Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery News Spring 2001 from the DIRECTOR
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PROFILE Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery News Spring 2001 From the DIRECTOR When the first National Portrait Gallery was created, in England in the 1850s, there was a general assumption that this place of national honor for Great Britain would have collections overwhelmingly composed of men. “Let us now praise famous men” would have easily served as its motto. Moreover, the famous men likely came from certain fields of achievement: politics, the military, and the high arts. The Victorians would have seen no irony in the fact that their age took its name and derived its highest ceremonial authority from a woman. That was the exception that proved the rule: women might inherit authority or station, but they were not likely to acquire it. By the time our own National Portrait Gallery was created, in the late 1960s, some progress had been made. When the first director and staff put together the inaugural exhibition, there were a number of remarkable women represented: Jane Addams, Gertrude Stein, Clara Barton, Doro- thea Dix, Charlotte Cushman, Lucretia Mott, Mary Baker Eddy, Lillian Russell, among others from across nearly two centuries of our nation’s existence. But the exhibition title—“This New Man”—carried its own irony. Included as well were the African Americans Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and Charles Drew, and the Native Americans Sitting Bull, Osceola, Jim Thorpe, and Will Rogers. However, those who were either nonwhite or female constituted only 10 percent of those on view in the exhibition. We still had some distance to go in the creation of a Portrait Gallery that looked like America. We still do; but I think we’re on the right track. In the more than a quar- ter century that I have known the Portrait Gallery, I have seen a concerted effort by our staff and Commission to locate images in a wide variety of media that capture every field of American achievement and the full range of Americans who have contributed to our national heritage. With the representation of women, and of African American men and women, we have begun to see some real progress not only in the range of individuals included in our permanent collection but in the presentation of portrait artists, such as Cecilia Beaux, Annie Leibovitz, James VanDerZee, and most recently in a widely acclaimed exhibition of the nineteenth-century daguerreotypist Augustus Washington. We have a way to go in the range of Latino and Asian American subjects and portraitists represented, but we can at least point to excellent exhibitions of the work of caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias and sculptor Isamu Noguchi. I have hopes, as well, that our presentation of Native Americans will become as strong in twen- tieth-century history as it is in nineteenth. The excitement of our twenty-first century nation is that it is begin- ning to benefit from the opening up of opportunities for all Americans. The nation we are becoming is the nation we were always meant to be. And the National Portrait Gallery will bear witness to that progress. 2 PROFILE Contents Vol. 2 No. 1. Spring 2001 Cover: Lucille Ball by Harry 11 Warnecke, 1945. Gift of Elsie M. Hard Hat News Warnecke © copyright restricted. Window and Stone See “Making Paper Picture Per- fect” on page 10. Restoration 4 12 Collection Highlights Portrait of an Artist Celebrating Women Sarah Miriam Peale 6 13 Q&A NPG on the Road In the next issue Interview with Barbara Portraits of Virginians on As we go to press, we are Novak View in Richmond able to report that the National Portrait Gallery 8 has received a private 14 donation from the Donald Historian’s Choice NPG News W. Reynolds Foundation, Maria Callas “A Brush with History” enabling us to purchase Exhibition Debuts Gilbert Stuart’s great 9 “Lansdowne” painting of 15 George Washington, which Curator’s Choice has been on long-term Jesse Owens NPG Schedules & loan to the museum. A full Information story on this American icon 10 will appear in our summer Making Paper 16 issue, which will be devoted to the Gallery’s acquisitions Picture Perfect Portrait Puzzlers and to the many generous A Look at the NPG donors who have contribut- Conservation Lab ed to our success. PROFILE National Portrait Gallery Marc Pachter Director National Portrait Gallery Smithsonian Institution Carolyn K. Carr Deputy Director and Chief Curator Commission Eloise Baden Chief Administrative Officer Barbara Novak, Chair Eighth and F Streets, NW Anthony C. Beilenson Washington, DC 20560-0213 Editor Jeannine Smith Clark Phone: (202) 357-2700 Carol Wyrick Office of Education Stephen Jay Gould Fax: (202) 786-3098 Julie Harris E-mail: [email protected] Review Editor Sidney Hart The Charles Willson Peale David Levering Lewis Web site: www.npg.si.edu Family Papers R. W. B. Lewis Bette Bao Lord Readers’ comments are welcome. Editorial Committee Joan A. Mondale Dru Dowdy Office of Publications Robert B. Morgan Marianne Gurley Office of PhotographicServices Roger Mudd Leslie London Office of Design andProduction Patrick Madden Office of ExternalAffairs Ex Officio Ellen G. Miles Department of Painting and Sculpture Earl A. Powell III © 2001 Smithsonian Institution Available in alternative formats. Frances Stevenson Office of Publications William H. Rehnquist Printed on recycled paper. Frederick Voss Department of History Lawrence M. Small 3 Collection Highlights: Celebrating Women Brandon Brame Fortune By contrast, Nettie Fowler Associate Curator of McCormick, wife of inventor Painting and Sculpture Cyrus McCormick, is repre- There are nearly two thousand sented in the Gallery’s col- likenesses of American women lections by a pristine marble in the collections of the National sculpture that highlights her Portrait Gallery. Unlike many of beauty. Created in 1866 by Eras- the portraits of men collected by tus Dow Palmer, it was praised the Gallery, very few are conven- at the time by a leading art critic tional head-and-shoulders por- as being “so gracefully poised, traits. On the contrary, our the features so regular, the head portraits of women, ranging from so naive, and the expression so Pocahontas to Betty Friedan, are feminine and sweet, that most as varied, fascinating, and color- persons would take the portrait ful as their subjects. for an ideal.” Her business Some make use of imagery acumen enabled her to make developed for portraits of men, important contributions to the Nettie Fowler McCormick by Erastus Dow Palmer, 1866 as seen in Charles Willson Peale’s profitability of the McCormick somber 1769 likeness of Anne Harvesting Machine Company. Green, who holds a copy of the The Gallery’s collections also the work of portraitist and fash- Maryland Gazette, the Annapolis include drawings and photo- ion illustrator René Bouché—a newspaper that she published after graphs of women, ranging from biting portrayal of society host- her husband’s death. Frank Her- Wallace Morgan’s precise and ess Elsa Maxwell. ring’s painting of efficiency expert quick sketch of reformer Belva Often the Gallery is fortunate Lillian Moller Gilbreth portrays Ann Lockwood, drawn at the to acquire portraits of women her with quiet, scholarly dignity, annual convention of the Ameri- from the time of their greatest pro- dressed in an academic gown. The can Woman Suffrage Association ductivity or fame. Such was the likeness of African American poet in 1912, to glamorous images of case with actress Tallulah Bank- Phillis Wheatley, published as the important stars of the screen and head, a formidable character who frontispiece to her Poems on Vari- stage, such as Baron De Meyer’s sat for the equally flamboyant ous Subjects, Religious and Moral luminous photograph of actress English painter Augustus John in in 1773, shows her writing at a Mary Pickford. One of the most London in 1930. John painted table, actively involved in creative arresting mid-twentieth-century her in the pink negligée that she and intellectual pursuits. paintings in the collection is wore in the theatrical farce He’s Mine. Bankhead loved this ethe- real, evanescent likeness and dis- played it in her bedroom. To an admirer of the painting and its subject, she remarked: “Even though I get down to living in a hall bedroom and cooking on a Sterno, I’ll never part with that picture.” She did not give up the painting, and when it was auc- tioned after her death, John Hay Whitney, an admirer, purchased it and gave it to the Gallery. Sculptor Jo Davidson was well known as a portraitist of emi- nent Americans of the interwar years. One of his most famous subjects was the modernist author Gertrude Stein, whose impassive, almost Buddha-like portrait is a Tallulah Bankhead (detail) by Augus- Elsa Maxwell (detail) by René Bouché, highlight of the Gallery’s collec- tus John, circa 1930; gift of the Hon. 1959 tions. Widely praised at the time, and Mrs. John Hay Whitney 4 Celebrating Women Anne Green by Charles Willson Lillian Moller Gilbreth by Frank Phillis Wheatley by an uniden- Peale, 1769; partial gift from the Herring, 1929–1930; gift of tified artist, after Scipio Moor- Governor’s Mansion Foundation of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Lillian head, 1773 Maryland Carey Barley Mary Pickford by Baron Adolph Gertrude Stein by Jo Davidson, Belva Ann Lockwood by Wal- De Meyer, 1920 1922–1923; gift of Dr. Maury lace Morgan, 1912 Leibovitz it was illustrated in the February 1923 issue of Vanity Fair, which also published Stein’s prose por- trait of Davidson. When the por- trait was complete, Stein circled it, announcing in characteristic fashion, “that’s Gertrude Stein, that’s all of Gertrude Stein, that’s all of Gertrude Stein there is.” Other portraits represent important women in a more pri- vate context.