National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Portrait of Lady Bird Johnson by Boris Artzybasheff

                        © Boris Artzybasheff

Claudia Taylor’s nursemaid declared that she was as pretty as a “ladybird,” a nickname that stuck with her through her entire life. Lady Bird Johnson graduated from high school at age fifteen and earned two degrees at the University of Texas: a B.A. in 1933 and a degree in journalism in 1934. That same year, she met Lyndon Johnson, a young legislative secretary. After a brief courtship—best characterized by her statement that “sometimes Lyndon simply takes your breath away”—they were married.

Devoted to her husband’s political career, Lady Bird Johnson ran his office during World War II and in 1955, after he suffered a heart attack. The couple had two daughters. As first lady, Lady Bird was active in Head Start and her promotion of the Highway Beautification Act.

The National Portrait Gallery’s Amy Baskette recently discussed this portrait of Lady Bird Johnson by Boris Artzybasheff at a Face-to-Face portrait talk. The work is displayed on the museum’s second floor, in the exhibition “America’s Presidents.”  The portrait was originally created for Time magazine's August 28, 1964, edition.

Listen to Amy Baskette's Face-to-Face talk on Lady Bird Johnson (13:36)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, April 2, when researcher Warren Perry speaks about Toni Morrison. 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.

Lady Bird Johnson / Boris Artzybasheff, 1964 / Crayon, watercolor, ink and polymer on board / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine / © Brois Artzybasheff

New Exhibition – Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture

Private collection, courtesy of Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

“Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” opens this Friday, March 27, at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition casts new light upon Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), one of the most influential artists of the recent past. Showcasing approximately 100 never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Duchamp, the show demonstrates that the artist harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the art world.

The exhibition includes works by his contemporaries Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Francis Picabia, and Florine Stettheimer, as well as portraits by a more recent generation of artists, such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Sturtevant, Yasumasa Morimura, David Hammons, Beatrice Wood, and Douglas Gordon. “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” closes on August 2, 2009.

In this blog post, we focus on one of the works featured in the exhibition: Portrait multiple de Marcel Duchamp (Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp) (above). Throughout a lengthy career that spanned much of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp recast accepted modes for assembling and describing identity. In 1917, having recently arrived in the United States, he found special significance in a mechanically produced photo-postcard that depicted him simultaneously from five different vantage points.  The five-way picture, made by sitting in front of a hinged mirror, had gained popularity by the late nineteenth century and was commonly found in photography studios and at amusement parks. Produced in editions of three, the portrait could be shared with friends.

The Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp suggests the artist’s early recognition of the multifarious nature of personal identity, something he would continue to explore throughout his career. Fascinated with the way portraits shape identity, Duchamp exploited the genre, often turning conventional codes for portrayal on their head.

For Duchamp, postcards were more than a novelty. By integrating the multiple portrait into his larger body of work, Duchamp transformed a mechanical picture, made by an anonymous camera operator, into a self-portrait that embodied his view of identity as fractured and unstable. It prefigures his creation of various alter egos, such as Rrose Sélavy. The picture was made on June 21, 1917, at the Broadway Photo Studio at the same time that Duchamp was photographed with his friends Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood.

Listen to James McManus, co-curator of the exhibition, discuss  Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1:46)

For more on Marcel Duchamp, be sure to visit the online exhibition. And please join us on Friday, March 27, for two exciting programs offered in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition: The Edgar P. Richardson Symposium on Marcel Duchamp and Conservation Panel: New Research on Marcel Duchamp’s Portraits by Jean Crotti. 

Portrait multiple de Marcel Duchamp (Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp) / Unidentified photographer / Gelatin silver print, 1917 / Private collection, courtesy of Francis M. Naumann Fine Art

Portrait of Martha Washington by Gilbert Stuart

Gilbert Stuart painted this portrait of Martha Washington at the same time he did that of the president. Both paintings were commissioned by the Washingtons. They were never completed, however, and the artist kept them in his possession until his death. Although Stuart made many copies of the president’s portrait, no other likeness of Martha Washington by Stuart is known to exist.

Sid Hart, senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery, recently discussed this 1796 portrait of Martha Washington at a Face-to-Face portrait talk. The work is displayed on the museum’s second floor, in the exhibition “America’s Presidents.”

Listen to Sid Hart's Face-to-Face talk on Martha Washington (28:07)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, March 26, when Lincoln’s Cottage curator Erin Carlson Mast speaks about Mary Todd Lincoln. 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.

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington / Gilbert Stuart, 1796 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; owned jointly with Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lecture by John Waters, this Saturday, March 21

                           © 1995 Joseph Sheppard

Visit the museum on Saturday, March 21, and see a lecture by iconic filmmaker John Waters as part of the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series. His talk will explore Letter of Resignation by the great abstract expressionist Cy Twombly. The series is made possible though a pioneering partnership among Washington College, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The event takes place in the museums’ Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium, and begins at 4:30 pm, with doors opening at 4 p.m.  It is free and open to the public; tickets will be released at 3:30 pm at the G Street lobby information desk on a first-come, first-served basis. Limit of two tickets per person. More information is available here. 

This 1995 portrait of John Waters is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collections. Painted by his neighbor Joseph Sheppard, the portrait shows Waters seated in front of the Italian poster made for Desperate Living, which depicts two of the movie’s stars, Jean Hill (left), and Mink Stole.

Waters, dubbed the “pope of trash,” draws the subject matter for his outrageous, shocking, often X-rated films—including Mondo Trasho (1969), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Desperate Living (1977)—from life in his native Baltimore. Their offbeat and earthy grittiness has influenced many other filmmakers. Waters says he purposely stooped low for the sake of “shock humor,” which he described as “making people laugh at things they would never laugh at if it were real.” However, in a surprising turn of events, his 1988 film Hairspray received a PG rating and then became a prize-winning Broadway musical.

The American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series will continue with lectures by critically acclaimed novelist Jamaica Kincaid; internationally recognized New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast; and leading Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. Kincaid will discuss the painting Kept In (1889) by Edward Lamson Henry on Saturday, April 11. Holzer will examine John Henry Brown’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln (1860) on Saturday, April 18. The 2009 series concludes on Sunday, April 26, with Chast’s exploration of Charles Addams’s famous cartoon Boiling Oil (1946). More information on the series is available on the website of the C. V. Starr Center.

John Waters / Joseph Sheppard, 1995 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rita St. Clair / © 1995 Joseph Sheppard

Raquel Welch

This article is written by Greg Kenyon, an English and history major from the University of Maryland who is interning at the National Portrait Gallery. He writes about this 1969 sculpture of Raquel Welch by Frank Gallo, on display in the “Bravo!” exhibition on the Portrait Gallery’s third-floor mezzanine.

Some of my favorite works in the National Portrait Gallery reside on the upper levels of the museum. Except for the American Victorian Renaissance architecture found here, the third floor embraces the twentieth century. “Bravo!” and “Champions” have their home on the third-floor mezzanine and display portraits of entertainers and sports stars, respectively.

The stairway leading up to the mezzanine is tucked away in the corner and is easy to miss. After entering the “Bravo!” gallery, it is just as easy to miss Raquel Welch, but once you turn around to exit, it is nearly impossible to leave without fully taking her in. Frank Gallo’s epoxy resin sculpture of Welch appears in its case with such vitality that I often do a double-take, mistaking her for another patron of the exhibition. The flesh tones and detailed features lend the sculpture  a lifelike appearance, especially when compared to works cast in a monochromatic medium such as bronze. One of the benefits of using epoxy, as Gallo did, was the ability to give it color, and he took full advantage of this benefit.

Gallo created the piece specifically for the November 28, 1969, cover of Time magazine. Gallo had been noted for his voluptuous sculptures of the female form before, but this was his first attempt at sculpting from life. Gallo himself transported the work from his studio in Champaign, Illinois, to New York to be photographed for the cover. To protect his work, Gallo decided to that he would ride alongside the boxed sculpture. But because the seatbelt was not large enough to secure the packaged sculpture, Gallo was forced to unwrap Ms. Welch, much to the pleasure of his fellow passengers, I am sure. The sculpture was critically acclaimed as well, winning the “Cover of the Year” award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Raquel Welch was one of the last studio stars, and although she was called “the most photographed woman in the world” by Time and the “most desired women of the 70s” by Playboy, none of her films achieved commercial success. Propelled to stardom by her role in Fantastic Voyage in 1966, Welch starred in the remake of One Million Years B.C. that same year, a role that cemented her place in popular culture. In the main promotional shot for the film, Welch is clad in a “prehistoric” fur bikini. No one may have seen One Million Years B.C, but everyone knows that poster. A child of the 1990s, I was not aware of its origin but immediately recognized it as the poster that Andy Dufresne used to cover his escape tunnel in The Shawshank Redemption. It is this iconic shot that cemented Welch’s status as a sex symbol of her generation, iconic enough to reappear in future films as a hallmark of the period’s popular culture.

In an ambitious move to be viewed as a serious actress, Welch later starred in one of the more noteworthy flops of the 1970s, Myra Breckenridge (1970). She went on to win a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her work in 1973’s Three Musketeers, but again, her role is most remembered for the double entendres and jokes centering around the figure she cut in her bodice.

Stop in the National Portrait Gallery and take a peek at the sculpture of Raquel Welch, appreciate the vitality of the sculpture, and compare Welch’s role in popular culture to that of our current celebrities. And while you are there, do peruse the other galleries on the third floor and take in the juxtaposition of the twentieth-century history and the old architectural style.

Raquel Welch / Frank Gallo, 1969 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Lincoln: Legend and Lore

Abraham Lincoln, as we view him today, is as much a product of legend as he is fact. Lincoln was a son of the early frontier and its storytelling tradition; much of the Lincoln lore was spun by Lincoln himself and perpetuated after his death by friends and colleagues. Such is the case of the most famous volume of stories about him, Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories by Colonel Alexander McClure.

A newspaperman and politician, McClure said, “Lincoln’s stories are like Lincoln himself. The more we know of them, the better we like them.” Lincoln joked about the politics, pretentious people, incompetent people, the law, the land, and himself. The stories that McClure records cannot all be directly attributed to Lincoln the man, but they are inextricably bound, thanks to McClure’s archive, to Lincoln the legend.

McClure tells of President Lincoln visiting the wounded troops from Chancellorsville at a Washington, D.C., hospital, and encountering an unusually tall private from a Pennsylvania volunteer regiment:

A whisper ran down the long row of cots that the President was in the building and would soon pass by. Instantly every boy in blue who was able arose, stood erect, hands to the side, ready to salute his Commander-in-Chief. The Pennsylvanian stood six feet seven inches in his stockings. Lincoln stood six feet four. As the President approached this giant towering above him, he stopped in amazement, and casting his eyes from head to foot and from foot to head, as if contemplating the immense distance from one extremity to the other, he stood for a moment, speechless. At length, extending his hand, he exclaimed, “Hello, comrade. Do you know when your feet get cold?”

Another story, this one embodying Lincoln’s self-effacing style, runs as follows:

The day following the adjournment of the Baltimore Convention, at which President Lincoln was renominated, various political organizations called to pay their respects to the President. While the Philadelphia delegation was being presented, the chairman of that body, in introducing one of the members, said, “Mr. President, this is Mr. S., of the second district of our State,—a most active and earnest friend of yours and the cause. He has, among other things, been good enough to paint and to present to our league rooms a most beautiful portrait of yourself.” President Lincoln took the gentleman’s hand in his, and shaking it cordially said, with a merry voice, “I presume, sire, in painting your beautiful portrait, you took your idea of me from my principles and not from my person.”

Many short comments are also attributed to Lincoln, fun certainly, but of questionable origin:

“What made the deepest impression upon you?” inquired a friend one day, “when you stood in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, the greatest of natural wonders?” “The thing that struck me most forcibly when I saw the Falls,” Lincoln responded, with characteristic deliberation, “was, where in the world did all that water come from?”

The complete text of Colonel McClure’s Lincoln’s Yarns and Stories can be found online at The Project Gutenberg Website. For more on Lincoln, visit the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln/ Anthony Berger at the Mathew Brady Studio,, 1864 / Modern albumen print from 1864 wet-plate collodion negative / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait of Dolley Madison by William Elwell

Dolley Madison served as White House hostess during the administrations of the widowed Thomas Jefferson and her own husband, James Madison. Her effervescence doubtless accounted, in part at least, for the popularity of Madison's presidency in its last several years. After the end of Madison’s term in 1817, Dolley helped her husband put his papers in order, selling a portion of them to Congress after his death.

William Elwell painted Dolley Madison's portrait in February 1848 and later sold it to her longtime friend William Winston Seaton, editor and co-owner of the Washington, D.C., newspaper The National Intelligencer. The portrait offers a glimpse of the aging Mrs. Madison, described by the artist in his diary as “a very Estimable lady—kind & obliging—one of the Old School.” It is on view on the museum's first floor, in the "America's Presidents" exhibition.

Listen to Ellen Miles’s Face-to-Face talk on Dolly Madison (14:09)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, March 12, when curatorial assistant Amy Baskette speaks about Lady Bird Johnson. 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.

Dolley Dandridge Payne Todd Madison / William S. Elwell, 1848 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait of Ornette Coleman by Frederick J. Brown

For both his musical virtuosity on alto saxophone and his compositions, Ornette Coleman is one of the major forces in American music in the late twentieth century. Like painter Jackson Pollock and writer Walt Whitman, who rejected traditional forms as too constrictive for human expression, Coleman broke with existing jazz diction, creating a raw sound that seemed to deliberately avoid the musical scale in favor of "playing in the cracks."

In 1959, Coleman's quartet produced The Shape of Jazz to Come, a musical manifesto that was the aural equivalent of Pollock's abstract expressionism. Coleman disavowed the idea that "free jazz," as his music was called, was pure improvisation, maintaining that careful planning went into each composition. In the 1970s Coleman moved into jazz funk, using electrified instruments. He is still a prolific musician, and his album Sound Grammar won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2007.

Reuben Jackson, archivist at the National Museum of American History, recently discussed this portrait of Ornette Coleman by Frederick J. Brown at a Face-to-Face portrait talk. The work is displayed on the museum’s third floor, in the exhibition “20th Century Americans.”

Listen to Reuben Jackson's Face-to-Face talk on Ornette Coleman (27:26)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, March 5, when curator of painting and sculpture Ellen Miles speaks about Dolley Madison. 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.

Ornette Coleman / Frederick J. Brown, 1992 / Oil and charcoal on linen / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Joel and Sherry Mallin and Sebastienne and Bentley Brown / © 1992, Frederick J. Brown