Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery NewsWinter 2001

PROFILEContents Vol. 2 No. 4 Winter 2001

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I write this director’s letter with a divided mind—but not a divided spirit. Like so many other Americans, I am permanently affected by the terrible events of Septem-ber 11 and am trying to comprehend their consequence for ourselves and for the world, even as I go about my many

activities and commitments. The late Barbara Tuchman, a remarkable histo-rian and, I am proud to say, a longtime commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery, reminded us some years ago that the nineteenth century did not end in 1900. It ended in 1914 with the Guns of August. Thereafter the world was permanently altered. We may later conclude that the twenti-eth century ended not with the millennial hoopla we all remember (along with the false alarm of Y2K), but with September 11, 2001. We have simultaneously seen our sense of security threatened but also our sense of national purpose reinvigorated. The America we took for granted, we now commit ourselves to preserve. What seemed trivial in aspects of our culture is evaporating; what has always seemed important is reasserting itself. The National Portrait Gallery has a central role in the Smithsonian’s commit-ment to the nation to embody its fundamental values. It was in that spirit that we took our determination to save the great “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington to the nation, and it was in that spirit that the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation gave us the means to do so. Just as important, we have been provided the resources to bring the portrait to Americans who live far away from Washington before returning it to our refurbished build-ing. This tour (launching in February 2002), which reminds us all of the nation’s founding principles and its tumultuous origins, has taken on added importance after September 11. George Washington rallies us again. With this issue of Profile we also rededicate ourselves to tell our nation’s history by looking at the remarkable individuals our culture has produced. In our collections, a plethora of professions and personalities show the diversity of American life, but in this case we take pleasure in focusing on the literary tradition. Imagine a gathering that features Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Langs-ton Hughes sharing with you their lives and interests, and you have the experience that we have provided to our readers. Understand that this is the tip of the iceberg. Our collection includes perhaps hundreds of Ameri-can writers, from the first African American published poet—the eigh-teenth century’s Phillis Wheatley—to James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Arthur Miller. We are, more than we sometimes think, a people of the word. I will resist telling you about the members of our staff who are also writ-ers, although you will sense the extent of their talents from the articles in Profile. I will also resist telling you in detail about my own two writ-ing children. But what’s important to say is that the Portrait Gallery here celebrates America’s creative spirit. In that we invest our hope.

PROFILE

National Portrait GallerySmithsonian Institution

750 Ninth Street, NWSuite 8300 Washington, DC 20560-0973Phone: (202) 275-1738Fax: (202) 275-1887E-mail: NPGnews@npg.si.eduWeb site: www.npg.si.edu

Readers’ comments are welcome.

©2001 Smithsonian InstitutionAvailable in alternative formats.Printed on recycled paper.

In the next issue

• NPG opens “George Washington: A National Treasure” at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• Inauguration of the Paul Peck Presidential Awards

• Conservation of minia-tures from the collection

From the DIRECTOR

Cover: February 1, 2002, marks the one-hundredth anni-versary of the birth of poet Langston Hughes. See feature article on page 6.

Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss, circa 1920; gift of W. Tjark Reiss in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

PROFILEContents Vol. 2 No. 4 Winter 2001

3

4The Real “Thin Man”Dashiell Hammett

5The Dark Side of a Literary LightDorothy Parker

6Langston Hughes in Washington, D.C.

8CivilWar@SmithsonianNew Website

10The Dolphin and the FishRobert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

12Children, Cameras, Community In Search of Heroes

13NPG Takes America’s First Hero on Tour

14NPG on the Road

15NPG Schedules and Information

16Portrait Puzzlers

PROFILE

National Portrait GallerySmithsonian Institution

750 Ninth Street, NWSuite 8300 Washington, DC 20560-0973Phone: (202) 275-1738Fax: (202) 275-1887E-mail: NPGnews@npg.si.eduWeb site: www.npg.si.edu

Readers’ comments are welcome.

©2001 Smithsonian InstitutionAvailable in alternative formats.Printed on recycled paper.

Marc Pachter DirectorCarolyn Carr Deputy Director and Chief CuratorEloise Baden Chief Administrative Officer

EditorCarol Wyrick Office of Education

Review EditorSidney Hart The Charles Willson Peale Family Papers

Editorial CommitteeAnne Christiansen Office of Public AffairsDru Dowdy Office of PublicationsMarianne Gurley Office of Photographic ServicesLeslie London Office of Design and ProductionPatrick Madden Office of External AffairsEllen G. Miles Department of Painting and SculptureFrances Stevenson Office of AdministrationFrederick Voss Department of History

CommissionBarbara Novak, ChairAnthony C. Beilenson Vice ChairJeannine Smith ClarkJoan Kent DillonStephen Jay GouldDavid Levering LewisR. W. B. LewisJon B. Lovelace Jr.Joan A. MondaleRobert B. MorganRoger MuddConstance Berry NewmanDaniel Okrent

Ex Officio MembersEarl A. Powell IIIWilliam H. RehnquistLawrence M. Small

Honorary CommissionersJulie HarrisBette Bao LordFred W. Smith

In the next issue

• NPG opens “George Washington: A National Treasure” at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• Inauguration of the Paul Peck Presidential Awards

• Conservation of minia-tures from the collection

Cover: February 1, 2002, marks the one-hundredth anni-versary of the birth of poet Langston Hughes. See feature article on page 6.

Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss, circa 1920; gift of W. Tjark Reiss in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

4

Sarah LoffmanCuratorial AssistantDashiell Hammett (1894–1961) only wrote five novels, but by the time the last of these, The Thin Man, was published in 1934, his contempo-raries had already credited him with expanding the boundaries of literature to include the detective story. Distancing himself from flowery language and complicated capers essential to popular drawing-room fiction of the time, Hammett’s austere writing style aligned him with liter-ary figures such as Ernest Hemingway. He had no inter-est in writing for an audience of what admirer Raymond Chandler called “flustered old ladies . . . who like their murders scented with magno-lia blossoms and don’t like to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty.” Blending psychological studies of character with the formulaic aspects of the detective story, Hammett created heroes appropriate for his era. These protag-onists are solitary private agents who aren’t afraid to walk down mean streets and deal with brutal criminals or widespread corruption. Yet they run no risk of being corrupted themselves because they live by a strict code of ethics that only they define. Cynical and sarcastic, these hard-drinking, hard-hitting tough guys seem emotion-less but inevitably encounter a femme fatale in this labyrinthine world, a mysterious woman who will either be their salvation or their demise. Hammett introduces the most notable of these characters, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, published in 1930. The author described him as “a dream man, . . . for your private detective wants to be a shifty fellow . . . able to get the best out of anyone he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.” And Hammett would know. Eight years as an agent at the Pinkerton Detec-tive Agency gave Hammett an intimate knowledge of the world he later depicted. Although he had no intention of leaving the detective business, the lingering effects of tuberculosis contracted while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I forced him to work behind a typewriter, as an author of detective stories. Hammett’s insiders’

knowledge of the streets lent the genre a gritty real-ism and tangible characters that had been previ-ously lacking. Hammett’s real-life persona was intricately tied to his writing, and he was viewed as the living embodiment of his characters. Edward Biberman’s portrait of the author, painted just shortly after the two men met in Hollywood in 1936, captures the many facets of this persona. Biberman found the six-foot-tall Hammett to be a svelte, striking figure

who “was, himself, in appear-ance, the ‘Thin Man’ of his novels.” On one level, the portrait reveals hard-boiled characteristics of Hammett’s personality associated with characters such as Sam Spade or Ned Beaumont in Hammett’s 1932 novel The Glass Key. The vertical lines in the background emphasize Hammett’s impressive stat-ure. He holds himself erect, without being rigid. His dark eyes, intensified by the contrasting pale tone of his skin, confront the viewer with a hard, unyielding gaze. His well-manicured appear-ance and the ever-present cigarette are reminiscent of Nick Charles, the suave, sophisticated protagonist in The Thin Man. The artist

extends this connection by drawing attention to Hammett’s large but delicate hands, implying that no matter how tough a character he might be, there is a softness somewhere beneath. Like his characters, Hammett also lived by a self-defined code of ethics. By the time Hammett sat for this painting in 1937, he had already been a dedicated Communist for several years. His adherence to leftist politics eventually landed him on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. In 1951, Hammett and two other trustees of the radical Civil Rights Congress were jailed for six months when they refused to reveal the names of contrib-utors to the bail-bond fund. In truth, Hammett had never set foot inside the office of the congress, and did not know the name of even a single contributor. The night before he was to appear in court, his longtime companion Lillian Hellman asked, “Why don’t you say that you don’t know the names?” “No,” Hammett said, “I couldn’t say that.”

The Real “Thin Man”

Dashiell Hammett by Edward Biberman, 1937

Tess MannEditorial Assistant, Charles Willson Peale Family PapersDuring the 1920s, New York’s famous social set of literary lights came to be known as the Algon-quin Round Table, after the New York hotel that was their favorite meeting place. Less well remem-bered is the name that critic Franklin P. Adams gave his peer group, the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club. The morbid humor of this alternate name (“Than-atopsis” means the contem-plation of death) directly referred to a social group in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but it also is particularly fitting in regards to one of the group’s most celebrated members, author and poet Dorothy Parker (1893–1967). At the height of her career, Parker unsuccessfully attempt- ed suicide three times. And although her poetry often reflected her personal despon-dency, Parker favored cyni-cism over sentimentality, as in her infamous rhyme Résumé, wherein she lamented the shortcomings of various meth-ods of suicide, concluding,

“You might as well live.” By the time George Platt Lynes photographed Parker in 1943, she had resigned herself to “this living, this living, this living,” but was tiring of her repu-tation as a witty raconteur and was eager for meaningful accomplishments. During the 1930s she had raised funds for the Socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. As the United States plunged into World War II, she felt even more keenly a desire to contribute something more substantial to her country than the rhymes and witticisms for which she was famous. Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, eleven years her junior, enlisted in the Army Air Forces as a lieutenant. Parker herself tried to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, but could not persuade the Corps to waive the age limit. Her bid for accreditation as a war correspondent was also rejected on the grounds that her Socialist lean-ings made her a “possible subversive.” Parker

The Dark Side of a Literary Light

Dashiell Hammett

knowledge of the streets lent the genre a gritty real-ism and tangible characters that had been previ-ously lacking. Hammett’s real-life persona was intricately tied to his writing, and he was viewed as the living embodiment of his characters. Edward Biberman’s portrait of the author, painted just shortly after the two men met in Hollywood in 1936, captures the many facets of this persona. Biberman found the six-foot-tall Hammett to be a svelte, striking figure

who “was, himself, in appear-ance, the ‘Thin Man’ of his novels.” On one level, the portrait reveals hard-boiled characteristics of Hammett’s personality associated with characters such as Sam Spade or Ned Beaumont in Hammett’s 1932 novel The Glass Key. The vertical lines in the background emphasize Hammett’s impressive stat-ure. He holds himself erect, without being rigid. His dark eyes, intensified by the contrasting pale tone of his skin, confront the viewer with a hard, unyielding gaze. His well-manicured appear-ance and the ever-present cigarette are reminiscent of Nick Charles, the suave, sophisticated protagonist in The Thin Man. The artist

extends this connection by drawing attention to Hammett’s large but delicate hands, implying that no matter how tough a character he might be, there is a softness somewhere beneath. Like his characters, Hammett also lived by a self-defined code of ethics. By the time Hammett sat for this painting in 1937, he had already been a dedicated Communist for several years. His adherence to leftist politics eventually landed him on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. In 1951, Hammett and two other trustees of the radical Civil Rights Congress were jailed for six months when they refused to reveal the names of contrib-utors to the bail-bond fund. In truth, Hammett had never set foot inside the office of the congress, and did not know the name of even a single contributor. The night before he was to appear in court, his longtime companion Lillian Hellman asked, “Why don’t you say that you don’t know the names?” “No,” Hammett said, “I couldn’t say that.”

The Real “Thin Man”

5

Tess MannEditorial Assistant, Charles Willson Peale Family PapersDuring the 1920s, New York’s famous social set of literary lights came to be known as the Algon-quin Round Table, after the New York hotel that was their favorite meeting place. Less well remem-bered is the name that critic Franklin P. Adams gave his peer group, the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club. The morbid humor of this alternate name (“Than-atopsis” means the contem-plation of death) directly referred to a social group in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but it also is particularly fitting in regards to one of the group’s most celebrated members, author and poet Dorothy Parker (1893–1967). At the height of her career, Parker unsuccessfully attempt- ed suicide three times. And although her poetry often reflected her personal despon-dency, Parker favored cyni-cism over sentimentality, as in her infamous rhyme Résumé, wherein she lamented the shortcomings of various meth-ods of suicide, concluding,

“You might as well live.” By the time George Platt Lynes photographed Parker in 1943, she had resigned herself to “this living, this living, this living,” but was tiring of her repu-tation as a witty raconteur and was eager for meaningful accomplishments. During the 1930s she had raised funds for the Socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. As the United States plunged into World War II, she felt even more keenly a desire to contribute something more substantial to her country than the rhymes and witticisms for which she was famous. Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, eleven years her junior, enlisted in the Army Air Forces as a lieutenant. Parker herself tried to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, but could not persuade the Corps to waive the age limit. Her bid for accreditation as a war correspondent was also rejected on the grounds that her Socialist lean-ings made her a “possible subversive.” Parker

instead called on her experience of World War I, and the memory of her first husband’s depar-ture for service, to write articles for Mademoi-selle and Vogue about the contributions women could make to the war effort and the emotional support of servicemen. And she contributed to the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film Saboteur, a cautionary suspense thriller about terrorism on the home front. But overall, Parker remained frustrated and began a steady decline

into depression, inactivity, and alcoholism. Lynes managed to capture Parker in mid-descent, somewhere between the beauty of her youth and the dissipation of her later years, caught between the earnestness of her professional striving and the increasing futility of the fight. However, in keeping with the tone of Parker’s poetry, Lynes’s dramatic, even melo-dramatic, portrait does not so much confront Parker’s descent as satirize it. Her arms wrapped around her, head tilted back, Parker tele-graphs the hallmark desper-ation of Greta Garbo in any number of films, most nota-bly Grand Hotel, which featured her famous plea, “I

want to be alone.” As Parker disparaged most work in Hollywood as insubstantial (including her own), Lynes tended to discount his own work as a fashion photographer. (He destroyed most of his fashion negatives before he died.) Conse-quently, underlying this rather glamorous photo-graph, one suspects a tacit complicity between photographer and subject in creating a portrait that tempers Parker’s own apparent vulnerability with her trademark cynicism. In her short stories, Parker had a talent for scru-tinizing the outward gestures that both masked and betrayed the interior worlds of her charac-ters. Similarly, Lynes’s portrait puts a mask of dry sarcasm over Parker’s genuine pain, which in turn was already so famous as to be yet another mask. It was a vicious circle that Parker did not know how, or did not have the will, to escape.

The Dark Side of a Literary Light

Dorothy Parker by George Platt Lynes, 1943

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they sang on Seventh Street—gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn’t help being sad some-times. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going.” Also helping to keep Hughes’s morale afloat was the salon run by the lovable maternal poet Georgia Douglas Johnson at 1461 S Street, NW. Every Satur-day evening she opened her home to the writers, young and old, who made up the black Washing-ton literary community. There, Hughes mingled with fellow artists such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Lewis Alexander, Marita Bonner, Clarissa Scott, and Hallie Queen, as well as older talents such as Angelina Weld Grimké and Alain Locke, a professor at Howard University. They and other writers and artists were increasingly conscious of them-selves as members of a new movement—the Negro Renais-sance. Indeed, in March 1925 the national magazine Survey Graphic had published a special number, edited by Locke, devoted to this unprecedented upsurge in African American culture and the arrival on the national scene of “The New Negro.” The center of this movement was decidedly New York, and Hughes was determined to keep in touch with Manhattan even as he lived in Washington. On May 1, he was there to attend a dinner sponsored by the black Opportu-nity magazine to cap a heralded literary competition that high-lighted the work of the younger artists. With his jazzy piece “The Weary Blues,” Hughes took first place in the poetry section. One highly impressed guest was the white novelist and bon vivant Carl Van Vechten, who decided to take up Hughes’s cause. Before the month was over, the young poet had signed a contract with Van Vechten’s own publisher,

Langston Hughes in Washington, D.C.

6

Arnold RampersadStanford UniversityLate in 1924, twenty-two years old, fresh from Europe, and thor-oughly broke, Langston Hughes arrived for the first time in Wash-ington, D.C. He had come to live with his mother, Carrie Mercer Hughes Clark. Herself jobless, Clark had thrown herself on the kindness of prosperous but distant cousins in Washington. This was the family of her father’s brother, John Mercer Langston, one of the most cele-brated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Taking pity on her, her cousins had invited her—and then Langston—to live awhile in their comfortable house in the LeDroit Park district, where the best of Washington’s blacks were said to live. Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes had grown up in Lawrence, Kansas, then lived for a year in Illinois before moving to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended high school and discov-ered his love of poetry. Some-times he had lived with his mother, sometimes not. While she pursued jobs as an actress and a teacher, his mother left

him with her own mother, a quietly proud woman whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry, fighting with John Brown’s band. In Cleveland, Hughes had even lived by himself for a while. After an unhappy year at Colum-bia University, Langston had quit school and worked as a delivery boy and a gardener in New York before finding work as a seaman. In 1923, he traveled by freighter to Africa, then made two voyages to Europe. After the second trip, he had jumped ship and headed to Paris. There he had worked for several months as a dishwasher in a nightclub. Hughes quickly found Wash-ington a trying place. The city was as grimly segregated as any south-ern town. The black middle class kept to itself, away from whites but also away from the masses of the black community. Langston, who refused to put on airs, saw his cousins and their friends as obsessed by notions of class and skin-color superiority. Since 1921, when he had published his first poem in a national journal, he had emerged as one of the most gifted African American poets. He wrote moving lyric pieces about nature, loneliness, and death, but his most powerful work, such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” proclaimed his pride in black culture and his love of the black masses. His first job in Washington was quite respectable. Hughes joined the staff of the black weekly newspaper the Washing-ton Sentinel, but he soon resigned when he was asked not to write but to hawk advertising space on commission. His next job was of a different sort altogether. For twelve dollars a week he worked in a wet-wash laundry. Far from being ashamed of the job, he celebrated it in a tributary poem,

“Song to a Negro Wash-Woman,” which covered an entire page

in the January Crisis magazine, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Soon Hughes and his mother were living on their own, in a cramped two-room apartment at 1749 S Street. His laundry job ended when he caught a nasty cold; the next, shucking oysters in a restaurant, he gave up after he ate too many and broke out in a painful rash. He returned to office work with his next job, as an assistant to Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro History and a founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson set Hughes to work on his current project, the listing of some thirty thousand persons that would be published as Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830. Hughes admired Woodson but soon grew restless. “I personally did not like the work I had to do,” he would recall. “Besides, it hurt my eyes.” He loved to roam the city, but his favorite place was unquestion-ably seamy Seventh Street, where the poorest, least educated blacks lived and loved and played and sang the earthy blues without inhibition. The grand symbols of national power meant little to them, according to Hughes; they

“looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud.” Hughes believed in music as the true metronome of the African American soul. “Like the waves of the sea coming one after another,” he would write, “like the earth moving around the sun, night, day-night, day-night, day—forever, so is the under-tow of black music with its rhythm that never betrays you, its strength like the beat of the human heart, its humor, and its rooted power.” As a poet, he learned from the musicians and those who loved them. “I tried to write poems like the songs

Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1983 print from 1939 negative

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Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1932; gift of Prentiss Taylor

they sang on Seventh Street—gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn’t help being sad some-times. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going.” Also helping to keep Hughes’s morale afloat was the salon run by the lovable maternal poet Georgia Douglas Johnson at 1461 S Street, NW. Every Satur-day evening she opened her home to the writers, young and old, who made up the black Washing-ton literary community. There, Hughes mingled with fellow artists such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Lewis Alexander, Marita Bonner, Clarissa Scott, and Hallie Queen, as well as older talents such as Angelina Weld Grimké and Alain Locke, a professor at Howard University. They and other writers and artists were increasingly conscious of them-selves as members of a new movement—the Negro Renais-sance. Indeed, in March 1925 the national magazine Survey Graphic had published a special number, edited by Locke, devoted to this unprecedented upsurge in African American culture and the arrival on the national scene of “The New Negro.” The center of this movement was decidedly New York, and Hughes was determined to keep in touch with Manhattan even as he lived in Washington. On May 1, he was there to attend a dinner sponsored by the black Opportu-nity magazine to cap a heralded literary competition that high-lighted the work of the younger artists. With his jazzy piece “The Weary Blues,” Hughes took first place in the poetry section. One highly impressed guest was the white novelist and bon vivant Carl Van Vechten, who decided to take up Hughes’s cause. Before the month was over, the young poet had signed a contract with Van Vechten’s own publisher,

Knopf, for a volume of verse. The promise of a book buoyed Hughes, but his future remained uncertain. He decided to try to return to college. This time he would attend, for the first time in his life, a predomi-nantly black school. Howard University in Washington seemed ideal; however, to his keen disappoint-ment, Howard would not prom-ise him a scholarship. Then one day, on a city bus, he met a young man who talked to him about prestigious Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest black college in the North. Hughes applied there and was promptly admitted. But where would he find the money? Carl Van Vechten had urged him to start work on an auto-biography. Such a book might bring him a handsome advance, but Hughes worked only fitfully at the task. He found dwelling on the past a painful exercise. Instead of writing his life story, he signed on as a busboy at the fashionable Wardman Park Hotel on Connecticut Avenue. Hughes was there one day when the celebrated troubadour poet Vachel Lindsay, the author of the bombastic Congo (1914), came to give a public reading. Copy-ing three of his poems, Hughes sidled over to Lindsay’s table in the dining room, placed them before the poet, and hurried back to the kitchen. That evening, Lindsay—always a showman—announced his discovery of a new poet, a Negro poet no less, working as a busboy in that very hotel. The Associated Press sent a photographer to capture the image of the Negro busboy poet

hoisting a tray of dishes. The story made the newspapers from Maine to Florida. The incident brought public-ity but no money. Then, on a trip to New York, Hughes spoke to Amy Einstein Spingarn, the wealthy wife of Joel Spingarn, one of the leaders of the NAACP, about a loan to go back to school. For a long while he heard nothing from her. Then, late in November, she agreed to help him. Overjoyed, Hughes thanked her profusely and prepared to leave the city. Early in the new year, the first copies of his book, The Weary Blues, arrived. Astride the red, black, and yellow dust jacket, an angular black bluesman played the piano. The reviews were favor-able, and sales were brisk. On January 15, 1926, at the Play-house at 1814 N Street, NW, with Alain Locke presiding, Langston read from his book to an admir-ing crowd of poetry lovers. Then, a few days later, he left Washing-ton for good. He was on to a new adventure, as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Arnold Rampersad is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor of English at Stan-ford University. His books include The Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford University Press, 1986, 1988), and Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Knopf, 1994). In 1991 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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Langston Hughes in Washington, D.C.in the January Crisis magazine, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Soon Hughes and his mother were living on their own, in a cramped two-room apartment at 1749 S Street. His laundry job ended when he caught a nasty cold; the next, shucking oysters in a restaurant, he gave up after he ate too many and broke out in a painful rash. He returned to office work with his next job, as an assistant to Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro History and a founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson set Hughes to work on his current project, the listing of some thirty thousand persons that would be published as Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830. Hughes admired Woodson but soon grew restless. “I personally did not like the work I had to do,” he would recall. “Besides, it hurt my eyes.” He loved to roam the city, but his favorite place was unquestion-ably seamy Seventh Street, where the poorest, least educated blacks lived and loved and played and sang the earthy blues without inhibition. The grand symbols of national power meant little to them, according to Hughes; they

“looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud.” Hughes believed in music as the true metronome of the African American soul. “Like the waves of the sea coming one after another,” he would write, “like the earth moving around the sun, night, day-night, day-night, day—forever, so is the under-tow of black music with its rhythm that never betrays you, its strength like the beat of the human heart, its humor, and its rooted power.” As a poet, he learned from the musicians and those who loved them. “I tried to write poems like the songs

Langston Hughes

8

History at your fingertips:

Robert E. Lee by Mathew Brady, 1865

Ulysses S. Grant by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, 1865

James G. BarberHistorianImagine being able to peruse the Smithsonian’s vast Civil War collections with the click of a mouse! CivilWar@Smithsonian, a newly created institution-wide website, is designed to do just that. Conceived in the summer of 1999, the site at http://www.civilwar.si.edu is being produced by the National Portrait Gallery. Curators from half a dozen Smithsonian museums are examining their Civil War holdings for objects of interest. To date, approximately 250 items have been identified, researched, and photographed for the site’s debut on January 4, 2002. Dozens of additional artifacts will be included in the months and years ahead. The National Portrait Gallery, not surprisingly, houses the Smithsonian’s largest collection of Civil War portraiture, with its images of leaders and luminaries numbering in the hundreds. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Stonewall Jackson are four of the best repre-sented subjects in the Gallery’s collection. Portraits of these leaders and dozens of others are displayed online, in every portrait medium of the period—paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs. They include one of the last studio photographs of Pres-ident Lincoln taken, as well as the monumental painting Grant and His Generals, the largest paint-ing owned by the National Portrait Gallery. More-over, the Gallery’s building, the Old Patent Office, is itself the Smithsonian’s single most unique Civil War monument and landmark and is the subject of special focus in the website. It was used as a soldiers’ barracks, as a hospital, and as a reception site for President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. Other Smithsonian museums house an extraor-dinary array of Civil War artifacts; the National Museum of American History is in fact the primary repository for the Civil War at the Smithsonian. For instance, its collection of Yankee small arms and uniforms, transferred from the United States War Department after the Civil War, is one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the country. Its other artifacts are varied. Many of them belonged to individuals, such as the black beaver top hat President Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre the night he was assassinated, and the famous war-horse Rienzi that carried Union cavalry general Philip H. Sheridan to victory in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864. Dozens of other artifacts, such as uniforms and firearms, are mass-produced army issue. Still other relics are unique, such as the offi-

cer’s dishtowel that was used as a flag of truce by Lee’s army at Appomattox and the table and chairs that Grant and Lee used when signing the terms of surrender. The objects that comprise the start-up of CivilWar@Smithsonian are organized into ten sections pertaining to such aspects of the war as soldier life, weapons, leaders, the war at sea, and the surrender at Appomattox. A section on the crusade against slavery examines a demonstration model of the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1794. This simple hand-held device was a boon to cotton grow-ers in the South and was a catalyst for the growth and expansion of slavery, arguably the root cause of the Civil War. A section on Abraham Lincoln includes the inkwell that he used when he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and a “wanted” poster offering a $100,000 reward for the capture, dead or alive, of the conspirators in his assassina-tion. The images of Lincoln also visually document how the cares and sorrows of four years of war deeply creased his humble face. CivilWar@Smithsonian includes an introduc-tory section that places the Smithsonian and its first secretary, Joseph Henry, centrally within the turbulent times, as he tried to keep the institution open and functioning. His daughter, Mary Henry, was twenty-seven when the war began. Her Civil War diary offers an inside perspective on the city of Washington and the Lincoln administration, and excerpts of it will be made audible in future updates of the Web site. The initial phase of the site will also contain a timeline and a guide to resources. Education components and new subject material are being planned for the future. It is our goal to keep CivilWar@Smithsonian a work in progress.

Confederate national flag. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; on loan from John McLean Hazen

Civil War Website

History at your fingertips:

Robert E. Lee by Mathew Brady, 1865

Ulysses S. Grant by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, 1865

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cer’s dishtowel that was used as a flag of truce by Lee’s army at Appomattox and the table and chairs that Grant and Lee used when signing the terms of surrender. The objects that comprise the start-up of CivilWar@Smithsonian are organized into ten sections pertaining to such aspects of the war as soldier life, weapons, leaders, the war at sea, and the surrender at Appomattox. A section on the crusade against slavery examines a demonstration model of the cotton gin, invented by Eli Whitney in 1794. This simple hand-held device was a boon to cotton grow-ers in the South and was a catalyst for the growth and expansion of slavery, arguably the root cause of the Civil War. A section on Abraham Lincoln includes the inkwell that he used when he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and a “wanted” poster offering a $100,000 reward for the capture, dead or alive, of the conspirators in his assassina-tion. The images of Lincoln also visually document how the cares and sorrows of four years of war deeply creased his humble face. CivilWar@Smithsonian includes an introduc-tory section that places the Smithsonian and its first secretary, Joseph Henry, centrally within the turbulent times, as he tried to keep the institution open and functioning. His daughter, Mary Henry, was twenty-seven when the war began. Her Civil War diary offers an inside perspective on the city of Washington and the Lincoln administration, and excerpts of it will be made audible in future updates of the Web site. The initial phase of the site will also contain a timeline and a guide to resources. Education components and new subject material are being planned for the future. It is our goal to keep CivilWar@Smithsonian a work in progress.

Stars and stripes quilt. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Eugene A. Teter and Martha Brown Teter

Flag of the 84th Regiment of Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institu-tion; gift of David K. Lander

Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, 1865

Union drum. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; gift of John S. Kyle

Unless otherwise noted, images are from the National Portrait Gallery.

Confederate national flag. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; on loan from John McLean Hazen

Civil War Website

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

—Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Lowell by Marcella Comès Winslow, 1974; gift of friends of Marcella Comès Winslow and the Philip L. Graham Fund

ined, not recalled.” It was on the problem of how

“personal” a poet could be that Bishop and Lowell quarreled. Lowell, in The Dolphin (1973) quarried his personal life to an extent that Bishop found objectionable, not least because Lowell recycled bits of Bishop’s letters in his verse. Bishop and Lowell had been heading for this quarrel throughout their friend-ship. While Lowell exemplified the evolution of a more confes-sional style of poetry suited to the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, Bishop adhered to the older modernist tradition of William Carlos Williams’s credo, “No ideas but in things.” In many ways, Bishop resembles Heming-way in the compression of her descriptive imagery. Hemingway was a great admirer of Bishop,

10

David C. WardDeputy Editor, Charles Willson Peale Family PapersRobert Lowell (1917–1977) and Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) are the two most important post-war American poets. Lowell was a scion of Boston society, albeit of a minor wing of the famous Lowell family, while Bishop was a Canadian orphan with no social advantages. Despite their difference in background, the two became great friends (they joked, half-seriously, about marry-ing each other), were critics and collaborators on their respective poetic projects, and wrote verse that was almost totally different from each other’s. Their relation-ship was based on their common, serious commitment to the craft of poem making. Their only major quarrel arose on the profes-sional issue about how person-ally revelatory a poet should be in the material he uses for

his poems. I use the masculine pronoun here because Lowell and Bishop reversed the usual gender stereotyping of the male sensi-bility being directed outward to the public while the woman’s is focused on the private or personal. Lowell’s verse, especially as he developed his own distinct style, always reflected his desire to connect with others, while Bishop’s relied on an objective style, which tended to layer emotions with a deep lacquer of description. Truth be told, Lowell was always something of a bully; his lifelong nickname “Cal” was given to him as a youngster by schoolmates who compared him to the viciously capricious Roman emperor Caligula. Lowell’s rambunctious charisma, the drama with which he invested his life, was only permitted because of his undeni-able poetic genius; without that

genius he would have been just another WASP misfit. Lowell was diagnosed at an early age as a manic-depressive. The disease seemed to get worse as he aged; he suffered several hospi-talizations when his mania became uncontrollable. After one commitment, he wrote in

“Waking in the Blue” about the beached lives of the men (“a Harvard all-American fullback” and “‘Bobbie,’/Porcellian ’29”) of his class, “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.” Lowell’s courage came by writing his way out of the ossuary. To do so, his writing, which always relied heavily on history, trans-formed itself by treating his own personal history as a subject for excavation. By this he hoped to express himself more clearly while connecting on a deeper emotional level with his audi-ence. In “Epilogue” he wrote, “I want to make/something imag-

The Dolphin and the Fish: Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Lowell by Rollie McKenna, 1951Elizabeth Bishop by Rollie McKenna, 1951

The Dolphin and the Fish

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He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

—Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop by David Levine, 1977

Robert Lowell by Marcella Comès Winslow, 1974; gift of friends of Marcella Comès Winslow and the Philip L. Graham Fund

ined, not recalled.” It was on the problem of how

“personal” a poet could be that Bishop and Lowell quarreled. Lowell, in The Dolphin (1973) quarried his personal life to an extent that Bishop found objectionable, not least because Lowell recycled bits of Bishop’s letters in his verse. Bishop and Lowell had been heading for this quarrel throughout their friend-ship. While Lowell exemplified the evolution of a more confes-sional style of poetry suited to the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, Bishop adhered to the older modernist tradition of William Carlos Williams’s credo, “No ideas but in things.” In many ways, Bishop resembles Heming-way in the compression of her descriptive imagery. Hemingway was a great admirer of Bishop,

especially of her most famous poem, “The Fish.” Part of the poem reads, “He was speckled with barnacles,/fine rosettes of lime,/and infested/with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three/rags of green weed hung down.” The fish is like one of Hemingway’s boxers, and it becomes evident as you move through the poem that the fish’s obstinate fight is not only admired by Bishop but that she may by the end have become the fish itself. Like Lowell, Bishop found in her writing a way to control the contingencies of modern life. Writing was a lifeline for both poets. Where Lowell tended toward an abundance that poetically descends from Walt Whitman, Bishop had the meta-physical concision of the other great nineteenth-century poet, Emily Dickinson. Bishop and Lowell patched up their quarrel over The Dolphin: for both writ-ers poetry was always more important than personality. The National Portrait Gallery owns eleven revelatory portrait photographs taken by Rollie McKenna in the early 1950s. Bishop and Lowell were among

her subjects, as were Wallace Stevens, Anne Sexton, and Randall Jarrell. McKenna (who found Bishop scarily formida-ble) is especially good at using shadow to allude to the conflicted depths of her poets’ lives.

Further reading: All of Bishop’s and Lowell’s poetry is in print (a new collected edition of Lowell’s has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and accessible as well in any good anthology of modern poetry such as those published by W. W. Norton; both writers’ verse belie the notion that poetry is intentionally obscure or difficult. Ian Hamilton’s Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York, 1983) is the standard life. While there is no complete biogra-phy of Bishop, her letters (Robert Giroux, ed., One Art: Elizabeth Bishop, Letters [New York, 1995]) make a wonderfully readable intro-duction to her life.

genius he would have been just another WASP misfit. Lowell was diagnosed at an early age as a manic-depressive. The disease seemed to get worse as he aged; he suffered several hospi-talizations when his mania became uncontrollable. After one commitment, he wrote in

“Waking in the Blue” about the beached lives of the men (“a Harvard all-American fullback” and “‘Bobbie,’/Porcellian ’29”) of his class, “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.” Lowell’s courage came by writing his way out of the ossuary. To do so, his writing, which always relied heavily on history, trans-formed itself by treating his own personal history as a subject for excavation. By this he hoped to express himself more clearly while connecting on a deeper emotional level with his audi-ence. In “Epilogue” he wrote, “I want to make/something imag-

Robert Lowell by Rollie McKenna, 1951

The Dolphin and the Fish

© 1

951

Rol

lie

McK

enna

Patrick MaddenExternal Affairs Director and Anne ChristiansenPublic Affairs SpecialistIn spring 2001, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery rescued its most treasured image—the

“Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart—from being placed on the auction block. When the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas, Nevada, stepped in with a generous $30 million gift, the Gallery was able to save the work for future generations of Ameri-cans, give the public the opportu-

NPG Takes America’s First Hero on Tour

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TexasFebruary 15–June 16, 2002

Las Vegas Art Museum, NevadaJune 28–October 27, 2002

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CaliforniaNovember 8, 2002–March 9, 2003

Seattle Art Museum, WashingtonMarch 21–July 20, 2003

12

Tia Powell HarrisEducation Outreach Program ManagerOur goal in this Community Heroes program was simple: to help students learn about their communities and the heroes that reside in them. But where would we begin? We looked to the Portrait Gallery’s own collection and discovered that we held the key to understanding. The NPG collection contains works by accom-plished photographers James VanDerZee, Gordon Parks, and Addison Scurlock. These photographers distinguished themselves in their contributions to community and the determi-nation to always photograph their subjects with dignity. National Portrait Gallery staff led two hundred students attending DCPS 21st Century Community Learning Centers at Terrell Junior High School, MacFarland Middle School, Kramer Middle School, and Francis Junior High School on a journey . . . through the camera lens. Students participated in a variety of creative writing and arts activities that increased both their self-awareness and their appreciation of photographic portraiture. After defining “hero” in their own terms and identifying qualified candidates in their own homes and neighborhoods, the students

photographed their subjects, but always with dignity and creativity. Finally,

they captured their own commu-nities and heroes on film with

disposable cameras donated in part by FujiFilm, Penn Camera, and MotoPhoto. Images of people, playgrounds, friends, flowers, street signs, and blue skies were the stuff of their world! And what did we learn of heroes? The camera and in-class adventures of the students led them to discover that often what

makes a person heroic is some tiny act of kindness

that touches the heart. Such a discovery suggests that some-

times the people closest to us are the real heroes. Furthermore, by

the program’s end, most students real-ized that they were our future community

heroes. “I don’t know what kind of hero I might be, but I know that I will be one to someone who might need me,” responded one student. The resulting images were judged for expres-sion and skill, prizes were awarded, and an exhibition of the best photographs was held at Martin Luther King Jr. Library from August 6 to October 26, 2001. More important, these young people discovered a new voice, a new vehicle through which to record history and celebrate their lives.

Children, Cameras, Community: In Search of Heroes

Camilla Queen and her“heroic” sister at the Community Heroes

award ceremony Photo by Tia Powell Harris

Award-winning photograph taken by Kramer Middle School student Dianna Cunningham of her hero Mr. John Walker, former security guard at the school

Community Heroes exhibition banner of student photographs on display at Martin Luther King Jr. Library

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Patrick MaddenExternal Affairs Director and Anne ChristiansenPublic Affairs SpecialistIn spring 2001, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery rescued its most treasured image—the

“Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart—from being placed on the auction block. When the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas, Nevada, stepped in with a generous $30 million gift, the Gallery was able to save the work for future generations of Ameri-cans, give the public the opportu-

nity to see the painting—the most important visual document from the founding of the nation—on its first-ever national tour, and restore a space for it in the Old Patent Office Building, the historic home of the museum. “George Washington: A National Treasure” will open in Houston on February 15, 2002. The exhibition will rekindle the public’s interest in the Father of Our Country through this quintessential image. Visitors will learn about the powerful Ameri-can symbolism in the 205-year- old painting and how it delivers George Washington’s timeless story. Through educational inter-actives, video, films, family days, and brochures, “George Wash-ington: A National Treasure” allows the public to reflect on Washington’s leadership, hero-

ism, and self-sacrifice; his defini-tion of the role of the presidency; and his life, career, and times. The tour will visit seven other cities besides Houston during the next three years: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, and New York City. Those who are unable to visit the exhibition in person can experience it online at www.georgewashington.si.edu. Teachers, students, and fami-lies can participate in online interactives, download infor-mation, and order educational materials as part of this excit-ing electronic companion to the exhibition. Experience George Washing-ton and the historic tour of this great painting—the founding image in the American album!

NPG Takes America’s First Hero on Tour

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TexasFebruary 15–June 16, 2002

Las Vegas Art Museum, NevadaJune 28–October 27, 2002

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CaliforniaNovember 8, 2002–March 9, 2003

Seattle Art Museum, WashingtonMarch 21–July 20, 2003

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MinnesotaAugust 1–November 30, 2003

Oklahoma City Museum of Art, OklahomaDecember 12, 2003–April 11, 2004

Arkansas Arts Center, Little RockApril 23–August 22, 2004

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York CityFall 2004

photographed their subjects, but always with dignity and creativity. Finally,

they captured their own commu-nities and heroes on film with

disposable cameras donated in part by FujiFilm, Penn Camera, and MotoPhoto. Images of people, playgrounds, friends, flowers, street signs, and blue skies were the stuff of their world! And what did we learn of heroes? The camera and in-class adventures of the students led them to discover that often what

makes a person heroic is some tiny act of kindness

that touches the heart. Such a discovery suggests that some-

times the people closest to us are the real heroes. Furthermore, by

the program’s end, most students real-ized that they were our future community

heroes. “I don’t know what kind of hero I might be, but I know that I will be one to someone who might need me,” responded one student. The resulting images were judged for expres-sion and skill, prizes were awarded, and an exhibition of the best photographs was held at Martin Luther King Jr. Library from August 6 to October 26, 2001. More important, these young people discovered a new voice, a new vehicle through which to record history and celebrate their lives.

Children, Cameras, Community: In Search of Heroes

Community Heroes exhibition banner of student photographs on display at Martin Luther King Jr. Library

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Lansdowne Tour

NPG Schedules and Information

Portrait of a NationTour Itinerary

For information on available bookings, contact the Department of Exhibitions and Collections Manage-ment at (202) 275-1777; fax: (202) 275-1897.

Portraits of the Presidents Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Simi Valley, CaliforniaCloses January 21, 2002

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art,Memphis, Tennessee February 18–May 19, 2002

Additional venues include: North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh; Virginia Historical Society, Richmond

A Brush with HistoryThe Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KentuckyCloses January 27, 2002

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AlabamaFebruary 23–May 5, 2002

Additional venues include: New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Eye Contact: Modern American Portrait DrawingsExhibition venues, beginning in May 2002, include:Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois; Naples Museum of Art, Florida

Women of Our TimeExhibition venues, beginning in summer 2003, include: Old State House, Hartford, Connecticut; Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Sioux City Art Center, Iowa

Visit www.npg.si.edu today!

14

NATIONALDanville, CaliforniaBlackhawk Museum*NPG will add several original objects to the panel version of its exhibition “Red, Hot & Blue” at the Blackhawk Museum, including Rosemarie Sloat’s full-length portrait of Ethel Merman as Annie from Annie Get Your Gun and a pink marble bust of Ginger Rogers by Isamu Noguchi. On view through March 2002.

Baltimore, MarylandB&O Railroad Museum*As part of a Baltimore-wide celebration of 175 years of railroading in America, NPG has joined with the B&O Railroad Museum to present

“Portraits of American Rail-roading from the National Portrait Gallery.” Comprising significant individuals in the history of the railroad industry, the exhibition will include portraits of Peter Cooper, William Ogden, and George Pull-man, among others. On view February 27, 2002, through July 2003.

Arlington, TexasLegends of the Game Museum*Twelve portraits of baseball immortals will remain on view through January 2003.

Houston, TexasThe Museum of Fine ArtsThrough the generosity of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, NPG has been able to forever save for the public trust the origi-nal grand-manner “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. The foundation is also the sponsor for an eight-venue tour of the painting—

“George Washington: A National Treasure”—of which The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the first venue. On view Febru-ary 15 through June 16, 2002.

Richmond, VirginiaThe Virginia Historical SocietyThirty-three paintings, sculp-tures, prints, drawings, and pho-tographs of important Virgin-ians, including Arthur Ashe, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert E. Lee, and Martha Washington, are on view through January 2003.

INTERNATIONALParis, FranceHôtel du Sully, Patrimoine Photographique From the 1940s through the 1970s, Philippe Halsman’s portraits appeared on the covers and in the pages of major picture magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life. Opened in Washington in 1998,

“Philippe Halsman: A Retrospec-tive” began its international tour at the NPG in London on May 23 and has been in Paris since October 4. The more than seventy original photographs include Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, and Albert Einstein. The Halsman show has been joined in Paris by a second NPG exhibition, “Hans Namuth: Portraits.” Namuth, an eminent photographer who gained recog-nition for his images of Jackson Pollock actively painting, also photographed significant artists, architects, and writers from 1950 until his death in 1990. Included among the seventy-five works in this exhibition are images of Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, John Steinbeck, and Andrew Wyeth. Through January 6, 2002.

NPG on the Road

Among the NPG images being lent to Baltimore’s B&O Railroad Museum is this cartoon billing railroad mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt as “The Colossus of Roads.” He is caught here hosing down the tracks of his transportation empire—an action meant to pun the term “watered stock.” In this practice, Vanderbilt diverted revenue from new-stock sales into his own pockets rather than using it for expansion of his lines’ assets. Lithograph by Currier and Ives, 1869

*Smithsonian Affiliate Museum

In an effort to continue making Profile enjoyable for our readers, we are asking for your help. If you have not

yet done so, please fill out the survey included in the fall 2001 issue of Profile and mail it to the address on the front. The survey is also available on the National

Portrait Gallery website at www.npg.si.edu. Thanks for your help!

NPG on the Road

NPG Schedules and Information

15

Portrait of a NationTour Itinerary

For information on available bookings, contact the Department of Exhibitions and Collections Manage-ment at (202) 275-1777; fax: (202) 275-1897.

Portraits of the Presidents Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Simi Valley, CaliforniaCloses January 21, 2002

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art,Memphis, Tennessee February 18–May 19, 2002

Additional venues include: North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh; Virginia Historical Society, Richmond

A Brush with HistoryThe Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KentuckyCloses January 27, 2002

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AlabamaFebruary 23–May 5, 2002

Additional venues include: New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Eye Contact: Modern American Portrait DrawingsExhibition venues, beginning in May 2002, include:Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Elmhurst Art Museum, Illinois; Naples Museum of Art, Florida

Women of Our TimeExhibition venues, beginning in summer 2003, include: Old State House, Hartford, Connecticut; Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Sioux City Art Center, Iowa

Useful Contacts

New location is at 750 Ninth Street, NW, Suite 8300, Washington, DC 20560-0973. Our main telephone number is (202) 275-1738; other contact informa-tion is also posted on our website.

Catalog of American PortraitsPhone: (202) 275-1840Web: www.npg.si.edu and click on SearchE-mail: npgweb@si.edu

Library Phone: (202) 275-1912Web: www.siris.si.edu (for the library’s catalog)E-mail: lynaghp@sil.si.edu

Office of External Affairs Phone: (202) 275-1764E-mail: maddenp@npg.si.edu

Office of Education For information about school and community programs, teacher resources, internships, and upcoming events:

Phone: (202) 275-1811 Web: www.npg.si.edu and click on EducationE-mail: npgeducation@si.edu

Office of Rights and Reproductions Phone: (202) 275-1791Web: www.npg.si.edu/inf/r&r/index-intro.htmE-mail: NPGRightsOffice@si.edu

Office of Publications To order an NPG publication, contact the National Museum of American History’s Shop.

Phone: (202) 357-1527Web: www.npg.si.edu and click on Information

Visit www.npg.si.edu today!

INTERNATIONALParis, FranceHôtel du Sully, Patrimoine Photographique From the 1940s through the 1970s, Philippe Halsman’s portraits appeared on the covers and in the pages of major picture magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life. Opened in Washington in 1998,

“Philippe Halsman: A Retrospec-tive” began its international tour at the NPG in London on May 23 and has been in Paris since October 4. The more than seventy original photographs include Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, and Albert Einstein. The Halsman show has been joined in Paris by a second NPG exhibition, “Hans Namuth: Portraits.” Namuth, an eminent photographer who gained recog-nition for his images of Jackson Pollock actively painting, also photographed significant artists, architects, and writers from 1950 until his death in 1990. Included among the seventy-five works in this exhibition are images of Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, John Steinbeck, and Andrew Wyeth. Through January 6, 2002.

In an effort to continue making Profile enjoyable for our readers, we are asking for your help. If you have not

yet done so, please fill out the survey included in the fall 2001 issue of Profile and mail it to the address on the front. The survey is also available on the National

Portrait Gallery website at www.npg.si.edu. Thanks for your help!

We Want to Hear From You!

Information

16

Portrait Pu lerszz

1. Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937): Financier and founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Oil oncanvas by Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley, 1923; gift of Paul Mellon. 2. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950): Poet whose most famous pair of lines was, “My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night.” Gelatin silver print by Berenice Abbott, circa 1929. 3. John Philip Sousa (1854–1932): Marine band conductor and composer of such march classics as “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Oil on canvas by Harry Franklin Waltman, 1909; gift of the Sousa Corporation. 4. John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937): Founder of Standard Oil and once reputed to be the richest man in the world. Plasterby Paul Manship, not dated; transfer from the Smithsonian American Art Museum; gift of the artist. All images are details.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Washington DC 20560-0973

Official Business Penalty for Private Use $300

Presorted StandardU.S. Postage PaidSmithsonian InstitutionG-94

Return ServiceRequested

Many in the Roaring Twenties regarded this secretary of the treasury as a main source of the era’s prosperity. An art collector, he later founded one of the coun-try’s great museums.

The first female poet to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, she would not have gotten high marksfor candle conservation.

This musician gave Americans some of their favorite standards for patriotic occasions. Marches were his specialty.

He and his company are said to be the late-nineteenth-century equivalent to Bill Gates and Microsoft.

In response to the tragedies of September 11, staff members from the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum painted the “Wall of Expression” outside of the Patent Office Building. The mural is dedicated to those

who lost their lives and loved ones in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., and to those individuals who contributed to the relief effort. The wall serves as a record of this moment in history and a message of hope for the future.

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