National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

In the Gallery: Artist Ray Beldner

Ray Beldner makes art from the stuff of everyday life. His works can be found in public and private collections, including the Federal Reserve Board, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and here at the National Portrait Gallery.

Two of Ray Beldner’s works, Avec Ma Langue Dans Ma Joue, or With My Language in My Game, and Duchamp Tout Fait are on display as part of the museum's exhibition “Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture.” This exhibition showcases approximately 100 never-before-assembled portraits and self-portraits of Marcel Duchamp ranging from 1912 to the present, including 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, Douglas Gordon, and Ray Beldner. See the exhibition while you can; its last day is this Sunday, August 2.

Avec Ma Langue Dans Ma Joue, or With My Language in My Game

Ray Beldner’s work, part of a larger series based on Duchamp’s small sculptural pieces, was inspired by Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959), which combines a plaster cast of Duchamp’s cheek with a pencil-drawn sketch of his profile.

Here Beldner has substituted his own image. The plaster cast of his cheek is flocked with ground money dust, with the result that the work, as Beldner jokes, looks like a “moldy” version of the original. The use of money dust references Duchamp’s ambivalent relationship to the art market, while Beldner’s remark about mold brings to mind Duchamp’s belief that works of art lose their importance, or become “stale,” over time.

Beldner’s translation of Duchamp’s English title plays on the multiple meanings of the French words langue and joue, paying tribute to Duchamp’s love of manipulating language.

Duchamp Tout Fait

In this composite image, Ray Beldner used digital technology to bring together twenty-six well-known images of Marcel Duchamp. By compiling images from throughout Duchamp’s life, Beldner effectively collapses time and merges Duchamp’s various identities into one compositional space.

As Beldner notes: “It’s a subtle photo, but if given enough time to reflect on it, one can discern many likenesses—from Rrose Sélavy to the artist at rest in front of his chessboard.” The title references Duchamp’s readymades—the everyday objects, such as a bottle rack and a urinal—that he designated as works of art. The commonly used French phrase “tout fait” roughly translates to “ready made.” By pairing the artist’s name with this phrase, or with Beldner’s construction of him, Duchamp himself becomes the “readymade” for this work of art.

Listen to Ray Beldner's gallery talk (39:58)

Avec Ma Langue Dans Ma Joue, or With My Language in My Game / Ray Beldner / Wood and plaster, flocked with ground money dust, 2007 / Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco and Caren Golden Fine Arts, New York City

Duchamp Tout Fait / Ray Beldner / Digital pigment print mounted on panel, 2007 / Courtesy of Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco and Caren Golden Fine Arts, New York City

The Body Art of Bruce Nauman

This article is written by Mike Maizels, a graduate student at the University of Virginia who is interning at the National Portrait Gallery. He writes about this 1990 self-portrait etching by Bruce Nauman, on display in the “Reflections/Refractions” exhibition.

A few lines. That is all Bruce Nauman seems to have given us here. When I toured “Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century” (on view at the National Portrait Gallery until August 16), I was struck by the sparseness of Nauman’s work, especially given the richness of its neighbors’. Hans Hofmann gives us a heavily worked over ink drawing that seems to testify to his immense energy. Chuck Close lets us literally see his fingerprints in his work, imparting a sense of his physical as well as visual presence. Robert Rauschenberg even offers us a monumental three part self-portrait that includes personal photos and an abbreviated, written autobiography. But Bruce Nauman gives us only a few lines.

But they are a strange few lines—they seem capable of making us move. I remember very clearly what I did when I first saw this piece. I tilted my head sideways and up, and then opened my mouth slightly, trying to place myself into that ambiguous gesture and figure out what on earth was going on. (I watched my father do the same thing, without prompting, when he saw the show.) I would argue, in all seriousness, that this turning-your-head-sideways-and-up-ness is the key to understanding not just this individual piece, but Nauman’s work as a whole (which just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, perhaps the most prestigious award in the international art world).

When his career was taking off in the 1970s, Nauman spoke emphatically about one of the most important goals of his practice. He wanted to use the human body as an art medium. As he writes, “If you can manipulate clay and end up with art, you can manipulate yourself in it as well. It has to do with using the body as a tool, an object to manipulate.” And as Nauman alludes here, whose body he is interested in is an open-ended question. He starts off, in his career and in his quotation, making art out of his own body (performance pieces, films of his body, casts of his body parts). But as his career developed, he began wanting to make art out of the viewer’s body—out of your body.

For me, the turning-your-head-sideways-and-up-ness of this piece encapsulates the core Nauman’s bodily art-making. The artist makes a symbolic gesture with his body (drawing a profile, creating a series of confining corridors, filming his tongue in slow motion) and the viewer follows with a reflexive, equally corporal response. Artist moves and viewers counter-move in a duet mediated by the physical work, which is usually quite sparse. The dance, however, is often extremely rich.

Bruce Nauman Self-Portrait/ Drypoint on paper, 1990/ National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; the Ruth Bowman and Harry Kahn Twentieth-Century American Self-Portrait Collection / Conserved with funds from the Smithsonian Women's Committee

One Giant Leap: Apollo 11

Speaking before Congress in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked for an American commitment to landing a man on the moon "before this decade is out." That commitment was indeed made, and eight years later, on July 16, 1969, three American astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—lifted off from Cape Kennedy, Florida, in their Apollo 11 spacecraft bound for the moon.

On July 20 they reached their destination. That day, at 10:56 p.m. (eastern daylight time), with an estimated 600 million people around the world watching him on television, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface uttering the words "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Shortly thereafter, while Michael Collins orbited above in the mission’s command ship, Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on this first human exploration of the moon. So a fantasy, as old perhaps as humanity itself, had become a reality. Soon after the astronauts returned safely to earth, artist Ronald Anderson set about doing this picture commemorating their moon landing. In preparation, he interviewed all three of his subjects, and after the painting was finished, they autographed it for him. 

It is a very beautiful thing, and most gratifying to the sight, to behold the body of the moon, distant from us almost sixty earthly radii, as if it were no farther away than two such measures--so that its diameter appears almost thirty times larger, its surface nearly nine hundred times, and its volume twenty-seven thousand times as large as when viewed with the naked eye. In this way one may learn with all certainty of sense evidence that the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the earth’s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.

- Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, 1610

Apollo 11 Crew (clockwise from top) Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Michael Collins / Ronald Anderson / Oil on prepared board, 1969 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Blakemore, Midland, Texas; Mr. and Mrs. Omar Harvey, Dallas, Texas; Mr. and Mrs. R.K. Keitz, Dallas, Texas; Col. and Mrs. Thomas A.P. Krock, Dallas, Texas; Mr. and Mrs. W.R. Lloyd, Jr., Houston, Texas; Dr. and Mrs. J.R. Maxfield, Dallas, Texas; Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Nagorny, Jr., Houston, Texas; Dr. and Mrs. H.B. Renfrow, Dallas, Texas; Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Taylor, Dallas, Texas; Dr. and Mrs. J. Robert Terry, Miami, Florida; Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Young, Dallas, Texas; and an anonymous donor

Andrew Johnson: Reviled and Dutiful Statesman of Tennessee

He was a patriot accused of treachery. He had every reason to loathe public service after his impeachment in 1868, but he continued to serve America and eventually became a U. S. senator after his single term as president (1865–69). He lost a son in the Civil War, but understood the necessity of war in preserving the Union. He was a slaveowner who freed his slaves and then ordered the emancipation of all slaves in his home state. His greatest accomplishment was considered a joke in his own day.

Had Andrew Johnson been told at the age of fourteen that he would someday be president of the United States, he certainly would have been skeptical. At the time, in the early 1820s, he was apprenticed to a tailor, and he could neither read nor write. Later, Andrew Johnson was a tailor by trade, an orator by gift, and eventually a politician by demand. After running away from North Carolina to Tennessee, he married Eliza McCardle, a young woman in Greeneville, where Johnson had chosen to settle. Eliza helped him learn to read and to write, and Johnson became involved in local politics when he was elected to the Greeneville Board of Aldermen at age nineteen.

Johnson’s rise to the presidency included a stop on practically every rung of the American political ladder. He began with his service as a town alderman and was elected mayor of Greenville in 1830. He subsequently served in the Tennessee State House, the Tennessee State Senate, and as a representative in the United States Congress. In 1853 he was elected governor of Tennessee; after four years, he was elected United States senator. President Abraham Lincoln chose Johnson for a running mate in 1864 because Johnson was a southern Union loyalist, and Lincoln wanted to increase his chances for reelection by broadening his support base. Lincoln and Johnson, of course, won the 1864 election, and Johnson became president upon Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Andrew Johnson held almost every possible electable office at the municipal, state, and federal level for a man of his day.

Why was he so reviled? Johnson believed that the South should be welcomed back into the Union in the aftermath of the Civil War; most of Congress did not agree. For his convictions, Andrew Johnson became the first president to be impeached. Choosing to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his cabinet, Johnson gave Congress the impetus to bring him up on charges of violating the Tenure of Office Act. The dispute was a simple one over the question of whether or not the president had the power to fire an appointed official without congressional approval.

Ultimately, Johnson was not convicted, but the harm was permanent. The Democratic Party nominated Horatio Seymour in the election of 1868, and Seymour lost the electoral vote to Republican Ulysses Grant by 134 electoral votes, although they were only separated in the popular vote by about 320,000 (less than 6 percent).

Adding to the humiliation of his impeachment and his failure to be renominated by his party was the horrible fact that Johnson lost his son Charles in service to the cause. A medical officer in the Union army, Charles lost his life when he was thrown from a horse in Nashville in April 1863.

Johnson’s legacy is an interesting one. The purchase of Alaska in 1867, known jokingly as “Seward’s Folly” for Johnson’s Secretary of State William Seward, greatly increased the size of America and was not truly appreciated until much later. Andrew Johnson’s home in Greeneville and his final resting place nearby (Andrew Johnson National Cemetery, also in Greeneville) are amazing tributes to a disliked but diligent public servant. Tucked away in the hills of east Tennessee, the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site is one of the National Park Service’s hidden treasures. The site boasts a modern museum, Johnson’s tailor shop, early childhood home, and Homestead, Andrew and Eliza Johnson’s home beginning in 1851.

Few presidents started out life with less than Andrew Johnson, and fewer still inspired such a palpable amount of venom in their adversaries. Disliked by many in his home state for his collusion with President Lincoln, Johnson was also despised by multitudes on Capitol Hill for his willingness to reconcile the defeated South with the Union. Until the end of his days, the former president chose to serve his state and his nation, and he was serving as senator from Tennessee at the time of his death in 1875.

This portrait of President Andrew Johnson, by Washington Bogart Cooper, 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.

Special thanks to the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site and National Park Service rangers Susan Georgion and Burke Greear for taking time to talk with us during the research for this journal.  

Andrew Johnson, early home, Greeneville, Tennessee.  Photo by Warren Perry.

Andrew Johnson grave site, Greeneville, Tennessee. Photo by Warren Perry.

Andrew Johnson monument, Greeneville, Tennessee. Photo by Warren Perry.

Andrew Johnson /  Washington Bogart Cooper / Oil on canvas, after 1866 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Mary McLeod Bethune, 134th Anniversary of Her Birth

“Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it may be a diamond in the rough.” These are the words of African American education advocate and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who earned national prominence for her lifelong devotion to improving educational opportunities for blacks in the United States. Her 1943 portrait, by Betsy Graves Reyneau, is on view in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Twentieth Century Americans” exhibition on the museum’s third floor. 

The fifteenth of seventeen children born to former slaves in South Carolina a decade after the end of the Civil War, Bethune (1875–1955) was accustomed to making something from nothing. She and her siblings used the charred splinters from burned logs as pencils and mashed elderberries for ink. Bethune searched through the city dump and trash piles behind hotels for discarded items that her family could use.

Bethune applied this same ingenuity to beginning her first school, believing that education offered African Americans the best route out of poverty.  She taught two African American girls in a run-down old house, using packing crates for furniture and meat-wrapping paper to write on. Tuition was fifty cents a week when Bethune first opened the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904 as an elementary school with just five pupils. However, Bethune never refused to educate a child whose parents could not afford to pay.

From its humble beginnings, Bethune’s school for girls began to accept boys as well. It eventually grew into a secondary school, then a junior college. In 1923 it merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville. Renamed Bethune-Cookman College in 1929, its first four-year degrees in teacher education were conferred in 1943. Hanging in the background of Bethune’s portrait is a picture of Faith Hall, the first major building erected at the college.

Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Statue in Lincoln Park, Washington, DC. Photo by Benjamin Bloom.

Mary McLeod Bethune / Betsy Graves Reyneau / Oil on canvas, 1943 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation

Portrait of George Washington by Robert Edge Pine

George Washington, appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental army, took command of a ragtag force of some 17,000 men in July 1775. He kept an army together for the next eight-and-a-half years—losing more battles than he won—but effectively ended the war with his victory at Yorktown in October 1781.

Mission accomplished, Washington—a hero who could have been king—resigned his military commission before Congress on December 23, 1783, and retired to Mount Vernon. Here, the man all artists yearned to portray posed in his uniform for English artist Robert Edge Pine. He wryly observed, "I am so hackneyed to the touches of the Painter's pencil, that I am now altogether at their beck, and sit like patience on a Monument."

Laura Simo of Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens recently spoke about this portrait of Washington at a Face-to-Face portrait talk. The 1785 portrait is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the “America’s Presidents” exhibition on the museum’s first floor.

Listen to Laura Simo's Face-to-Face talk on George Washington (29:32)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next Face-to-Face talk is Thursday, July 9, when museum director Martin Sullivan speaks about Margaret Sanger. 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.

George Washington / Robert Edge Pine / Oil on canvas, 1785 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait Competition: Finalists and Shortlisted Artists Selected

The National Portrait Gallery has selected the artists whose work will be included in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009. The juried exhibition includes 49 works that will be on view from Oct. 23 through Aug. 22, 2010. Of these works, submitted by people from across the nation, seven were selected for the shortlist. Each of these seven will win cash awards, and the first prize will include an award of $25,000 and a commission from the museum to create a portrait of a living individual for the museum’s permanent collection. The prizes will be announced in a private event Oct. 22.

“The second Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition represents a significant milestone for the National Portrait Gallery,” said Martin Sullivan, director of the museum. “We opened the entries to all visual arts media and received a wonderful response.”

The competition received 3,300 entries in a variety of visual arts media, from digital animation and video to large-scale drawings, prints and photographs and a plethora of painted and sculpted portraits. It was open to artists working in the United States who had created portraits after Jan. 1,2007, in any visual art form. The exhibition of the finalists’ works includes paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs and video.

External jurors for the competition were Wanda M. Corn, professor emerita in art history at Stanford University; Kerry James Marshall, artist; Brian O’Doherty, artist and critic; and Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker. Jurors from the National Portrait Gallery were Martin E. Sullivan, director; Carolyn K. Carr, deputy director and chief curator; and Brandon Brame Fortune, curator of painting and sculpture.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition is a triennial event that invites figurative artists to submit entries in all media to be considered for prizes and display at the National Portrait Gallery. During the exhibition, museum and Web site visitors can vote for their favorite pieces as part of the “People’s Choice Award,” and winners of this part of the competition will be announced Jan. 24, 2010. The endowment from the late Virginia Outwin Boochever has enabled the museum to conduct a national portrait competition and exhibition that encourages artists to explore the art of portraiture.

Congratulations to the Portrait Competition finalists and shortlisted artists (*denotes artists on the shortlist):

Mequitta Ahuja, Houston
Jason Shaw Alexander, Los Angeles
Jen Bandini, Queens, N.Y.
Margaret Bowland, Brooklyn, N.Y.*
Benita Carr, Atlanta
Laura Chasman, Roslindale, Mass.
Mark Cummings, Newport Beach, Calif.
Yolanda del Amo, Brooklyn, N.Y.*
Armando Dominguez, Miami
Jenny Dubnau, Jackson Heights, N.Y.
Daniel Mark Duffy, Newtown, Conn.
David Eichenberg, Toledo, Ohio
Gaela Erwin, Louisville, Ky.*
Chambliss Giobbi, New York
David Gracie, Omaha, Neb.
Leor Grady, New York
Anne Harris, Riverside, Ill.
Patricia Horing, Larchmont, N.Y.
Anna Killian, Pensacola, Fla.
Erika Larsen, Hoboken, N.J.
David Dodge Lewis, Farmville, Va.
Lisa Lindvay, Chicago
Francesco Lombardo, Marshall, N.C.
Perin Mahler, Grand Rapids, Mich.
John Manion, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Bruce McKaig, Washington, D.C.
Pavel Melecky, Arlington, Texas
Sam Messer, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Paul Mindell, Norwalk, Conn.
Matthew Mitchell, Amherst, Mass.
Samantha Mitchell, New York
Austin Parkhill, Arvada, Colo.
Sonia Paulino, Los Angeles
Cliffton Peacock, Charleston, S.C.
Stanley Rayfield, Richmond, Va.*
Emil Robinson, Cincinnati*
Kate Sammons, Los Angeles
Philip Schirmer, Sargentville, Maine
Justin Shaw, Lincoln, Neb.
Satomi Shirai, Astoria, N.Y.
Michael A. Smith, Ottsville, Pa.
Ben Tolman, Washington, D.C.
Jim Torok, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Margaret Trezevant, Tampa, Fla.
Lien Truong, Eureka, Calif.
Clarissa Payne Uvegi, New York
Adam Vinson, Jenkintown, Pa.*
Dave Woody, Fort Collins, Colo.*
John Randall Younger, Charlottesville, Va.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition jury at work on May 28, 2009