National Portrait Gallery Part Two

Rockwell

Few people recognize that the National Portrait Gallery, housed in the Old Patent Building, is actually a dual museum; the same facility also is also the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. If official portraits aren’t to your liking, there’s plenty more to entertain and amaze.

Richard Avedon

First, though, can we just get past the whole lives of the rich and famous thing?  Adjacent to the Hall of Presidents is a large gallery devoted to workers, common folks, and those down on their luck. You will find iconic images from Lewis Hine, Winslow Homer, Dorothea Lange, and others, but also things you probably haven’t seen in textbooks. There is, for instance, a series of photos and paintings of newsies, the kids who used to hawk papers on the streets and have done so since Colonial times. A few of then images that really grabbed me included a heartbreaking image of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century orphan girl. On the triumphant end of the scale, how about a real-life Rosie the Riveter in vivid Kodachrome? I also admired the subtle curation of this gallery. Norman Rockwell’s well-known image of a coal miner tells us one kind of story, but it’s not the same narrative as an enormous portrait rendered by Richard Avedon. 

 

The facility is also a real superb repository of American folk art—much of which is stored behind glass in accessible archives. This is the museum equivalent of a library’s open stacks, and it’s something most museums don’t do. Usually curators choose a small sampling of a museum’s collection; the bulk is in storage. There’s a roving-about-an-attic quality to open archives that turns the viewing experience into a treasure hunt. I could have spent hours there. Alas, I had to rendezvous with my traveling companions in less than one, so here are just a few discoveries.

 

There are paintings of all sorts in the galleries, many of which have been reproduced for books, posters, and websites. These names are also familiar: Benton, Cassatt, Catlin, Durand, Hassam, Hopper, O'Keeffe, Lawrence, Naguchi…

The Old Patent Building lends itself well to smaller special exhibits. Let me just highlight two, the first devoted to the photos of Diane Arbus (1923-71), arguably the most celebrated female shutterbug of the post-World War Two years. She had an eye for sharp focus, but also for anything unusual and bizarre. Some detractors called her work carnivalesque and accused her of freak show sensationalism. In retrospect, she was on to something. Forget the land of the free and the home of the brave, the United States has long been a nation of wide margins.  Arbus spent most of her life in New York City—that sprawling polyglot American dynamo where rules have exceptions and even the exceptions are meant to be broken. Were her images manipulative? During her lifetime many thought so. Today, some think she was prescient in making the marginalized visible. So did her image of a woman holding a monkey dressed in baby clothes stretch the definition of the mainstream? Should we applaud the “Yeah, so what?” insouciance of a transvestite in the process of a makeover? Do we marvel over a Jewish giant, or feel sorry for him? Is Arbus’ work transgressive or transformational? Frankly, I’m not sure how to answer those questions. I can say, though, that she was never boring and that you know a Diane Arbus photograph when you see one. And no one ever accused her of catering to popular demand. 

 

It’s been (gulp!) 50 years since 1968, a pivotal year in American history: The Tet Offensive, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, urban riots, the Chicago Democratic convention, Nixon’s election…. Conservatives like to label it the year America took a wrong turn but of course, it’s not that simple. The year before, the so-called Summer of Love, was just as filled with myth, merriment, and mischief as the one that followed—as is every year of every era. This summer the National Portrait Gallery had a small show on 1968 that at first underwhelmed me. It’s small, I had seen most of what was in it in various contexts, and it was almost entirely visual with only the slightest nod given to context or analysis. Then I recalled what Todd Gitlin said about how the Sixties are recalled as fragmented, disconnected events and images that are reduced to stand-ins for an entire era. He’s right. The Sixties have become the image equivalent of a play list set on shuffle. What did it mean? It depends on who loads the images and why they chose one set over another. All that’s clear is that the Sixties mattered. 

 

The NPG show focuses mostly on snap shots of the counterculture: a day-glo Jimi Hendrix poster, a collage of the Grateful Dead, an anti-Vietnam poster, a side-by-side of the Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company that will make Baby Boomers yearn for their youth…. Two pieces stand out as poignant harbingers—Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art down-the-barrel POV of a gun we have come to worship, and the Black Power protest salute of John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the Mexico City Olympics. It is easy/facile for conservatives to blame the Sixties for all manner of perceived woes, but it really boils down to this. American stood at a crossroads in 1968. One path pointed toward the Age of Aquarius, the other to five more years of Vietnam, repressed civil liberties in the name of law and order, and a rollback of the Great Society. We have no idea what the Age of Aquarius would have yielded—perhaps a nightmare of a different order. But we know what the second path brought: Sandy Hook and associated mass slaughters, the return of the Gilded Age, and the need for Black Lives Matter. The more I thought of the NPG kaleidoscope look at 1968, the more nostalgic and sadder it made me.