, Robinson led the Orioles with a searing .429 batting average; the Orioles took the series four games to one and Robinson was named series MVP.  In his hall of fame induction speech in 1983, Robinson stated, “Throughout my career I was committed to the goodness of this game. In fact, I feel my love for the game of baseball over rode everything else.”

In the late 1970s in both print and televised media, Volkswagen ran an advertisement for its Rabbit which featured Reggie Jackson (right)—in his New York Yankees uniform—saying, “The only person I have to impress . . . is me.”  Although that statement might have been the moniker for millions in the "Me Generation," it was particularly apt for Jackson, an athlete whose skills and personality shone high above others during his exceptional career. 

The playoffs were always Jackson’s true season to shine, and he earned his nickname Mr. October from a spectacular performance in the 1977 World Series.  In that series, playing for the New York Yankees, he hit five home runs and carried a .450 batting average.  The Yanks took the series from the Los Angeles Dodgers, four games to two.  Over his twenty-one year career, Jackson was part of five championship teams, three with the Oakland A’s (’72, ’73, and ’74) and two with the New York Yankees (’77 and ’78).  Jackson was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery    

Brooks Robinson / Walter Kelleher/ Gelatin silver print, 1958 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution      

Reginald Martinez Jackson / Howard Rogers / Tempera on board, 1974 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

 

Walker Percy, 1916-1990

Walker Percy died on this date twenty-two years ago, May 10, 1990.

The protagonist in Walker Percy's 1961 National Book Award winner, The Moviegoer, is a guy named Binx Bolling who seeks spiritual fulfillment in watching movies.  To Binx, movies are an endless resource for explaining both the patterns and the oddities of life; he also occupies himself with a spiritual quest which he describes as being “onto something,” a condition which is the alternative to the despair of daily existence.

Percy, a medical doctor by training, was similar to his protagonists who were modern, intelligent men attempting to make sense of the rapidly evolving twentieth century. Over a writing career that spanned almost forty years, Percy increased the scope of two of his major themes – man and his existential quest to find meaning in life, and the impact of technology on citizens of the twentieth century.   Percy’s Bolling describes the sad condition he sees about him in late twentieth century America:

Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before . . . and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but raised in the Mississippi delta by his uncle, poet and essayist William Alexander Percy.  Both men are usually identified as members of that legion of southern writers of the twentieth century which includes Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and William Faulkner.  Percy’s lifelong friend was Shelby Foote, also a novelist, but most remembered for his work as a Civil War historian.  Percy died on May 10, 1990. 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Walker Percy / Keith Carter / Gelatin silver print, 1989 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Bill and Sally Wittliff

 

Conserving Civil War–Era Prints

Long before any work of art appears on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, its condition is chronicled by a team of experts. Some works need the attention of the NPG’s conservation team, a small group of professionals whose training combines art history, studio art, chemistry, and practices of materials preservation.

Recently, when works by cartoonist Adalbert Volck were chosen to be installed as part of the five-year commemorative anniversary tributes for the Civil War, it was noted that several of the works were in need of conservation.  These works can be seen in the exhibition "The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck" on view through January 21, 2013.  

“Many of them had foxing to some degree,” noted NPG paper conservator Rosemary Fallon, “but some were more severe than others. Foxing is a reddish-brown discoloration caused by fungus in paper and activated by moisture; when it occurs, the discoloration can be reduced without harming the work of art. The answer to the foxing problem with the Volck works was to give them a bath.

Before treatment

“Those works needing conservation,” Fallon said, “were treated by being washed in a tray of a special solution of water and other chemicals. The images were never in danger of being washed away because the black carbon-based ink is very stable.”

Several of the works were immersed more than once to achieve the desired results, that is, a brightening of the paper. “Further measures were taken to neutralize the acidic components, and lighten the foxing in the paper by placing a bank of artificial lights with ultraviolet filters over the washing tray,” added Fallon. The treated art was then air-dried and later humidified and pressed to eliminate wrinkles, or buckles.

Fallon also noted that this particular technique of caring for works on paper “really suits certain types of works. A lot of the nineteenth-century prints such as lithographs, engravings, etchings, and woodcuts with stable media fit into this sort of treatment protocol.”

During treatment

NPG historian and Volck exhibition curator James Barber commented, “An ancillary benefit of selecting objects from the NPG collections for special exhibitions is that it allows pieces in need of conservation to be given a higher priority than pieces lying in storage, waiting their turn at rejuvenation. I always look forward to seeing the magic our talented conservators have performed on an old treasure, newly restored. This was the case with several of the works by Adalbert Volck.”

 

Smuggling Medicines into the South / Adalbert Volck / Transfer lithograph on paper, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Space Shuttle Discovery Arrives at the Smithsonian

Note: On April 17, 2012, the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum became host to the Space Shuttle Discovery in a monumental event. Discovery was flown from Cape Canaveral on the back of a Boeing 747 and arrived later in the day at the Udvar-Hazy Center to become a permanent part of its collection.

As part of the Smithsonian-wide effort to share this special event with the world, this is the third of three articles featuring a discussion of some of the great personalities and moments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Photo by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Few moments rival the spectacular one in which the culmination of thousands of years of scientific and engineering progress resulted in a man stepping onto the surface of the moon.  Neil Armstrong (below) summed it up keenly with his utterance, “That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”  

After Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, there were several years wherein the next goals of the space program were being prioritized.  When the moon-targeting Apollo missions came to a close in 1972, NASA projects continued to gain public interest with such scientific missions as Skylab (1973) and—with the Soviet space agency—Apollo-Soyuz (1975). 

However, America’s interest in space was truly renewed with the advent of the shuttle program in 1981.  For thirty years, the shuttles and their skilled crews kept work apace in space, depositing satellites, executing further scientific experiments, and building a space station in conjunction with the Russian space program and additional international efforts.

“Achievements in spaceflight are the result of determination, ingenuity, courage, creativity, skill, and that unique quality that we all share—the American spirit,” commented General Jack Dailey (right), director of the National Air and Space Museum, as space shuttle Discovery came to rest in its final home at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on Thursday, April 19, 2012. 

With Discovery’s retirement, an era of vigorous exploration comes to a close.  Discovery’s numbers are stunning; the shuttle flew thirty-nine missions from 1984 to 2011, and the shuttle and its crews orbited the earth 5830 times, traveling over 148 million miles.    

Accompanying Discovery on its final journey into the Smithsonian collection and attending the dedication were the statesmen and stateswomen of space, that is, many of Discovery’s commanders, pilots, and mission specialists who took the mighty ship to work thirty-nine times for extended periods over the last thirty years.  General Dailey also noted that the day’s proceedings included “one of the greatest gatherings of astronauts in the history of NASA.” 

Fifteen of Discovery’s thirty-two commanders were on hand to witness the dedication. Also present was Discovery mission specialist John Glenn, who flew on mission STS-95 from October 29, 1998 through November 7, 1998. 

In the spirit of the NASA commitment to exploration and knowledge, Glenn, who piloted Friendship 7 into history in 1962, observed that, “Americans have always had a curious, questing nature that has served us well.”

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Photo by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

 

Photo by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

 

Neil Alden Armstrong / Robert Theodore McCall / Painting, 2009 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of McCall Studios

John Glenn / Boris Artzybasheff / Tempera, ink and pencil on Masonite, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine / © Boris Artzybasheff

 

Teen Portrait Competition: Enter by April 29!

A sister competition to the third installment of the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2013, the Teen Portrait Competition is currently accepting entries. The deadline has been extended until April 29, 2012. Grand Prize winners will be honored at the National Portrait Gallery in 2013; competition details can be found at www.npgteenportrait.org.

Recently, we talked with one of the teen coordinators of this new completion, Sarah Schnorrenberg.

Q: What is your role in facilitating this competition?

SS: I am on the marketing team. The ten of us were split into teams: management, marketing, and design. As a group, we planned the entire competition. Rebecca Kasemeyer [NPG’s director of education] expected the competition to consist of photographs, but aside from that we had full rein in creating it, especially as this is the first one for teens.

Along with the other members of the marketing team, I've been trying to help get the word out about the competition. As is true for all of the teens working on the competition, this was a new experience. I've never done any marketing before, and I came out able to say that I've written a press release.

Q: How have you liked the response so far?

SS: Our most recent stat is 109 entries [as of publication there are more than 200 entries], which is about half of our target, but still a very respectable number. I'm hoping that in consecutive years, after news spreads, the response will be much larger.

Unfortunately, I won't be on the teen design team by then, but I'm sure that in years to come the competition will be just as acclaimed as the Outwin Boochever competition. However, I am not trying to diminish this accomplishment; 109 is a great number to achieve and we are all very excited. In this last month of the competition, we might reach our target.

 Q: The website notes, “The work entered should be understood as a portrait in the broadest sense.” What sort of stylistic representation is acceptable as an entry? Is this a wide-open entry field?

SS: The first day we came in to work on the competition, we spent the morning wandering around the National Portrait Gallery, looking at examples of portraits and discussing exactly what our definition of a portrait was.

The one example that we threw around during meetings of a more abstract portrait is the brick. Some artist [Robert Arneson] took a brick and called it a self-portrait for some esoteric reason. We tackled the question of whether or not we would accept this.

While I was inclined to accept bricks myself, we came to decide that the portrait must at least include part of a human body. Therefore, if one decides that a foot captures the essence of their subject, we will accept the picture of the foot. I would like to think that this is wide open. We are trying to get teens interested in portraiture, and it seems counterintuitive to me to reject one's form of expression when we are trying so hard to get them to express something in the first place.

Q: Can you tell us anything about the works you have seen so far, or is that an unfair question?

SS: The two I've seen were wonderful and complete opposites. When we opened the first entry, we were all taken aback. (Or at least I was.) A large, high-definition picture popped up on the computer screen, and it was great quality. It was a picture of a boy with water pouring over his hair and eyes popping against the blue water droplets. It was very striking, to say the least. I forget what the title was, but the artist wrote something about the portrait representing his brother's loss of innocence. It was all very Catcher in the Rye-esque.

The other portrait was much more subtle—black and white, with a girl against ivy and the lighting striking her just right. Both pictures give me great hope about the turnout we will have by April 29, and I'm eager to see all the entries in May. Clearly, teens still hold some esteem for portraiture as a form of art, because they do it so well.

 

John Glenn in Space: From Friendship 7 to Discovery

Note: On April 17, 2012, the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum will become host to the Space Shuttle Discovery in a monumental event. Discovery will be flown from Cape Canaveral on the back of a Boeing 747 and will arrive later in the day at the Udvar-Hazy Center to become a permanent part of its collection.

As part of the Smithsonian-wide effort to share this special event with the world, this is the second of three articles featuring a discussion of some of the great personalities and moments of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

When Discovery arrives at the Udvar-Hazy Center on April 17, 2012, it will come to rest after thirty-nine missions into space. One of its most famous journeys, that of October 29 through November 7, 1998, featured a passenger who was familiar with space travel, although it had been thirty-six years since his previous flight.

In his memoir, John Glenn comments on the early days at NASA:

So many details were unclear . . . none of us knew if Project Mercury was going to be an ongoing program or just a short look at the feasibility of space flight that would have us back at our respective services in a year or two. It was certainly obvious to me from the levels of preselection testing we had gone through that something unusual lay ahead. But at that point, even NASA was still feeling its way.

After Alan Shepard’s odyssey of May 5, 1961, in which he became the first American in space, NASA’s plans became more defined when, on May 25—less than three weeks later—President John F. Kennedy made his famous “before this decade is out” speech in which he emphatically stated that America’s goal was to put a man on the moon. The Mercury 7 astronauts suddenly had a mission—a mission unlike any endeavor in history. Launch after launch, NASA propelled men into space, with each flight carrying with it a new goal. Shepard’s mission was followed by Virgil Grissom’s suborbital mission of July 21, 1961, which in turn was followed by John Glenn’s historic orbital shot of February 20, 1962.

Glenn writes of the first of his three orbits that day:

Moving away from the sun at 17,500 miles an hour—almost eighteen times Earth’s rotational speed—sped the sunset. This was something I had been looking forward to, a sunset in space. All my life I have remembered particularly beautiful sunrises or sunsets. . . . I’ve mentally collected them, as an art collector remembers visits to a gallery full of Picassos, Michelangelos, or Rembrandts. Wonderful as man-made art may be, it cannot compare in my mind to sunsets and sunrises, God’s masterpieces. . . . It was even more spectacular than I imagined, and different in that the sunlight coming through the prism of Earth’s atmosphere seemed to break out the whole spectrum, not just the colors at the red end but the greens, blues, indigos, and violets at the other. It made “spectacular” an understatement for the few seconds’ view. From my orbiting front porch, the setting sun that would have lingered during a long earthly twilight sank eighteen times as fast. The sun was fully round and as white as a brilliant arc light, and then it swiftly disappeared and seemed to melt into a long thin line of rainbow-brilliant radiance along the curve of the horizon. I added my first sunset from space to my collection.

Although Glenn was not the first person to orbit the earth—the Soviets had sent Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov into orbit the previous year—Glenn’s Friendship 7 flight was not cloaked in secrecy, as the Soviet flights were. Indeed, the American mission was televised and watched worldwide.

Glenn, like fellow explorers Shepard and Grissom, was received as a hero; his career would take him out of space and eventually into the United States Senate. The aeronautic practicum continued throughout the 1960s with the remaining Mercury experiments, followed by the Gemini and Apollo missions, and eventually the space shuttle program.

Glenn would return to space aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998 and become the oldest astronaut in the history of space exploration.Tied to Glenn’s achievements are the two crafts themselves, Friendship 7 and Discovery, with Friendship 7 having joined the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1963.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

John Glenn / Boris Artzybasheff / Tempera, ink and pencil on Masonite, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine / © Boris Artzybasheff

John Glenn / George Tames / Gelatin silver print, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Frances O. Tames, © New York Times

 

Cited:
John Glenn, with Nick Taylor, John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

 

John Coltrane by Roy DeCarava

On Sunday, April 15, the National Portrait Gallery and the Anacostia Community Museum present Insights into Coltrane and Hancock. In anticipation of this concert and conversation, Historian David Ward visited Roy DeCarava’s portrait of John Coltrane, located in the “Twentieth-century Americans” exhibition on the third floor.

“He bridged the old and the new like a colossus.” —Roy Haynes

How do you portray a sound? Roy DeCarava’s portrait of John Coltrane (1926–1967) vibrates with the intensity that “Trane” brought to his music, and its multiple exposures suggest the cascading notes that poured from his saxophone.

Aside from suggesting the timbre and volume of Coltrane’s playing, the photograph also seems like a glimpse into the spirit world: the physicality of Coltrane—who was a large, bulky man—becomes indistinct and diffused, blown apart by the exploration of the ecstatic possibilities of his music.

Coltrane never developed the mannerisms and styles that more flamboyant musicians, such as Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie, used to accent their playing and augment their performance. His style was no style. Coltrane, who was shy to begin with, simply played. DeCarava’s diffused image makes recognition difficult—it is not a “likeness” but suggests a musician achieving the kind of lift-off in which he would simply disappear, leaving only the music behind, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

Born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926, with ancestors who were ministers in the AME Zionist church and musicians, Coltrane started playing music when he was about twelve, studying clarinet and then alto saxophone. After a stint in the navy, Coltrane moved to Philadelphia, where his now-widowed mother had relocated, and became part of the emerging wave of East Coast bebop musicians.He started playing tenor saxophone and by 1949 was recording with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. By the middle 1950s he was playing and recording with Miles Davis in one of the most influential jazz ensembles of all time; among its recordings was Kind of Blue, a watershed of modern music.

Coltrane had also become an addict, battling alcohol and drugs. While Ralph Waldo Emerson once made the argument that a poet should use drugs or stimulants to dissolve self-consciousness, in practice, drug addiction usually ruins the poet—or the musician. Coltrane was fired multiple times, including by Davis.

Coltrane finally got clean in 1957, and his sobriety seems to have enhanced his already strong conviction that his music was fundamentally spiritual. That spiritual dimension was explored to its sonic limits in Coltrane’s own bands and in such albums as Giant Steps and, tellingly, A Love Supreme. (His greatest popular hit was a 1960 jazz version of the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune “My Favorite Things.”) Coltrane’s explorations of eastern religion and its connections to what he now called “world music,” not jazz, were cut short by his early death from liver cancer.

In San Francisco, the “Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church,” founded in 1971, takes Coltrane as its patron saint and prophet, using the saxophonist’s music and lyrics as the basis of its liturgy. Such is the power of Coltrane’s life and legend that this reverence for the musician seems wholly appropriate. Coltrane’s importance is not just in his place in the history of jazz, his performances, or his albums, but in the way that he pursued his art as the vessel through which to achieve a spiritual transcendence of earthly forms, including the structure of music itself.

Coltrane, in the tradition of Emerson’s comment that he did not want “meters but meter making arguments,” was one of the great creative destroyers in American culture. Like Walt Whitman and Jackson Pollock—or Emerson himself—Coltrane was a breaker of forms, remaking the traditional to create wholly new ways of embodying artistic expression and the human spirit. No picture can capture that, but DeCarava’s is as close as we will get.

—David Ward, Historian, National Portrait Gallery

 

DISCUSSION AND PERFORMANCE: JAM at NPG
Sunday, April 15, 2012, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Insights into Coltrane and Hancock
Location: McEvoy Auditorium

Celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) with the Anacostia Community Museum and the National Portrait Gallery as we feature the lives and music of John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. Join WPFW radio host Rusty Hassan, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, in a discussion of the life and contributions of both musicians. Then, the award-winning Howard University Jazz Ensemble, under the direction of Professor Fred Irby III, will perform memorable works by both Jazz giants. This JAM program will be held at the National Portrait Gallery’s McEvoy Auditorium, 8^th and G Streets NW, Washington, DC, and is a memorable annual concert for jazz lovers of all ages.

FREE; for reservations, call 202-633-4866

 

John William Coltrane / Roy DeCarava / Gelatin silver print, 1961 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / © Roy DeCarava

The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862

Like so many of our nation’s battlefields that have been preserved and maintained by the United States National Park Service, Shiloh, located in southwest Tennessee, is a place of great beauty and peace. However, like all battlefields, Shiloh is a place where armies were embroiled in an awful and bloody struggle, where men fought close and died close, and where many men and boys gathered their last views of life amidst smoke, screams, and horror. For all of the peace and the pastoral beauty that Shiloh exudes today, it is difficult to believe that for two days in 1862 it was a hellish place.

For his victorious work at Forts Henry and Donelson, General Ulysses Grant (above) was given a large command, and while waiting for troops under General Don Carlos Buell to reinforce him, he began to occupy the site at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. A small country church nearby was named Shiloh, from whence the ensuing battle derived its name. On what would have otherwise been a typical coupling of sunny and rainy spring days in a verdant southern setting, many soldiers and officers of immense talent were deployed on a battlefield that would yield almost 24,000 casualties—killed, missing, and wounded.

Confederate generals Albert Sidney Johnston (right) and Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard jointly attacked Grant’s forces early on the morning of April 6. While the initial assault on the Federal troops camped at Pittsburg Landing came as a surprise, Grant’s troops were able to hold off the Confederates until the following day, when Buell’s troops arrived to reinforce Grant and his men. Before the day was done, Johnston would bleed to death from a bullet to his right leg.

Among Grant’s generals on the field at Shiloh were two Wallaces—no relation—W. H. L. Wallace, and Lew Wallace. W. H. L. Wallace would lose his life as a result of wounds from the battle, while Lew Wallace, failing to reinforce William T. Sherman’s troops in a timely fashion, would be partially blamed for Union losses on the battle’s first day.

Lew Wallace (left) would serve the United States government for many years after Shiloh, both as a diplomat and statesman. He never received full credit for his generalship, however, even though a strong possibility existed that he had received nebulous orders from General Grant that caused the errors on the battlefield. However, Lew Wallace is not so much remembered for his service to his country as he is for his single great literary accomplishment: Wallace authored the historical novel Ben Hur.

Another participant of note in the Battle of Shiloh was the young schoolteacher John Wesley Powell. Powell was an anomaly among the troops of either army. He could read and write, and he was also schooled in Latin and Greek. Powell was hit in the right arm while commanding a battery of cannon, and W. H. L. Wallace, doomed to be struck down that afternoon, gave his horse to Powell in order for him to seek medical aid.

Powell later explored the American West, led the United States Geological Survey, worked as an ethnologist for the Smithsonian, and co-founded one of Washington, D.C.’s most famous intellectual institutions, the Cosmos Club. Powell accomplished all of this with a stunning impediment; his right arm was amputated as a result of the wound he received at Shiloh..

With reinforcements at hand, Grant was able to overturn the southern advances made on April 6 the next day and secure a bloody victory, if only because the southern army was compelled to leave the field and retreat to Corinth, Mississippi. Civil War historian Shelby Foote summarizes the battle:

Union losses were 1754 killed, 8408 wounded, 2885 captured: total, 13,047—about 2000 of them Buell’s. Confederate losses were 1723 killed, 8012 wounded, 959 missing: total, 10,694. Of the 100,000 soldiers engaged in this first great bloody conflict of the war, approximately one out of every four who had gone into battle had been killed, wounded, or captured. Casualties were 24 percent, the same as Waterloo’s. Yet Waterloo had settled something, while this one apparently had settled nothing.

And while this fight may have settled nothing immediately, this thin victory and southern capitulation would provide the Federal army with a keen path toward the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the summer of 1863, at which time the western theater of the Deep South would be effectively removed from the war.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Ulysses Simpson Grant / Barr & Young / Albumen silver print, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Albert Sidney Johnston / Edward Anthony / Albumen silver print, 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 

Lewis Wallace / Charles DeForest Fredricks / Albumen silver print, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mrs. F.B. Wilde 

John Wesley Powell and Tau-Ruv / John K. Hillers / Albumen silver print, 1874 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Cited:
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958).