National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Happy 150th Birthday, Grandma Moses!

Anna Mary Robertson was born on a farm on this date—September 7—in 1860. She lived the life of a farmer's wife until the death of her husband, Thomas Moses, in 1927. Widowhood pushed Anna Mary Moses into retirement from farming, and in the mid-1930s she began to paint rural vignettes. Word about her homespun pictures began to disseminate as she entered her octogenarian years. By the time Moses died at the age of 101, she was an international celebrity artist known as “Grandma Moses.”

 

Her art was simple and uplifting. Farm life and the joyful spirit of family enterprise serve the visual core of her work.  While the academic term for her work is called “naïve”—Moses was untrained as an artist and her work was being shown in a small town drugstore when it was spotted by a New York collector—the initial response to her work went well beyond the academy.

 

Late in her life, the artist was invited to the White House, and in 1969, she was posthumously honored on an American postage stamp. Grandma Moses died in 1961; her paintings are now monuments on the American cultural landscape.

 

 

Image:  Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1860-1961 / Clara Sipprell / Gelatin Silver print, c.1950 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Katie Louchheim

 

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

In the Spirit of the United States Open, Happy Fifty-eighth Birthday Jimmy Connors

Tennis has been around for centuries.

In the late medieval text The Turke and Sir Gawain, the Turke shows Gawain a castle wherein the tennis balls are so large they can only be hit by giants:

 

Many aventures thou shalt see there,

Such as thou never saw yare

In all the world about.

Thou shalt see a tenisse ball

That never knight in Arthurs hall

Is able to give it a lout.

 

Shakespeare mentions tennis no less than five times if one includes brief notes alluding to tennis balls and tennis courts. Polonius, describing a scenario of his son Laertes’ possible activities in Paris, briefly mentions tennis to the spy Reynaldo in act 2, scene 1 of Hamlet:

 

He closes with you thus: “I know the gentleman,

 I saw him yesterday”—or t’ other day,

 Or then, or then—“with such and such…

 There was a gaming, there o’ertook in ‘s rouse,

 There falling out at tennis.”

 

Shakespeare, or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, must have had some intimate knowledge of the game, because the writer also mentions tennis in Henry VIII/All Is True, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and Henry the IV, Part Two.

After Shakespeare, a few innovations moved the game along until it began to look roughly like what we see today. And then came Jimmy—he was a southpaw, he was a hard-hitter, and he was the kind of man who spoke what he felt with the umpires and the officials. Jimmy Connors, with some help from Elie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, and Chris Evert, moved tennis into the age of rock and roll.

Before the 1970s, tennis was a game, many thought, that was restricted to the country clubs; after the arrival of Jimmy Connors and his Wilson T2000 racquet, tennis became the sport of the seventies.  Sure, there was football and the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and sure, there was the 1975 World Series between the Reds and the Red Sox; there was even some guy named Ali storming around in the world of boxing, mowing men down to the mat and reciting poetry as they fell.

However, the face of tennis was Jimmy Connors. Title after title, continent after continent, Connors faced the best. In the decade that defined modern tennis, Connors stayed on top of the game longer than anyone. He was the U.S. Open champion three times in the 1970s (twice more in the early 1980s), and he won both doubles and singles championships at Wimbledon during the same decade.

Among his many other accolades, Jimmy Connors was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1998. He is married to another icon of the 1970s, model Patti McGuire. Jimmy Connors celebrates his fifty-eighth birthday today, September 2, 2010.

 

Works cited:

The Turke and Sir Gawain, ed. Thomas Hahn, originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995) http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/turkfrm.htm (accessed September 1, 2010).

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Image: Jimmy Connors (born 1952) / by Ross Barron Storey (born 1940) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

--Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

Lindy Hot Then Not Then Hot Again

Slower, now— slow enough to ground loop safely—left rudder—reverse it—stick over the other way—The Spirit of St. Louis swings around and stops rolling, resting on the solidness of the earth, in the center of Le Bourget. I start to taxi back toward the floodlights and hangars—But the entire field ahead is covered with running figures!

    —Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis

 

 

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) occupied some of the most fantastic headlines of the twentieth century. First, of course, he flew solo in his Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic. Later, tragically, his son was kidnapped and murdered. Later still, damaging his golden reputation, Lindbergh was the loudest of those who denounced the United States’s involvement in the conflict that would become World War II.

 

After his transatlantic flight of May 20–21, 1927, Lindbergh was celebrated everywhere. The postwar generation, like every American generation, had its own celebrities, but Lindbergh was different. His accomplishment was unlike anything in history. In Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen writes:

 

His picture hung in hundreds of schoolrooms and in thousands of houses. No living American—no dead American, one might say, save perhaps Abraham Lincoln—commanded such unswerving fealty. You might criticize Coolidge or Hoover or Ford or Edison or Bobby Jones or any other headline hero; but if you decried anything that Lindbergh did, you knew that you had wounded your auditors. For Lindbergh was a god.

 

Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were unable to escape the press on their joyful wedding day in May 1929 and this would set the precedent for some of the horrible years to follow. In February 1932 their twenty-month-old son Charles was kidnapped and murdered. The ordeal of the Lindberghs’ search for their baby played out like a Greek tragedy, with hope and terror alternating places on the stage for months after the kidnapping. Ultimately, the deceased child’s body was found, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for the crime.

 

Lindbergh spent the late 1930s observing the conditions of the various air corps of France, England, and Germany. He also encouraged bolstering American air power, as he had a keen grasp of the Luftwaffe’s potential. As world war again approached, Lindbergh preached nonintervention in European matters and was at loggerheads with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt believed in coming to the aid of France and England, and his entire political machine was geared in that direction.

 

Lindbergh halted his noninterventionist efforts after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Throughout the remainder of the war, Lindbergh worked with the American military to research and to develop more efficient fighter craft. He also flew on multiple combat missions as a civilian and at least one time confronted a Japanese plane in dogfight conditions, winning the day.

 

Charles Lindbergh died on August 26, 1974.

 

 

Cited:

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s. New York: Harper and Row, 1931.

Lindbergh, Charles. The Spirit of St. Louis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

 

Image: Charles Agustus Lindbergh, Jr, Underwood and Underwood (active 1880--c.1950), Gelatin silver print,

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institutio

 

--Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits

 

 

 

 

 

New Exhibition: “Americans Now”

“Americans Now,” drawn from the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, features portraits of outstanding individuals in the realms of science, business, government and the arts. The exhibition will be on view through June 19, 2011.

The show includes such familiar names as Erykah Badu, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Tom Hanks, Tony Hawk, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Willie Nelson, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Martha Stewart. These figures have been portrayed by some of the most prominent artists of our era: Chuck Close, Robert McCurdy, Elizabeth Peyton, Martin Schoeller, Kehinde Wiley and Dan Winters. The wide range of sitters continues with an iconic image of President Barack Obama by Shepard Fairey and a portrait of Michelle Obama by artist Mickalene Thomas.

“Americans Now” showcases a variety of media. Examples include a projected video—The Late Night Triad by Jason Salavon, which features Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman—and video portraits of George Clooney and LeBron James that are a created through a process pioneered by Lincoln Schatz.

Birthday of Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash was born 108 years ago today.

The New Yorker magazine has always benefited from a surfeit of humor writers. Contributors in the first half of the century included James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley (as himself and under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes), and Ogden Nash.

The witty contributions of these and other individuals established the magazine’s attitude in its first decade. As Harold Ross starkly noted, “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.”

That being the case, a new chapter in American literature began in 1925. Within the magazine’s first decade, Ogden Nash was the epitome of what the New Yorker sought as a contributor. And although Nash published on his own and in other magazines over his lifetime, his work appeared hundreds of times in The New Yorker. 

Nash was born in Rye, New York, and attended Harvard briefly, but his humor and his cadence were not taught to him; rather, they were simply his gifts.

Nash wrote a zoo of poetic animal observations, among them The Turtle:

The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

In 1952, the Saturday Evening Post published another example from Nash’s bestiary, The Chipmunk:

My friends all know that I am shy,
But the chipmunk is twice as shy as I.
He moves with flickering indecision
Like stripes across the television.
He’s like the shadow of a cloud,
Or Emily Dickinson read aloud.
Yet his ultimate purpose is obvious, very:
To get back to his chipmonastery.

Nash was a master at stretching meters, meanings, and spellings. And while his most fun poems will not beat the reader over the head with multitiered symbols and vast extended allegories, his structure is carnivalesque in that it parodies more traditional styles.

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Ogden Nash / Frederick S. Wight / Oil on canvas, 1933 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist

August 16, 1977—The Death of Elvis

 
Thirty-three years ago today, Elvis Presley died at his home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. At the time, had anyone told the world that Elvis would be as revered three-plus decades later as he was when he was in his prime, it is likely that the prognosticator would be ridiculed. However, the madness of such a forecast is only now exceeded by the madness that is still Elvis-mania. Hundreds of thousands of people visit Graceland yearly, and Elvis’s recordings sell to each succeeding generation.

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, “Echoes of Elvis,” is a collection of works that were created since Elvis’s death and pay tribute to the late king of rock and roll. Exhibition curator Warren Perry said, “We have been really pleased to be able to salute one of history’s greatest entertainers. That the show has been well received is due to Elvis’s continuing popularity, a third of a century since his death.”

The Portrait Gallery will also be paying homage to the king with a second Elvis show this year, “Elvis at 21,” which will feature photos (above) of Elvis by photographer Al Wertheimer. RCA asked Wertheimer to photograph Elvis during a March 1956 visit to New York, during which the young singer made an appearance on The Steve Allen Show and later recorded “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”

“Elvis at 21” will open on October 23, 2010, and run through January 23, 2011. “Echoes of Elvis” will close on August 29. 

Untitled (Elvis and Priscilla), from the portfolio Graceland / William Eggleston / Dye transfer print, 1983 (printed 1984) / Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of Amy Loeserman Klein / © Eggleston Artistic Trust and Cheim & Read, New York

Elvis Aron Presley and unidentified woman / Alfred Wertheimer  / Pigmented print, June 10, 1956 / Govinda Gallery, Washington D.C.

Fears of the Fearless FDR: A President’s Superstitions for Friday the 13th

In one of the most memorable moments of his political career, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, the man who led America through two of the greatest challenges our country has faced—the Great Depression and World War II—was not without “fear itself.”

Roosevelt, whose “fireside chats” were moments in which he reassured and comforted and informed America, was afraid of fire. In No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes:

Outside Roosevelt's door, which he refused to lock at night as previous presidents had done, Secret Service men patrolled the corridor, alerting the guardroom to the slightest hint of movement. The refusal to lock his door was related to the president's dread of fire, which surpassed his fear of assassination or anything else. The fear seems to have been rooted in his childhood, when, as a small boy, he had seen his young aunt, Laura, race down the stairs, screaming, her body and clothes aflame from an accident with an alcohol lamp.

Goodwin goes on to describe how the president, a man struck down by polio in his thirties, would practice escaping from fires by “dropping from his bed or chair and then crawling to the door.”

Interestingly, FDR also had a mild case of triskaidekaphobia. From the Greek tris/three + kai/and + deka/ten + phobos/fear, our thirty-second president disliked the number thirteen. Journalist and Roosevelt biographer John Gunther wrote, “Like most people with good luck, FDR was moderately—not excessively—superstitious. He hated Friday the thirteenth, he would never start an important trip on a Friday if he could help it, and he disliked sitting down with thirteen at dinner.”

The president's fears, however, were greatly misplaced, and Friday the thirteenth bore him no ill. Franklin D. Roosevelt died on Thursday, April 12, 1945.

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Franklin Delano Roosevelt / Herman Perlman / Tempera and gouache on board, 1935 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist

Cited:
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Gunther, John. Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950.

NPG Internship: All in a Summer's Work

By Allie Hewett, Administrative Intern and Baylor University Graduate Student

In Washington, D.C., if spring is the season for cherry blossoms, then summer is definitely the season for interns. As one of the lucky interns at the National Portrait Gallery, I have spent my summer researching museum branding and product development for the associate director of operations.

As a graduate student in Baylor University’s Museum Studies Program, I was eager to learn from the NPG staff and tackle a new challenge. My graduate program prepares students for careers in the museum field by enhancing subject-specific knowledge with courses in education, collections management, and exhibition design, and allows us to gain hands-on experience while working in the on-campus museum.

Surprisingly, my academic background is not related to art history—my undergraduate major was biology! My path to the museum field was the result of many positive experiences visiting museums of all types, and working and volunteering in natural history museums and zoos.

Despite my background, in no way do I feel out of place at the NPG. I am surrounded by scientists, including Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, Albert Einstein, and E. O. Wilson; I feel connected to these extraordinary Americans and inspired by their achievement. In fact, I believe this is what makes the National Portrait Gallery unique—as a museum that focuses on both art and biography, its collections are filled with sitters from diverse areas of achievement. Every visitor finds someone to whom he or she can relate.

The goal of my internship project is to ultimately increase awareness of the National Portrait Gallery and its mission. Branded merchandise allows visitors to proudly promote the museum and represent their experience to the rest of the public. (Plus, who doesn’t love shopping?) Collections-related merchandise also reminds visitors of their experience. This project has required interdepartmental collaboration, as I have researched copyright and personality-rights issues and reviewed past products and the product-development process.

I have learned a lot at the National Portrait Gallery, and am grateful for such a beneficial internship experience. My fellow departmental intern and I have worked hard to create new merchandise, and hope that visitors will wear NPG gear with pride! What type of merchandise would YOU like to see available in the museum shop?

The National Portrait Gallery has internship opportunities during all seasons; see our NPG internship page.  

Last Week of Portraits Alive!

Tatiana Brown as Denyce Graves

The Teen Ambassadors will conclude their summer programming this week with the final five performances of “Portraits Alive!” As with previous years, program coordinator Geri Provost-Lyons has been immensely pleased with the program results. Provost-Lyons states, "It has been an awesome summer. As the students perform over time, their work gets better and better. Some visitors have returned to view the performances a second time, and we have also enjoyed the tremendous support of many former Teen Ambassadors—the program's alumni."

The visitor experience has been a positive one also. One patron commented, “What a fun program, not just for the audience but for the students who participate. These actors embraced their characters and made me want to know more about them. I hope I’m in the D.C. area next summer to see it again.” Another visitor said, “What a wonderful program! The kids obviously worked very hard and deserve some special recognition. I applaud the museum for sponsoring this.”

“Portraits Alive!” will be presented each afternoon at 2:15 at the National Portrait Gallery with a final performance scheduled for Friday, August 13. Admission is free.

Clarence King: Man of Maps, Mines, and Mystery

Clarence King (shown on far right) was a talented paradox.

As a friend of Henry Adams, John Hay, Clover Adams, and Clara Hay, King was the fifth member of the clique that called itself “The Five of Hearts.” However, upon King’s death in 1901, Henry Adams and John Hay discovered that King had been hiding his marriage to an African American woman in New York. Using the alias James Todd, King had married Ada Copeland in 1888, and they eventually had five children. That he would keep an interracial marriage from his best friends was perhaps a sign of the times, but it also was indicative of the degree to which King was an independent thinker and doer.

Another side of King's personality was his sometimes out-of-place sense of fashion. As biographer Patricia O'Toole notes in The Five of Hearts, King's behavior during the excursions of the Fortieth Parallel survey signified the cultural component of his mental makeup:

An aesthete with a particular fondness for painting, King saw to it that photographers and landscape painters accompanied the survey, and he strove to give his camps an air of refinement. In the evening, after a long, gritty day in the field, he donned silk hose, gleaming shoes, and a suit freshly pressed by his valet. Materializing at the campfire, he looked to an astonished Henry Adams like “a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush.”

A graduate of Yale, King was a man of science who also stepped easily into literature. While conducting the survey, he corresponded with William Dean Howells, who published some of King's stories of the American West in the Atlantic. King employed contour lines in his mapmaking, giving the viewer a notion of the terrain. He was unafraid of testing science in the lab and, in the face of Charles Darwin's ideological sway, O'Toole records that King believed not only in long-term evolution, but also that “cataclysmic events such as earthquakes had also left their mark on the evolution of plants and animals.” Clarence King's work with the Fortieth Parallel survey (1867–77) was a critical episode in the geographical and geological decipherment of the American West.

In 1878, King was appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, but he did not stay long. He was always plagued by money problems, first having to support his mother, and later, feeling compelled to keep up a certain lifestyle among his wealthy and aristocratic friends. King borrowed heavily and later lived with the specter of his hidden New York family behind him. Always in search of wealth, King led forays into mining that never met with the great success of which he dreamt.

John Hay's comments to Henry Adams (cited in The Education of Henry Adams from Hay's letters) upon King’s death in 1901 show simultaneously immense respect and heartfelt pity for the potential of their now-lost friend, calling King, “the best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries . . . with everything in his favor but blind luck, hounded by disaster from his cradle.”

-Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Cited:
The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
The Five of Hearts by Patricia O'Toole
For further reading: 
The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax--Clarence King in the Old West by Robert Wilson

                        
Clarence King and the Field Party of 1864 / Silas Selleck / Albumen silver print, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution