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12-17 P-Winter 04.Indd PROSmithsonian NationalFIL Portrait Gallery ENews Winter 2004–5 From the DIRECTOR In the many years I’ve been at the Gal- lery, I’ve found that the middle word in our name, “portrait,” means differ- ent things to different people. A great number reserve it for painting or sculp- ture, viewing the word only in classic fine-arts terms. More than once, I’ve heard someone say “I don’t have a portrait” of so and so, “just a pho- tograph.” This kind of thinking may have influenced the Gallery’s early restriction on collecting photographs, a ban that was fortunately lifted in the early 1970s. Since then, we have continually broadened the variety of portraiture we acquire and display, including not only our initial collecting mediums of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and medals, and then photo- graphs, but also posters, caricatures, and folk art of both earlier eras and our own day. And as we look to the future, we will include audiovisual, multimedia, and other electronic formats. As we reinstall our collection, we are more and more aware of the need to share all forms of represen- tation of lives, to explain when they were introduced, and to show how the form used affects the way we “see” these remarkable individuals. I find myself increasingly using the term “portrayal” rather than “por- traiture” to capture all the ways our great museum aspires to evoke the lives that have shaped our history. “Portrayal” allows us to acknowledge the place of performance in those depictions, such as Hal Holbrook’s classic Mark Twain, as well as the many wonderful theatrical programs produced by our own Education Department. The word “portrayal” lets us acknowledge works of music or dance and also the literary arts—most notably biogra- phy—all of which convey the spirit of particular individuals. And thinking broadly in other ways, we have also come to investigate more and more the question of “image,” which is literally a creation that can be acquired and displayed in a gallery but also an intangible term describing the public view of a life—an individual’s “persona” or sometimes “myth.” Our curators and historians and educators challenge themselves to understand what a painting says about the symbolic role of the subject, as in Margaret Christman’s fascinating discussion in this issue of John Singleton Copley’s depiction of Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, or perhaps the image that might both serve and imprison a celebrity, as in Amy Henderson’s inquiry into the allure of Greta Garbo, or even an image of alleged criminals that can be refuted by humane rendering, as in Wendy Wick Reaves’s examination of Aaron Douglas’s Scottsboro Boys. Reviews by Anne Collins Goodyear, Eileen Kim, and Warren Perry further reveal the complexity of portraiture, portrayal, and image. This is the perspective that enriches the twenty- first-century National Portrait Gallery. 2 PROFILE Contents Vol. 5. No. 4. Winter 2004–5 4 9 12 Curator’s Choice Book Review Then & Now The Scottsboro Boys Portraiture Vacancy on the Court by Shearer West 5 14 Historian’s Choice 10 NPG Schedules & Henry Laurens Book Review Information Daniel Boone: An American 6 Life by Michael A. Lofaro 16 Garbo Lives! 11 Portrait Puzzlers 8 Paul Peck Presidential Book Review Awards Under a Wild Sky: John George M. Elsey and James Audubon and the Brian P. Lamb Making of “The Birds of America” by William Souder In the next issue Cover: A major new acquisition of both historical and artistic • Poets in the collection significance, Aaron Douglas’s moving portrayal of Clarence Norris • Outwin Boochever and Haywood Patterson, two of the Scottsboro Boys, speaks to the Portrait Competition seriousness of racial prejudice in the 1930s. See article on page 4. Marc Pachter Commission Director Daniel Okrent, Chair PROFILE Carolyn Carr Anthony C. Beilenson, Vice Chair Deputy Director and Chief Curator Sally G. Chubb Eloise Baden Jeannine Smith Clark Associate Director for Administration Joan Kent Dillon Ella Milbank Foshay Editor National Portrait Gallery Manuel L. Ibáñez Carol Wyrick Jill Krementz Smithsonian Institution Office of Education Jon B. Lovelace 750 Ninth Street, NW Associate Editor Joan A. Mondale P.O. Box 37012, MRC 973 Sidney Hart Robert B. Morgan Washington, DC 20013-7012 Department of History Roger Mudd Constance Berry Newman Phone: (202) 275-1738 Managing Editor V. Thanh Nguyen Fax: (202) 275-1887 Dru Dowdy Barbara Novak E-mail: [email protected] Office of Publications R. Theodore Steinbock Website: www.npg.si.edu Editorial Committee Jack H. Watson Jr. Pie Friendly Readers’ comments are welcome. Commissioners-elect Office of External Affairs H. P. “Pete” Claussen Marianne Gurley Mallory Walker To receive Profile, please send your Office of Photographic Services John Wilmerding name, home address, and e-mail address Ellen G. Miles (if applicable) to [email protected] or Department of Painting and Sculpture Ex Officio Members the post office box listed above. Ann M. Shumard Earl A. Powell III Department of Photographs William H. Rehnquist Sherri Weil Lawrence M. Small Unless otherwise noted, all images are from Office of Development the National Portrait Gallery collection. Honorary Commissioners ©2004 Smithsonian Institution. Editorial Support Julie Harris All rights reserved. Jessica Hoffman David Levering Lewis Program Assistant Bette Bao Lord Fred W. Smith Design Leslie London, London Graphics 3 CURATOR’S CHOICE The Scottsboro Boys Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson Pastel on paper by Aaron Douglas, c. 1935 Wendy Wick Reaves Weldon Johnson. In his illustrations and painted Curator of Prints and Drawings murals, Douglas created new, modernist prototypes In the long struggle for civil rights and racial equal- to express the African American experience, incor- ity in America, few episodes had the impact of the porating influences from Egyptian art, West Afri- infamous Scottsboro Boys case. When nine black can sculpture, cubist painting, and Art Deco design. teenagers falsely accused Ultimately, he became of raping two women on an influential professor a freight train were tried at Fisk University. Doug- in Scottsboro, Alabama, las made this portrait in in 1931, white juries a more realist manner, found eight of the nine avoiding any hint of guilty, and they were modernist stylization. sentenced to death. The His mentor, German widely condemned ver- artist Winold Reiss, had dicts and the subsequent drawn imposing pastel reversals, retrials, and portraits of Harlem hearings—including authors. Like Reiss, two successful appeals Douglas focused on the to the United States essential humanity and Supreme Court—mobi- dignity of his subjects. lized protests across the This drawing was country and the world. probably made around The International Labor 1935, when the Supreme Defense (ILD), the legal Court unanimously arm of the Communist overturned the convic- Party, hoping to recruit tions in the Norris and black workers to their Patterson cases because cause, led the defense instead of the more deliberate of Alabama’s exclusion of blacks from the jury rolls. NAACP. Their involvement encouraged a global By this time, a one-year fellowship had exposed response from whites and minorities alike. Douglas to the modern European and African art As the nine youths languished in the brutal collected by Albert C. Barnes, and he had spent Alabama prison system, their lives were largely another year studying in Paris. He was also newly destroyed; together, they spent 130 years in jail, politicized. He had joined the Communist Party in despite the recantation of one of the alleged victims. the early 1930s, and as head of the Harlem Artists Clarence Norris (1912–1989) and Haywood Patter- Guild, he was demanding more black participation son (1913–1952), the subjects portrayed in NPG’s in the WPA’s art program. Douglas was undoubt- recently acquired pastel by African American artist edly moved by the cover of an ILD pamphlet that Aaron Douglas, were prominent figures in the case. featured photographs of Norris and Patterson sur- Norris was paroled in 1944 and pardoned by Gov- rounded by the phrases “save our lives,” “they must ernor George C. Wallace in 1976; Patterson spent not burn,” and “join the fight to free them.” Even sixteen years in prison and escaped to Michigan in more powerful is Douglas’s wordless copy of the 1948, where the governor refused to extradite him. two likenesses. The stark, isolated faces, drawn Douglas’s moving portrait provides the oppor- in beautifully blended pastels, mutely confront tunity to pair a critical historical story with a pow- their audience. The picture speaks to the profound erful work of art. The Kansas-born artist, armed response to this soul-chilling miscarriage of justice with a BFA from the University of Nebraska, settled and the seriousness of racial prejudice in America. in New York City in 1925 and became the lead- ing visual artist for the Harlem Renaissance. After Further reading: James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro publishing his drawings in Alain Locke’s The New (New York: Vintage, 1994); Amy Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: Negro and in national magazines, Douglas illus- Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson, Miss.: Uni- versity Press of Mississippi, 1995), and Jim Miller, Moments trated thirteen books by such acclaimed authors of Scottsboro: The Scottsboro Case and American Culture as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). 4 Curator’s Choice HISTORIAN’S CHOICE Henry Laurens Oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley, 1782 transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 1942 Margaret C. S. Christman Laurens posed for his portrait in early 1782, Historian just after he had been released from nearly fifteen The portrait of Henry Laurens (1742–1792) of South months’ imprisonment in the Tower of London.
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