National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

A New Monumental Presence: MLK on the National Mall

 
Photo by Warren Perry

Washington is populated with memorials. Of the highest order are the monuments chosen for sites on the National Mall, the space bound at the east terminus by the United States Capitol, and at the west terminus by the Lincoln Memorial. The works permitted to be placed in that area are thoroughly considered and decided upon by several entities, among them the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

One of the recent academic contributions to this discussion is art historian Kirk Savage’s Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Savage notes, “The planning authorities in charge of caring for the landscape have an understandable interest in maintaining [the National Mall] as is and preventing it from being overrun by new monuments.”

Every piece of cultural architecture that goes onto the Mall is strictly considered in terms of meaning, design, location, construction—criteria that feed into the final decision of any memorial’s or museum’s potential existence on the most treasured of national spaces.

Obviously, these considerations take time. The Martin Luther King Memorial, to be dedicated on August 28, 2011, is a visual testimony to that process.

The memorial was first envisioned in the mid-1980s by members of Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity to which King belonged, and the dream of that group has taken more than a quarter-century to put into place. The date, August 28, was selected because it is the anniversary of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

While Martin Luther King Jr.’s presence in Washington is memorialized in the films and photographs of the August 1963 march on Washington, the granite memorial will serve as a permanent presence of the civil rights leader’s time in the nation’s capital.

The sculpture was executed by Chinese artist Lei Yixin and stands thirty feet high; it is a projection from the center of two large pieces collectively called the Mountain of Despair.

Visually, it appears as though King has transcended the Mountain of Despair and stepped forward into the promised land.

Although this monument was discussed on paper and in the studio for years before this day, the location of the MLK memorial—between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials on the Tidal Basin—and its sheer monumentality will provide scholars, art critics, and patrons a subject for discussion for centuries to come. 

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

For additional reading on Martin Luther King Jr., please see this article from our blog.

 

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

Martin Luther King, Jr. / Boris Chaliapin / Watercolor and pencil on board, 1957 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Gift of Time magazine

Cited:
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

James Baldwin: The Writer and the Witness

By Marcy Held, intern, National Portrait Gallery, Center for Electronic Research and Outreach Services

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Writer James Baldwin remembered this as “the best piece of advice I ever got [though] it’s not advice, it’s an observation.”

Whether one views these words as advice or as observation, it is clear that Baldwin lived by these words as he built his career as a civil rights–era author, orator, and activist that is distinguished by a level of talent and passion that was nothing short of remarkable.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, on August 2, 1924. He was raised, along with his eight younger brothers and sisters, by his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, and his stepfather, David Baldwin, a preacher and laborer from New Orleans. Biographer David Leeming describes James Baldwin’s origins and their influence upon his career.

Rising out of Harlem, James Baldwin used the mystery of his parentage and his humble birth, and the ineffectualness of his stepfather, as starting points for a lifelong witnessing of the moral failure of the American nation—and of Western civilization in general—and the power of love to revive it.

While attending De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Baldwin was constantly torn between pursuing his own intellectual development and helping to provide for his family. In high school Baldwin decided that he wanted to become a writer, and he befriended fellow classmates Emile Capouya (a future author) and Richard Avedon (a future photographer). Baldwin’s stepfather wanted him to become a preacher and did not approve of his association with white friends, but Baldwin rejected his stepfather’s views and turned away from the church completely during his adolescence.

After graduating from high school, Baldwin lived in various areas in New York and New Jersey, working odd jobs alongside Capouya and writing at night. During this time, Capouya introduced Baldwin to Richard Wright, author of Native Son. Wright became a mentor to Baldwin and even helped him edit the beginnings of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Wright was so impressed with Baldwin’s work that he nominated the younger writer for the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Fund, which Baldwin won. However, Baldwin became so overwhelmed by Wright’s support that he began to have difficulty writing.

Baldwin also found it hard to keep a job because of consistent encounters with racism in the workplace, and in 1948 he bought a plane ticket with the remaining money from his trust fund winnings and went to live in Paris.

In the introduction to his later work, The Amen Corner, Baldwin recalls how he first arrived in Paris “with forty dollars and no French.” But despite these hardships, Baldwin was able to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain and to find a publisher in New York.

In order to purchase a plane ticket back to New York, Baldwin had to borrow money from actor Marlon Brando, a friend from Greenwich Village in the early 1940s. After returning home in 1952, Baldwin only stayed for three months before going back to Paris to wait for the publication of his novel.

Baldwin followed the success of Mountain with a nonfiction book, Notes of a Native Son, in 1955 and then his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, in 1956. Author Toni Morrison describes Baldwin’s writing style in her essay “Life in His Language” as published in Quincy Troupe’s James Baldwin: The Legacy:

No one possessed or inhabited language for me the way you did. You made American English honest—genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power.

Baldwin gained fame as a social activist in addition to being known as an author; he dedicated his life to analyzing the alienation felt by minority groups living in the United States and to the cause of gaining rights particularly for racial minorities and for the gay community.

Of his own social activism Baldwin stated, “The sexual question and the racial question have always been entwined. . . . If Americans can mature on the level of racism, then they have to mature on the level of sexuality.” Baldwin was a prominent member of CORE (Congress On Racial Equality) and advocated reform alongside such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

Despite experiencing periods of intense loneliness and contemplation, Baldwin was also a charismatic figure, with a wide circle of friends, including jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and authors Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. Baldwin continued to travel and write, and had published seventeen works by the time of his death on December 1, 1987, in St. Paul de Vence, France.

Although Baldwin is consistently labeled as a spokesman for a generation and for minority groups, he always said that he identified more as “a witness to whence I came, where I am. Witness to what I’ve seen and the possibilities that I think I see.”

James Arthur Baldwin / Beauford Delaney / Pastel on paper, 1963 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

James Arthur Baldwin / Boris Chaliapin, 1963  / Watercolor and pencil on board / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

 

Works Cited:
James Baldwin, The Amen Corner (New York: Dial Press, 1968).

David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

Lisa Rosset,  James Baldwin: Author (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989).

Quincy Troupe, ed., James Baldwin: The Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).

W. J. Weatherby,  James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989).

 

NPG Staff Profile: Jennifer Robertson, Registration Technician

Q: What is your title and how long have you been at the National Portrait Gallery?

A: Registration technician, ten years

Q: Where did you go to college and how did you prepare yourself for a career in museum work?

A: I received a BA in history from the University of California, Riverside, and an MA in museum studies at the George Washington University. I started on the path to a career in museum work as a volunteer at the San Bernardino County Museum while I was working on my undergraduate degree. I eventually landed a job there and gained some great experience in museum registration and collections management.

I was lucky enough to work with history, art, anthropology, paleontology, and special collections, which exposed me to a wide variety of disciplines and materials.

Q: You have worked on many exhibitions here at NPG—do you have a favorite show or installation?

A: I’ve been involved in roughly sixty exhibitions since I started working in the Registrar’s Office. My favorite exhibition so far war the inaugural Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2006. It was a perfect example of how dynamic portraiture can be.

Q: Do you have a favorite work in the collection?

A: It’s hard to have just one favorite. I love the portrait of Walter Lippmann (below) by Stanley Meltzoff hanging in our “Twentieth-Century Americans” exhibition. Its hushed tone reminds me of a late-night writing session, when the rest of the house is quiet and all you can hear is the tick of the clock and the rustle of papers.

I’m also partial to the three portraits we have by Ralph Steadman, one of William S. Burroughs and two of Hunter S. Thompson. I love Steadman’s style—free-flowing, almost spastic—it has a great energy to it.

Q: Can you give us a “best moment at the NPG” story?

A: My best moment at the NPG was when the gallery reopened to the public in 2006. I was a member of the team of people responsible for moving the art back into the building for the reopening, and we worked long, hard days to ensure that everything would be in place for opening day. It’s an achievement I’m very proud of.

Walter Lippmann / Stanley Meltzoff / Oil on gessoed panel, c. 1954 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The Battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, August 10, 1861: The Death of a General

The American Civil War was replete with educated men to conduct it. Generals on both sides of the fight graduated from West Point—the United States Military Academy—and the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was also an alumnus. Robert E. Lee, destined to command the southern armies, was not only a West Point graduate but also the former superintendent of the school.

Among other notable academy alums were Ulysses S. Grant (1843); William Tecumseh Sherman (1840); Leonidas Polk (1827); George Meade (1835); John Sedgwick (1837); Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, George Pickett (all 1846); and George Armstrong Custer (1861). If there was a single institution responsible for the sophisticated administration of the war both on and off the battlefield, it was West Point.

Because of the nature of the school, West Point also lost many of its former students in combat.

Early in the war, this attrition commenced. Nathaniel Lyon (above), brigadier general and 1841 West Point graduate, had proven his merit during the Mexican American War. Though brave, Lyon was also a man with a severe personality and a penchant for doing things his own way. Writer and Civil War historian Shelby Foote describes Lyon in a bizarre and almost comedic episode that took place only three months before the general’s final fight:

…disguised in women’s clothes, including a bonnet and veil to hide his red hair and whiskers, [Lyon] had ridden in an open carriage to reconnoiter a secessionist camp. Afterwards he surrounded the place, forced its surrender under the muzzles of his guns, and marched the would-be Confederates off to prison, shooting down two dozen civilians when a crowd on the streets of St. Louis attempted to interfere.

Lyon was not one to back down from a fight, and his belief in the cause of the Union was strong. When he was assigned to his Missouri post, Lyon set out to subjugate the rebellion in the region.

By early August 1861, he found his army greatly outnumbered by rebel troops near Springfield. At Wilson’s Creek, early on August 10, General Lyon divided his army and attempted to defeat the much larger Confederate force by striking at them from both the north and the south of their position.

Like the battle at Manassas only a few weeks before, the chief strategy was savagery; complex battle plans gave way to simple killing. “Far from resembling panoplied war,” Foote writes, “It was more like reciprocal murder.” Trying to rally his troops against the greater contingency, Lyon was wounded several times before falling dead to a rebel bullet. He was the first Union general to be killed in the war. Many more from both his country and his alma mater would follow.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Nathaniel Lyon / Unidentified Artist / Albumen silver print, c. 1861 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Sources:
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958).

United States Military Academy at West Point, Notable Grads

 

Loving Lucy at 100: Lucille Ball, 1911–1989

Tomorrow marks the one hundredth anniversary of Lucille Ball's birth.

One of the characteristics of great comedy is risk. Stepping away from the mannerly comedies of the silver screen, Lucille Ball began to showcase her talents in gutsier venues early in her acting career; being polite and pretty was getting her nowhere fast.

“I took the slapstick parts the other starlets spurned," she notes in her autobiography. "And never whined about the siphon water and pies in my face. I considered myself lucky to be paid while learning a business I adored."

Lucy was responsible for some of the most memorable moments in early television, and even today, sixty years after the premier of I Love Lucy, small-screen aficionados recognize the genius in such moments as the "Vitameatavegamin girl" and Lucy stuffing her cheeks with chocolate as the candies rolled off the factory belt too quickly.

What made Lucille Ball funny was not that Lucy was unladylike in her juice-induced stupor or obnoxious in her attempt to hide the chocolates—it was precisely that she was a lady who found herself in those bizarre situations that made America love her.

This was not by accident. Lucy's partner in the early television experiment was her husband, Desi Arnaz, and they had strong ideas about their characters' motivations: 

As Lucy Ricardo, I played a character very much like Liz Cugat on my radio show [My Favorite Husband]. Lucy was impulsive, inquisitive, and completely feminine. She was never acid or vicious. Even with pie on her face she remained an attractive and desirable female, stirred by real emotions. Lucy Ricardo's nutty predicaments arose from an earnest desire to please. And there was something touching about her stage ambitions. As we were discussing her with our writers, Desi spoke up. "She tries so hard. . . . She can't dance and she can't sing. . . . She's earnest and pathetic. . . . Oh, I love that Lucy!" And so the title of the show was born.

The Ricardos' adventures took them many places and introduced them to scores of people. With their neighbors/best friends/landlords, Fred and Ethel Mertz (played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance), they traveled, fought and made up, and met the industry stars of the day. Both John Wayne and William Holden made famous appearances on the show, as did Harpo Marx in an unforgettable scene in which Lucy mirrors the famous comedian. 

Lucille Ball had some minor successes in television after the run of I Love Lucy, but nothing like the comedic storm that she co-created with Arnaz. I Love Lucy aired for six seasons, from 1951 through 1957, and in those 181 episodes, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo lived in a world in which being a big-band leader played second fiddle to the often frenetic preoccupations of his wife. In syndication, America and the world still live with them.

—Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery, Catalog of American Portraits

 

Cited:
Lucille Ball with Betty Hannah Hoffman, Love, Lucy (New York: Putnam, 1996). 

 

Lucille Ball / Harry Warnecke / Color carbro print, 1944 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Elsie M. Warnecke / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Gift of Elsie M. Warnecke, © Daily News, LP

Lucille Ball / Philippe Halsman / Gelatin silver print, 1950 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of George R. Rinhart, © Philippe Halsman Archive