J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010

Portrait of J.D. Salinger by Robert Vickrey, now on view

     Art © Robert Vickrey/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

"A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I'm going to apply myself when I go back to school next September.  It's such a stupid question, in my opinion.  I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?  The answer is, you don't.  I think I am, but how do I know?  I swear it's a stupid question."
—Holden Caulfield

Jerome David Salinger had one of the great successes of all time with The Catcher in the Rye (1951). He then vanished, publishing only a few collections of short stories and emerging only to sue people who attempted to write about him; his last publication was in 1965. Yet Catcher in the Rye remains a classic. Its teenaged narrator Holden Caulfield’s account of a weekend in Manhattan continues to speak to disaffected adolescents kicking against the “phonies.” It has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide and is still occasionally banned by education administrators who fear its corrupting impact on alienated youth.

Here, in a way that Salinger (and Caulfield) would have appreciated, artist Robert Vickery interprets the book’s title literally and paints the author against an amber wave of grain. The portrait was created for the September 15, 1961, edition of Time magazine.

J. D. Salinger by Robert Vickrey, 1961, tempera on board; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Comments

[Siger Brabant]

"Against an amber wave of grain"? Doesn't the color and style and the placement of the building immediately call to mind Wyeth's 'Christina's World'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina%27s_World It seems that that must have been the artist's intention.

[National Portrait Gallery]

Thank you for your comment and your interest in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

Robert Vickrey and Andrew Wyeth are 20th century contemporaries who both often worked with egg tempera. It is possible, then, that Vickrey’s J.D. Salinger is an homage to Wyeth’s Christina’s World.

However, the “building” you refer to is actually a human figure peering over a cliff. Vickrey’s portrait is a direct reference to the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield. Caulfield aspires to serve as the guardian of a group of children playing in a rye field adjacent a cliff. Whatever the subtler implications, the portrait makes an overt play to Salinger’s novel.