National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

In Memoriam, Mark Planisek, 1959–2009

On June 24, 2009, the National Portrait Gallery lost one of its sons. Mark Planisek succumbed to injuries he suffered after being struck by an automobile in Arlington, Virginia, on the night of Friday, June 19. Mark had been a museum technician and art handler at NPG since 1999.

“Everyone who knew Mark admired his enormous talent, warmth, and kindness,” said NPG Director Marty Sullivan. “We all feel devastated by this terrible tragedy. We share the grief of Mark’s family and the large circle of friends he treasured.”

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1959, Mark Planisek devoted his life to art. As a member of the National Portrait Gallery’s installation team, Mark was one of those personally responsible for the magnificently successful reopening of the Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2006.

Away from work, Mark had an international presence in the art world; his work has been exhibited in China, India, Germany, Canada, and throughout the United States. In 2006, Mark’s work was a juried choice admitted into the prestigious biennial in Florence, Italy. His awards were numerous, and his art was widely appreciated. A sampling of Mark's work can be viewed here and here.           

Since 2001, Mark had also been part of the local and national movements among American artists to develop portrait projects honoring the sacrifice of American servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the winter of 2004–5, he joined a number of local artists who were creating small paintings based on photographs of American service personnel killed since October 2001.

The project, called “Faces of the Fallen,” featured more than 1,300 portraits by hundreds of artists. Mark created thirteen paintings, all eight by six inches, in acrylic and mixed media on canvas. For all of this work, he and the other artists involved put aside any personal feelings about the war and concentrated on creating a meaningful memorial for the families. As Mark said, “I wanted to do this for the families. What began as a protest became a form of honor for these soldiers. Putting a face with a name has so much more impact than seeing a name by itself.”

All of the artists who participated in “Faces of the Fallen” gave the portraits to the families. In 2007, Mark created two more paintings, which became part of a permanent memorial at the naval amphibious base in Coronado, California, to honor two Navy SEALS who died in Iraq in 2006.

Mark leaves behind many friends among his colleagues. Molly Grimsley, NPG registrar, said yesterday, “Mark was a very gentle, kind soul, who brought me happiness and encouragement whenever I saw him. I’ll miss him greatly.”

Read more memories of Mark on the DC Arts Center website and the Art and Art Handling blog. 

Woodrow Wilson, Last of the Virginians

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the most educated of all the presidents. He graduated from Princeton University in 1879 and the University of Virginia Law School. Later, in 1886, he received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and then taught at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton. Wilson would serve two terms as president of the United States, the last of the Virginia presidents (to date) and the eighth in the Virginia line after Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, and Taylor.

Interestingly, Wilson’s political career did not begin in his home state. As president of Princeton University for eight years, Wilson was known in New Jersey, and although he was a political novice, the Democratic Party sought him in 1910 to run for governor of the state. Upon election, his reform measures were passed regularly during the first part of his term, but a Republican legislature just as regularly shot down his initiatives after 1912. Gaining the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1914 was actually harder than winning the presidency itself; it took more than forty ballots at the Democratic convention, but Wilson was finally given the nomination. The split over the Republican vote between William Howard Taft and the Progressive Party candidate, former president Theodore Roosevelt, resulted in Wilson’s ascent to the White House.

Former National Portrait Gallery historian Frederick Voss writes of Wilson’s presidency:

Measured on the basis of its domestic reforms, Wilson’s administration was singularly successful. But when World War I forced him into a role of international leadership, Wilson met with tragic failure. Reluctantly declaring war on Germany in 1917, he brought an international idealism to his wartime leadership that called for an un-vindictive peace agreement after Germany was defeated.

Wilson suffered a stroke in September of 1919 while on a cross-country trip promoting the Treaty of Versailles. During the remaining years of his second term, his second wife, Edith, severely restricted access to her husband. and some historians have conspiratorially posited that Mrs. Wilson was actually making many decisions for the chief executive during that period.

Although his plans for European recovery from the Great War were never realized, Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919. Thomas Woodrow Wilson retired from office to his private residence on S Street NW in Washington, D.C., and died in 1924, never having fully recovered from the stroke that rendered his final years in office moot.

This portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, by John Christen Johansen, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in "America's Presidents," the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.

Source:
Frederick Voss, Portraits of the Presidents (New York: National Portrait Gallery in association with Rizzoli, 2000). 

Woodrow Wilson's birthplace, Staunton, Virginia, now part of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library complex. Photo by Warren Perry.

Woodrow Wilson / John Christen Johansen, c. 1919 / Oil on canvas / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of an anonymous donor, 1926

"Wanted: $2,000 Reward" by Marcel Duchamp

Originally created in 1923, Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward was the last work of art he completed before leaving New York that year to return to Paris. Duchamp based the work on a joke notice designed for tourists that he found in a New York restaurant. He pasted two head shots of himself on the poster and had a printer add another alias to those already listed: that of his recently created alter ego Rrose Sélavy.

Although Wanted challenges traditional conceptions of the creative process, the work, which Duchamp re-created at key moments in his career, also played a significant role in the construction of his artistic identity. This version, based on the now-lost original, is a replica intended for Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, a portable museum of his work.

Wanted is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, in the exhibition “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture” on the second floor. Jennifer Quick, research assistant at NPG, recently spoke about the work in a Face-to-Face portrait talk.

Listen to Jennifer Quick's Face-to-Face talk on Marcel Duchamp (18:37)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, June 18, when guest curator James McManus speaks about the portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Brian O’Doherty, on view in the exhibition “Inventing Marcel Duchamp.” 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.

Wanted: $2,000 Reward / Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) / Lithograph, 1961 (replica of 1923 original) / Frances Beatty and Allen Adler © 2009 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp

Happy 85th Birthday to President George Herbert Walker Bush

America has had many individuals of considerable talent and skill occupy the chief executive’s office at 1600 Pennsylvania.  President George H. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, was certainly one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1942, he signed on with the navy and became one of the youngest American pilots to fly in World War II.  Later he attended Yale where he played baseball and participated in the very first (as well as the second) College World Series.

George H. W. Bush began his career in the oil business and then entered politics in the mid-1960s.  First a Texas congressman, he later became U.N. ambassador, director of the C.I.A., and in 1981, Vice President of the United States.  He was elected president in 1988 defeating Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts; Bush served from 1989 to 1993. His presidency was marked by two major foreign policy victories in 1991, the American-led coalition’s elimination of Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. 

On his 80th birthday, the former president celebrated with a parachuting excursion and he is scheduled to mark his 85th birthday with yet another sky-diving adventure today at Kennebunkport, Maine.          

President George H. W. Bush sat for this portrait at his home in Kennebunkport. The picture’s backdrop, however, is the East Room of the White House. Among artist Ron Sherr’s aims was to balance the formality of the composition with a warmth capable of drawing the viewer into the picture.

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “President’s in Waiting” features a video interview of George H.W. Bush, along with interviews of other former vice presidents. And, when you visit the museum, be sure to see "America's Presidents," the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.



George Herbert Walker Bush / Ronald Norman Sherr  / Oil on canvas, 1994-1995 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Krueger

Self-portraits by Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop chose her subject matter from the New York street life that flowed through Union Square, beneath her studio window. Although she moved to the Bronx after her marriage, Bishop continued to travel almost daily to her studio to observe and sketch laborers, shopgirls, children, and unemployed men.  While Bishop’s art focused on the urban street life, there were two moments—in her youth and old age—when self-portraiture played an important role. 

As a young woman in the late 1920s, she found herself a convenient subject, noting that self-portraiture may serve just “to provide oneself a model, especially handy for a young artist as a means for studying picture problems.” In this etching (top), her concerns are formal: structure, form, gesture, and the play of light on a tilted, slightly turned face. The detachment, unreadable expression, and elegant geometry of the head all disguise personality. Even her hand, resting too lightly to support her head, seems merely part of a pose she wished to explore.

After a long, successful career, Bishop returned to self-portraiture when failing health forced her to give up her beloved studio. In a series of unsparing self-appraisals, she conveyed the anguish of her physical limitations. Nonetheless, she continued to challenge herself. Turning away from “mobility” to the depiction of motion itself, she noted, "I found I was much less interested in the genre aspect of the picture, in particularity." In the older drawing (left), one senses the actual rotation of the head. That immediacy, ironically, does not convey the specific individual or precise moment but instead the sense of a timeless, universal truth.

These two self-portraits by Isabel Bishop are on display at the National Portrait Gallery, in the exhibition “Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century” on the second floor. Wendy Wick Reaves, curator of prints and drawings, recently spoke about the pieces in a Face-to-Face portrait talk.

Listen to Wendy Wick Reaves’s Face-to-Face talk on Isabel Bishop (13:34)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is this Thursday, June 11, when research assistant Jennifer Quick, speaks about the “Wanted” poster from the Boite—Series D by Marcel Duchamp, on view in the exhibition “Inventing Marcel Duchamp.” 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.

Etching, 1929 (printed c. 1988–89) / The Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn Twentieth-Century American Self-Portrait Collection, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Ink wash on paper, c. 1984–85 / The Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn Twentieth-Century American Self-Portrait Collection / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Kiss Me Cole, and Happy 118th Birthday

Cole Porter, as we see in the 1953 Soss Melik charcoal portrait, was at home behind the ivories. In his biography, Cole, Brendan Gill says of Porter, “His eyes are his best feature—large and dark brown and slightly popped, with heavy lids and something lemur-like in their in their playful, darting alertness.” And although Porter’s eyes seem more penetrating than playful in the Melik portrait, his expression is perhaps a moment away from a smile.

One of Porter’s dearest friends was Gerald Murphy, an upperclassman at Yale during Porter’s college days. Murphy and his wife Sara were the nucleus of the jazzy expatriate experience in Paris in the 1920s, and other than Cole Porter, they counted among their friends Pablo Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Archibald and Ada MacLeish, Fernand Léger, Robert Benchley, and John Dos Passos. Calvin Tomkins’s succinct but fun biography of Murphy, Living Well Is the Best Revenge, contains Murphy’s recollection of first encountering Porter in the Yale sophomore dormitory:

One night as I was passing his room I saw a light and went in. I can still see that room—there was a single electric light bulb in the ceiling, and a piano with a box of caramels on it, and wicker furniture, which was considered a bad sign at Yale in 1911. And sitting at the piano was a little boy from Peru, Indiana, in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, looking just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East. We had a long talk, about music, and composers—we were both crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan—and I found out that he had lived on an enormous apple farm and that he had a cousin named Desdemona. He also told me that the song he had submitted for the football song competition had just been accepted. It was called “Bulldog,” and of course it made him famous.

Among the proud Eli, the Porter-penned Yale fight song is an integral part of the tradition-rich experience; what other university can claim such authorial fame to its anthem? NPG Assistant Program Manager Ian Cooke recently commented on Porter’s contribution to campus lore:

I was about fourteen years old and living next door to Sterling Library when I found out that the Yale fight song was written by Cole Porter. By then saturated in the history and mythology of the place, all I can remember thinking is “it figures.” “Beinecke” wasn’t a rare-book library around the corner; he was a kindly old man, very patient with my crush on his green Mercedes cabriolet. The athletic director was a former NFL quarterback [Frank Ryan] who sat right in front of us at hockey games, two thousand fans and a . . . marching band bouncing Porter’s tune off the cement walls of a hockey rink designed by Saarinen. It seemed like everyone was a big shot, or bound to become one. I would have been much more surprised to learn that Yale’s fight song was written by someone since forgotten than I was to learn it was written by Cole Porter.

However, if the Yale fight song had been the last song Cole Porter ever penned, his name would hardly be a household word. Porter’s body of work anchors the American musical theater experience. Such songs as “Anything Goes” and “It’s De-Lovely” are pop standards, while Kiss Me, Kate could very easily be the most popular musical adaptation ever. The lyrics to such tunes as “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” reflect Porter’s keen ability to push rhymes across the page while the music resonates with cheer.

    Brush up your Shakespeare,
    Start quoting him right now,
    Brush up your Shakespeare
    And the women you will wow.
    Just declaim a few lines from “Othella”
    And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella,
    If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er
    Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer,
    If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
    What are clothes? “Much Ado About Nussing.”
    Brush up your Shakespeare
    And they’ll all kowtow.

Cole Porter was born on June 9, 1893, and spent his years in New York, Paris, Los Angeles—wherever a song was needed for a stage or a screen. Porter authored hundreds of songs, and his work remains widely performed today. He died in 1964.

References:
Kimball, Robert, and Brendan Gill. Cole. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971.
Tomkins, Calvin. Living Well Is the Best Revenge. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Cole Porter / Soss Efram Melik, 1953 / Charcoal on paper / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Instiution

Portrait of Carlton Fisk by Susan Miller-Havens

A tenacious competitor with an impressive work ethic, Carlton Fisk was one of major league baseball’s most capable and durable catchers. During twenty-four seasons in the American League (first with the Boston Red Sox and later with the Chicago White Sox), Fisk caught a record-setting 2,226 games and posted home-run tallies that ranked him among the top-hitting catchers of all time.

Fisk’s accomplishments were all the more remarkable because he repeatedly overcame career-threatening injuries. In 1975, after battling back from reconstructive knee surgery and a broken arm, Fisk gave Red Sox fans a never-to-be-forgotten thrill in the sixth game of the World Series when he drilled a twelfth-inning home run to win the game. Fisk always demanded the best, not only of himself but of his teammates. As he once observed, "You don’t play baseball. . . . You work at it."  More about Carlton Fisk is available in this previous blog post.

This portrait of Fisk by artist Susan Miller-Havens is on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Champions” exhibition, on the third-floor mezzanine. 

In two series of paintings, Inside Outside and  Looking At Exceptional Men the oil painter, Susan Miller-Havens  painted over 100 pieces related to athletes that have been shown publicly and are owned by sport enthusiasts and art collectors through out the United States. She views sports as a metaphor for life. She has written, "All team sports reflect what it is like to be a human being: hoping for success, sometimes getting it, failing, picking oneself up, trying again to be the best..all the while striving to be part of a team. Like life, sports are both simple and complex."

Miller-Havens chose to focus on baseball and basketball because they are known to her and appeared to be in an interesting contrast to one another. In 2000 she wrote, "Basketball is a war with battle plans played on an enclosed court. The action is highly regulated by a complex fouling system that controls the power and veracity of the game. In contrast I subscribe to former Commissioner of Baseball, Bart Giamatti's way of thinking about baseball. It is really a story of coming home, not combat. Played in a large park the confrontation between teams is given more space. Giamatti compared it to Odysseus's task of conquering a variety of obstacles in order to get home. Scoring requires getting to home plate. In baseball the player may hit the ball, get to base or not. LIke Odysseus, the Sirens and the Greek gods of weather must be dealt with by the player before he can get home. In basketball players are positioned and must execute the diagramed plan as a group moving together to enable the basket to be scored." 

Listen to an interview with artist Susan Miller-Havens (24:48)

Slideshow of selected works by Susan Miller-Havens