National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Portrait of Elvis Presley by Red Grooms

Red Grooms, like fellow Tennessean William Eggleston (whose work is also featured in “One Life: Echoes of Elvis”), has often memorialized Elvis in his art.

In this image, he arms Elvis with his trademark flashy apparel and accompanying guitar, but a slightly closer observation will yield several other components of Elvis’s iconographic ensemble—the lip curl, the slick, combed-back hair, the omnipresent Cadillac, Graceland, and the stylized stage posture. One of the famous gates of Graceland is swung open behind the entertainer while a woman in a red dress and black high heels observes the singer from the porch of the mansion.

Red Grooms is to American art as Mark Twain is to American writing; he is the foremost humorist in his discipline. He is also a prolific artist who works in many media.

Warren Perry, curator of “One Life: Echoes of Elvis”, recently discussed Elvis Presley and his portrait by Red Grooms.  “One Life: Echoes of Elvis” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery through August 29, 2010. 

Listen to Warren Perry's Face-to-Face talk on Elvis Presley (23:13)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next talk is tomorrow (April 8), when curator Ann Shumard speaks about Lena Horne. 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.

Elvis Presley / Lithograph, 1987 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / © 2010 Red Grooms / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Article by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery 

Carl of the Cosmos

Carl Sagan was one of those American icons who had been quietly coming onto the public scene and then suddenly—bang! His name was known in every household of the nation. Then again, perhaps big bang would be more appropriate. By 1980, citizens of the United States were being lectured on their roles as citizens of the cosmos and Sagan had become a one-man, pro-galactic motivational spokes-physicist. His cause was the universe; his tool was science.

Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Sagan attended high school in New Jersey and later received his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Chicago. He worked with National Aeronautics and Space Administration from its earliest hours, contributing to many major expeditionary projects. Not one to pander to dogmas, Sagan boldly asserted in his 1980 television series Cosmos, “Evolution is a fact, not a theory.”

Among his many distinctions and awards, Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Dragons of Eden, a discourse on evolution and human development, in 1978. He published hundreds of articles and treatises in his lifetime. Perhaps most importantly, he is credited with the vast increase in the popularity of science studies, resulting from both his work in television and his authorship of such reader-friendly, science-themed books such as Broca's Brain, Intelligent Life in the Universe, and Murmurs of Earth. Carl Edward Sagan died in December 1996.

 - Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery 

Carl Sagan / Raul Vega, / Color photograph on paper , 1980 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

Robert Penn Warren, born April 24, 1905

After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. . . . But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men 

Robert Penn Warren is one of the most gifted and prolific American authors of the latter twentieth century; his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men (1946) is one of the most significant books in American literature. Educated at Vanderbilt, Warren first gained attention as one of the "Agrarians," a group of conservative southern writers who wanted to slow social change, especially in race relations. Warren was too progressive for the group and subsequently recanted his early support for racial segregation, becoming an important voice for integration.

Warren made the South the theme of his writings, which were voluminous. A major novelist, he was also an important poet, one whose combination of the vernacular and modernism achieved the fusion of the old and the new, which he had attempted to find—unsuccessfully—with the Agrarians. He was twice poet laureate of the United States.

Robert Penn Warren /  Marcella Comès Winslow / Oil on canvas, 1945 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Friends of Marcella Comès Winslow

Birthday of Daniel Chester French

Sculptor Daniel Chester French was born 160 years ago today.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid the presence of Daniel Chester French in Washington, D.C.

The Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922, contains French’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, which is possibly the most prominent portrait of the sixteenth president of the United States in the world. One might argue that the obverse of the Lincoln penny is a more widely distributed and more widely known image of Lincoln. However, the penny's reverse contains a micro-image of French's seated Lincoln within the larger memorial, and one cannot have the head of the penny without the tail, reinforcing the Lincoln Memorial's ubiquitous recognition.

Biographer Adeline Adams wrote of French:

No American sculptor has received a more general acclaim from his fellow countrymen. East and West, North and South, our cities possess sterling examples of his work. Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard have set the seal of their approval upon him by honorary degrees. Among the artistic professions, the glad recognition of his powers was from the first a matter of course. Suffice it to mention here his membership in the National Academy of Design, the American Institute of Architects, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Sculpture Society. Of this last body, he was president for two terms, and from 1910 until his death (in 1931), honorary president. This society also chose him as the first recipient of its medal of honor, and he was among the first to receive the Architectural League's medal of honor in sculpture.

Although French's monument to Lincoln is certainly the greatest work for which he is known, it is only one work in a lifetime of sculpture. French was also the creator of memorials for Francis Parkman (Boston), Thomas Gallaudet (Washington, D.C.), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Concord, Massachusetts), among many others. French's statue of the Minute Man (below) stands on the site of the Old North Bridge at Concord—with Lexington, the location of the first battle with the British in the American Revolution.

The Lincoln Memorial, photo by Warren Perry.

The Minute Man, by Daniel Chester French, in Concord, Massachusetts. Photograph by Warren Perry

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Daniel Chester French, / Mary Evelyn Beatrice Longman  / Bronze relief , 1926 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of the artist, 1936

Cited:
Adeline Adams, Daniel Chester French: Sculptor (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932).

Birthday of America's Sweetheart: Mary Pickford

"She was an excellent businesswoman," National Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson observes, adding, "but there were a couple of eccentricities about her. First, when her mother died, Pickford was in her forties, and she cut off all her ringlets, almost as a reaction to being rid of her 'Hollywood mom' type mother. Those ringlets are in a box in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History; I've seen them. Second, after she lost her star status in the 1930s, she set her mind to destroying the old nitrate films that made her famous. Luckily, she was stopped by friends."

Pickford was born on April 8, 1892, in Toronto as Gladys Louise Smith, and as a child she acted in theater first in Toronto, then in New York. By seventeen, she was in the movies—before the first decade of the twentieth century had closed. Before she was thirty, she was co-founder of United Artists—before the second decade of the twentieth century had closed. She was powerful, pretty, and loved by the world, not just America. Sometime after filming Taming of the Shrew in 1929 with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, biographer Eileen Whitford records:

Fairbanks's wanderlust demanded they continue on to Athens, where their undimmed fame     caused a gratifying riot. A group of stevedores who had climbed up on the running board of the car even asked the visitors to autograph their ears. . . . In Tokyo a crowd of ten thousand nearly crushed her. Fearing for their lives, her husband hopped on the shoulders of Chuck Lewis, his trainer, and skipped through a window, then reached down and pulled Mary up behind him.

After cutting her hair in June of 1928, Pickford was largely criticized by her fans, and as Whitford notes, "Pickford lashed back, threatening retirement if nothing but a head of hair was keeping her in pictures."

Another act of destruction, this one with more long-term cultural ramifications, was thwarted by Pickford's cronies; rather than destroy her films as she had once intended, she eventually donated a large body of her work to the Library of Congress, although the donation fell short of being a complete one. Mary Pickford, Hollywood's first starlet, made more than two hundred films, her last being in 1933. She died in Santa Monica in 1979.

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Suggested reading:

Eileen Whitfield, Mary Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (New York: Faber and Faber, 1997).

Kevin Brownlow, Mary Pickford Rediscovered: Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).

Image: Mary Pickford / Henry Major / Pencil on paper, c. 1929 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Jo Davidson

American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein was a high priestess of early-twentieth-century modernism for the many who visited her fabled Paris apartment. She collected and promoted the art of the avant-garde, including that of Picasso and Matisse, and her own abstract, repetitive prose inspired the experiments of playwrights, composers, poets, and painters.

“There was an eternal quality about her,” sculptor Jo Davidson wrote. “She somehow symbolized wisdom.” He chose to depict her here as “a sort of modern Buddha.” Delighted by the sculpture, Stein composed one of her famous prose portraits of Davidson, later published in Vanity Fair alongside a photograph of this work.

Wendy Wick Reaves, curator at the National Portrait Gallery, recently discussed Gertrude Stein and her portrait by Jo Davidson. The sculpture is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in the exhibition “Twentieth-Century Americans” on the museum’s third floor.

Listen to Wendy Wick Reaves' Face-to-Face talk on Gertrude Stein (22:43)

Face-to-Face occurs every Thursday evening at the National Portrait Gallery. The next talk is tomorrow (April 8), when Warren Perry, writer and researcher at NPG, speaks about Elvis Presley. 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.

Gertrude Stein / Jo Davidson / Terra cotta, 1922-1923 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Dr. Maury Leibovitz

The United States Enters World War I

Although blood had been splashed across the soils of Europe since 1914, it was not until April 6, 1917 that the United States formally entered the conflict with a declaration.  When the day finally arrived however, the American war machine was wholly committed to the action.  And though wars had been waged across Europe since the continent was first peopled, the hellishness of this most recent event was unprecedented.  Two developments underwrote this new horror- political alliances and new ways to kill.  Alliances between nations increased the scope of combat involvement significantly, while technical developments in chemistry and machinery enhanced the ferocity of death—making.

Wilfred Owens' poem Dulce et Decorum est is the most recognized poem of the experience and it describes too well the abject nature of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling, 
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, 
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . 
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, 
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

Sadly, Owens, a British soldier serving in France, was killed just prior to the armistice. 

The American experience in the war laid the foundations for the what Gertrude Stein described as a "lost generation" and the age of modernism.  Writers such as Ernest Hemingway (right) and John Dos Passos served as ambulance drivers and their works are marked by the loss of faith which punctuated their return from the war.  Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms chronicles the journey of Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver, whose loss is comprehensive.  To affirm Henry's total personal catastrophe, Hemingway removes hope by having Frederic's lover, Catherine, give birth to a stillborn child; Catherine dies quickly thereafter and Hemingway closes the work with Frederic viewing Catherine's lifeless body.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good.  It was like saying good-by to a statue.  After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

The protagonist is alone in the world—and in the rain, no less—and is left with the crisis of his existence.

That the First World War had such an impact is no surprise.  Millions were dead and wounded and Europe had never known such colossal loss.  One positive result of the war was the attempt at building a League of Nations, an idea of American President Thomas Woodrow Wilson.  However, the United States Congress was not in favor of the League of Nations and Wilson suffered a stroke in October of 1919 while campaigning for his ideas.  He never recovered his health and when he died in 1924, the war to end all wars claimed yet another victim.   

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Ernest Miller Hemingway / Renate Bolz / Oil on canvas, 1962 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

"You Are Wanted by U.S. Army" / John J. Pershing / K. M. Bara, c. 1917 / Color lithographic poster / National Portrait Gallery

Excerpt from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

 
Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929-1968)  by Jack Lewis Hiller (b. 1930), Gelatin silver print, 1960, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: gift of Jack Lewis Hiller