National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Adapting Whitman to the Stage: Swift to My Wounded

The National Portrait Gallery’s first dramatic publication, Swift to My Wounded: Walt Whitman and the Civil War, is now available at the NPG museum shop and also online.

Whitman’s experiences in Washington are at the very core of his poetry and his journals. After his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg in December of 1862, Walt Whitman came south from Manhattan and began work as a volunteer. He spent time with soldiers recovering in the Patent Office Building (now home to the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum), which had been converted into a hospital for much of the Civil War.

Whitman later worked in the building as a clerk for the Department of the Interior until he was fired by Secretary James Harlan in June 1865. Swift to My Wounded is a dramatic interpretation of those experiences as well as Whitman’s thoughts on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

In 2007 Swift to My Wounded was staged again at the McEvoy Auditorium, and in November 2008 the show was performed in the National Theatre’s Helen Hayes Gallery.

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The following is from the National Portrait Gallery’s Profile magazine.  It was written by Warren Perry, NPG researcher and playwright, and discusses the making of Swift to My Wounded: 

The goal of every playwright is very simple: keep the audience from leaving. Adapting a biography for the stage is similar to creating an original drama in that the writer/adaptor’s primary task is to make the work compelling and vital.

Three years ago, Tom Donahue, chairman of the Catholic University Drama Department; Bill Largess, artistic director for the Washington Stage Guild; and Jewell Robinson, director of public programs for the National Portrait Gallery, decided to produce a play based on Walt Whitman’s Civil War experiences for the 2006 reopening of the National Portrait Gallery. I was honored to be asked to participate and was given the job of adapting Whitman’s works for the stage.

To create the play that became Swift to My Wounded from Whitman’s poetry and journals—two obviously non-theatrical genres—I first organized Whitman’s original work into a sequence of events that the character Walt Whitman could reflect upon and discuss. Next, I added transitions and embellishments to the original language. This second process was a delicate act—after all, who would presume to think that the addition of his or her language could enhance Walt Whitman’s own words?

Still, a quick analysis of Whitman’s writing yields a very interesting note: Walt Whitman was a list maker. Both his poems and his journals are marked by lists—lists of battlefields, lists of states in the Union, lists of plants and flowers, lists of parts of the human body—limitless lists of all kinds. Consider this passage from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d:

Lo, body and soul—this land,
My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling
and hurrying tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the South and the
North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing
Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with
grass and corn.

Other than a splendid description of Whitman’s America, this partial stanza of forty-eight words contains a list of places and rivers (Manhattan, the South, the North, the Ohio, the Missouri), a list of characteristics of Manhattan (spires, tides, ships),and two things found on the prairie (grass, corn).

The beauty of these observations serves poetry well, but it does not necessarily work as well for the stage and for keeping the audience’s attention. Whitman’s journals are even more intensively loaded with lists than his poetry. At this point in the development of the work, I wrote several original passages into the play to reflect the topicality of Whitman’s war commentary, and to provide a storyline into which his journals and poetry could be interpolated.

Ordinarily, from a writer’s point of view, the work would then be complete, except for the suggestions and notes of an editor. Writing for stage, however, is unlike writing for print, and the collaborative input of the producer, the director, and the actor mandated some revisions and changes to the arc of the storyline, all of which served the first rule of drama, which is, of course, to keep the audience from leaving.

For more on Whitman, see this previous blog post, as well as the website for NPG's former exhibition "One Life: Walt Whitman, A Kosmos." And learn more about history of the Patent Office Building in the NPG's online exhibition "Temple of Invention: A History of a National Landmark."

Now On View: Edward Kennedy by Andy Warhol

Elected to the United States Senate in 1962, Edward Kennedy owed his early success to his close identification with his elder brothers, President John F. Kennedy, whose Senate term he completed, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.  Praising their commitment to public service, he acknowledged, "I'm very proud of that association."

Kennedy built on this legacy when he sought the presidency in 1980. Andy Warhol's silkscreened portrait, created as a campaign fund-raiser, plays off the colors of the American flag and suggests the glamour of politics by enhancing the candidate's features with thin red and blue lines and diamond dust.   Warhol’s portrait of Kennedy is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery, on the museum’s first floor.

Although Kennedy lost the 1980 Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter, whom Warhol had portrayed four years earlier, the long-serving senator became an influential leader in his party, addressing such issues as health care, education, and immigration reform.

Edward Moore Kennedy / Andy Warhol / Screenprint with diamond dust on board, 1980 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, 1932–2009

Of the four sons of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, only Edward Moore “Teddy” Kennedy lived past the age of fifty; Senator Kennedy died yesterday, August 25, at the age of seventy-seven. This portrait of Senator Kennedy, by artist Boris Chaliapin, is part of the collections at the National Portrait Gallery.

All of the Kennedy men led dynamic lives, although the three oldest sons died tragically and suddenly.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest Kennedy son, was killed on August 12, 1944, when the navy PB4Y Liberator he was flying with 22,000 pounds of dynamite exploded. Biographer Robert Dallek writes that the munitions arming system in the Kennedy-piloted craft was armed while in flight by a stray British electronic signal, a possibility unrealized by the U.S. air command, which was a “crucial, and fatal, error.”

John F. Kennedy, the second son and thirty-fifth president of the United States, an immensely popular and charismatic individual, was killed by an assassin in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Robert F. Kennedy, the third son, died in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president. Like his brother John, Robert was popular and charismatic; also, like John, Robert Kennedy was murdered by an assassin.

The remaining Kennedy son was committed to public service like his brothers, and Edward Moore Kennedy entered the United States Senate at the age of thirty, in 1962. During his time in office, Senator Kennedy proudly served as the standard-carrier for the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, although it is often recorded that his willingness to cross the aisle to bring a project to fruition is what made him a great statesman.

An automobile accident at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, in 1969 marred Senator Kennedy’s career, although he gathered some support in 1980 and made an unsuccessful bid to unseat incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Kennedy spent much of his time working on health-care initiatives, among them the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act of 1990. The senator’s Web site reads today, “Kennedy has authored more than 2,500 bills throughout his career in the United States Senate. Of those bills, several hundred have become Public Law.”

Sources:

Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John Kennedy (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003).

http://kennedy.senate.gov/

Edward Moore Kennedy / Boris Chaliapin / Pencil and tempera on board, 1968-1969 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Behind the Scenes: NPG Interns

Throughout the year, the National Portrait Gallery welcomes interns from all over the United States to participate in the daily operations of professional museum work.  Providing invaluable support to a wide variety of departments and projects, interns in turn receive unique experiences and a new cadre of professional skills.  As summer 2009 comes to a close, we present a brief selection of their impressions:

Caitlin Swindell, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services:
I learned a great deal about how art museums operate… My work incorporated entering data onto The Museum System, our gallery database, scanning and cropping a number of images from many galleries and museums, as well as responding to research requests and public inquiries. As a result I have learned a variety of skills that I know will prove to be useful later on in the work place and in life. 

Maggie Crosland, Department of Painting and Sculpture:
From day one I have felt not only welcomed but also that the entire NPG staff genuinely enjoys the interns and appreciates their work.  My supervisors on the [Outwin Boochever] Portrait Competition have gone out of their way to include me in as many elements of the project as possible.  I have never had a more career directing experience and at the end of two summers here I have a much clearer sense of what it is I want to do after I graduate. 

Teresa Adams, Design and Production Intern:
I have enjoyed my internship this summer. I have learned a lot about how the text for shows is installed and de-installed. I enjoyed helping to install the Thomas Paine show and de-installing the Duchamp show. This internship has been an eye-opener for me into the inner workings of the museum world.

Kendra Sykes, Department of History:
My summer in DC has been one of the most rewarding of my life... Besides conducting really great research, I was able to learn so much more about various museum professions and what they entail by talking with my supervisor as well as other staff at the NPG. I also learned that the execution of an exhibition requires a lot of work and time. I feel that my internship project was especially unique because I was able to work with material that was not always readily available—such as retrieving LIFE magazines from the Concourse—and this made my research all the more rewarding. I will truly miss it here at the NPG and I can’t wait to see the finished product of this exhibition!

Valerie Egan, Department of Education:
My internship with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has proven to be an invaluable professional experience.  As I enter the arts and cultural sector, the NPG staff has welcomed every opportunity to discuss their positions, career paths and provide professional guidance and resources.  I count myself very lucky to have benefited from the unique resources of Washington DC and the Smithsonian Institution.  

More information about the National Portrait Gallery's internship program is available on the museum's website, including an application form.  

Top photo, left to right: NPG Director Martin Sullivan, Ashley Holmes, Brooks Swett, Erica Cottam, Mike Maizels, Christopher Sutton, and Lyrica Taylor.

Bottom photo, left to right: Rachael Penman, Brittany Sigley, Maggie Crosland, Catherine Swindell, Teresa Adams, Valerie Egan, Amy Lowman, Kendra Sykes, and Internship Program Manager Leni Buff.

Portrait of Thomas Paine by Laurent Dabos

In this blog article, National Portrait Gallery historian Margaret Christman discusses the story behind Thomas Paine’s circa 1792 portrait by French artist Laurent Dabos. This recently acquired portrait is featured in the new exhibition “One Life: Thomas Paine, the Radical Founding Father” on the museum’s first floor.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose stirring words in Common Sense (1776) had paved the way for the Declaration of Independence, was not averse to posing for posterity. Yet, as fate would have it, a number of his portraits have dropped from sight. Discoveries of important images have been made, however, and the National Portrait Gallery has recently acquired one of them.

The story begins with Paine’s biographer, Moncure Daniel Conway, who in the 1880s began an exhaustive investigation in Europe and America of all things Paine. In his two-volume Life of Thomas Paine (1892), Conway revealed the existence of twelve full-length oil likenesses of leaders of the French Revolution— Paine the only non-Frenchman among them. These had been undertaken around 1791 and 1792 and reproduced, Conway stated, “in cheap woodcuts and distributed about France.” The dozen originals were in the possession of a wealthy Syracuse, New York, businessman.

In 1908, Conway—noting that the artist was Laurent Dabos of Toulouse—indicated that the painting of Thomas Paine had come into the hands of the widow of a British collector. (This is the small full-length acquired by the British National Portrait Gallery in 2006.)  Conway, however, was not aware that Dabos had also painted a bust version derived from the same picture. After turning up some years ago at a house sale in Northumberland, this beguiling image of America’s most radical Founding Father was brought to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery and purchased in the spring of 2008.

Dabos has captured Paine at a point of high drama. In 1787 he had returned temporarily to his native England from America in an effort to bring his design for an iron bridge to fruition. The 1789 storming of the Bastille in Paris rekindled Paine’s passion for “political Bridges,” and conservative Gouverneur Morris found him to be “inflated to the Eyes and big with a Litter of Revolution.”

Rebutting British conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution, Paine, in his two-part Rights of Man, hammered away at monarchy and the established order of the English constitution. Charged by the British with “wicked and seditious writings” in 1792, he fled to France where he was greeted with cannon salutes.

Elected to sit in the National Convention, he took his seat on September 21, 1792, eager—although he spoke no French—to help write a new constitution for a republic rooted in freedom and equality.

The beginning was an echo of Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But soon enough, Paine found himself on the wrong side of power. Spurning Paine’s advice to spare the life of Louis XVI and exile him to America, the Convention sent the king to the guillotine on January 21, 1793.

Before the year was out, the somewhat moderate Girondins, with whom Paine was allied, were overthrown by the Jacobins. One after another of the twelve luminaries whom Dabos had portrayed dropped off the stage—the Marquis de Lafayette imprisoned in Austria; Marat stabbed in his bath; others beheaded.

Paine was arrested on December 27, 1793, and, despite his claim as an American citizen, was confined to Luxembourg Palace prison on the basis of his birth in a country that was now at war with France. “I saw myself in continual danger,” Paine wrote years later to Samuel Adams. “My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and . . . I every day expected the same fate.”

When Paine emerged from his more than ten months’ imprisonment—after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre (another of Dabos’s subjects) and through the efforts of the new American minister, James Monroe—he was the only one of the “Dabos twelve” still alive on French soil.

Read more about the exhibition "One Life: Thomas Paine, the Radical Founding Father” in this article from Smithsonian's Around the Mall blog.

Thomas Paine / Laurent Dabos (1761–1835) / Oil on canvas, c. 1792 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 1921–2009

The National Portrait Gallery was saddened to hear this morning of the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She was a lifelong advocate of children’s health issues, and is best known for her tireless leadership in the struggle to improve and enhance the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Her life transformed the lives of many others.

Only a few months ago, on May 9, 2009, Eunice Kennedy Shriver was honored at the museum with the unveiling of her portrait. It was the first portrait commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery of an individual who has not served as president or first lady. The portrait is on display on the museum’s second floor rotunda. 

Shriver’s portrait was painted by artist David Lenz, winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006.  His winning painting, Sam and the Perfect World, portrays his son, an active participant in Special Olympics events. For this commission, Lenz embraced the idea of making a portrait of Shriver that would also include five persons with intellectual disabilities who have been involved in Special Olympics and the Best Buddies program: (left to right) Airika Straka, Katie Meade, Andy Leonard, Loretta Claiborne, and Marty Sheets.

In an interview with NPG curator Brandon Fortune, David Lenz remarked, “Mrs. Shriver’s work has done so much for so many people. It’s truly been, really, a civil rights movement. If you go back just four or five decades ago, people with intellectual disabilities were routinely neglected.  They were abused.  They were warehoused in institutions, sometimes in deplorable conditions.” He continued, “So the basic arrangement of the painting is, she is leading this group of athletes out of the darkness of the past, and into the light of acceptance, and understanding, and community. . . . Her work is so far-reaching and so profound that it’s kind of like a beautiful circle of light in the sky for everyone to see.”

Read more about Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her portrait by David Lenz, in this article from Smithsonian Magazine.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver with artist David Lenz (rear) and Special Olympics athletes (left to right) Katie Meade, Airika Straka, Loretta Claiborne, Andy Leonard, and Marty Sheets.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver / David Lenz, 2009 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Commissioned as part of the First Prize, Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2006

Portraits Alive! Performances by NPG’s Teen Ambassadors

The “Portraits Alive! Lost and Found” tour offers an innovative journey that breathes life into the people featured in paintings, prints, and photographs in the National Portrait Gallery. See the museum’s 2009 Teen Ambassadors perform brief biographical narratives featuring such well-known people as Rudolph Valentino, Lena Horne, Juliette Gordon Low, and Angela Davis.

The dramatic interpretations are written and performed by students from Washington-area high schools who have participated in the Portrait Gallery’s eight-week youth program that fuses the disciplines of history and theater.

To see the students’ impressive work, take the "Portraits Alive!" museum tour. Remaining dates are Tuesday, August 11 through Friday, August 14. Each tour begins at 2:15 p.m.; meet in the museum’s F Street Lobby. R

Read more about "Portraits Alive!" in this article from Smithsonian Magazine's Around the Mall blog.

Portrait of Merce Cunningham by Elaine de Kooning

                        © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Some found him bewilderingly outrageous. Many others proclaimed him a genius of the first rank. But on one point there is little room for dispute: Merce Cunningham was one of the great influences in the evolution of twentieth-century western dance. He died Sunday July, 26, at age ninety. This 1962 portrait of Cunningham by Elaine de Kooning is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

Joining Martha Graham’s dance company in 1939, Cunningham won his earliest distinction as the originator of major dance roles for a number of Graham’s productions, including Appalachian Spring. In the mid-1940s, he struck out on his own and, in tandem with avant-garde composer John Cage, began developing a dance form—termed aleatoric—that was characterized by an unstructured randomness. After founding his own company in 1953, Cunningham continued to innovate, raising dance to ever more abstract levels.

Today there are few areas of dance—both traditional and avant-garde—that have not been affected by Cunningham’s experimentation. His portraitist, Elaine de Kooning, was most often identified with the abstract expressionist school. But much of her work contained strong figurative elements, endowing her portraits with both the representational vision and the gestural brushwork of abstract expressionism.

Merce Cunningham / Elaine de Kooning / Oil on canvas, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, Inc. / © Elaine de Kooning Trust

Now On View: Katharine Hepburn’s Oscars

Bursting into Hollywood’s dream factory, Katharine Hepburn was an ironic misfit, sporting a highly stylized personality and headstrong independence that boldly announced a new kind of female presence on the silver screen. Her performances in Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond, (1981) won her four Best Actress Academy Awards, a record that still stands today. The National Portrait Gallery recently acquired the four Oscar statuettes as a gift from the Katharine Hepburn Estate; they are now on view in the “Twentieth-Century Americans” gallery on the museum’s third floor, next to a 1982 portrait of Hepburn by artist Everett Raymond Kinstler. 

Katharine Hepburn was honored first for her role in Morning Glory (1933). This statuette is a legend in itself. Although the origin of the term “Oscar” is debatable, its first use was in an article by entertainment columnist Sidney Skolsky. Reporting on the ceremony and stumped on the spelling of “statuette,” the term that was commonly used to refer to the award, Skolsky instead wrote that Hepburn “won the Oscar for her performance as Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory.”

The Oscar statuette was designed in 1927 by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons and sculpted by George Stanley. The figure stands on a film reel with five spokes, signifying the original branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers. The pedestal was raised in 1945, giving the Oscar a height of 13 ½ inches; it weighs 8 ½ pounds. Rather than its original gold-plated bronze, it is now composed of the alloy britannia and coated in twenty-four-karat gold.  These design changes are why Hepburn’s first Oscar, for Morning Glory (1933), appears smaller and less opulent.

Learn more about Katharine Hepburn by visiting the online exhibition for "KATE: A Centennial Celebration.”  This exhibition was on view at the National Portrait Gallery from November 2, 2007, to September 28, 2008.

Katharine Hepburn's four Best Actress Academy Awards (Morning Glory, 1933; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967; The Lion in Winter, 1968; On Golden Pond, 1981) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the estate of Katharine Hepburn

Nolan Ryan versus Robin Ventura, August 4, 1993

Nolan Ryan was ready to put the wraps on his career, and if anyone deserved a rest, it was Nolan Ryan in 1993. Since September of 1966, Nolan Ryan had been retiring batters, and the time had arrived for him to finally retire himself. He would be leaving baseball having pitched seven no-hitters and having struck out more batters (5,714 would be his career total) than any pitcher in the history of the game.

But Nolan Ryan had one more moment left.

On this date in 1993 in the Texas heat, the forty-six-year-old Ranger pitcher tagged Chicago White Sox third-baseman Robin Ventura in the ribs with a pitch that would have sent Ventura to first base had he not decided to visit the pitcher’s mound on his way. What ensued was perhaps the most one-sided brawl in baseball history; it was over pretty quickly, really. Ventura, twenty years younger than Ryan, charged the mound in retaliation for the pitch. Ryan put Ventura in a headlock, and then rained a rapid half-dozen punches into Ventura before Ryan’s catcher, Ivan Rodriguez, pulled the two men apart.

Because Ventura started the altercation, he was ejected from the game.

One witness to the game, the then-current owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush, said in his 2000 campaign memoir, A Charge to Keep, “I remember when Robin Ventura charged the mound, and Nolan gave him what the sportswriters called a ‘Texas whuppin.’ He looked like a beast protecting his lair. Ventura must have been irrational to charge someone as big and tough as Nolan. After the bench-clearing brawl, Ryan went on to pitch seven innings, allowing only one earned run. . . . The Ventura incident cemented the legend of Nolan Ryan.”

Nolan Ryan was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in July, 1999. This portrait of Nolan Ryan, by artist Ruth Munson, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in the “Champions” exhibition on the third floor mezzanine.

Nolan Ryan / Ruth Munson / Oil on canvas, 1994 - 1997 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Ruth Munson