I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it in a sentence and wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Here, for the uninformed is a definition, by way of a few of its synonyms: advertising, promotion, marketing, propaganda, push, puffery, buildup, boosting, fuss, excitement, informal hype, spiel, hullabaloo, splash. Packs some punch, doesn’t it?
Wendy Wick Reaves, the show’s curator says it has its origin in 19th-century circus rhetoric, “flamboyant hucksterism” (hmm, hucksterism, use that word in your next text message). Still not sure, though, I keyed the word into ProQuest, my favorite online database of old newspapers. Scribe Henry E. Dixey of The Chicago Daily Tribune reached across the decades and clued me in. His 1909 treatise follows:
It was the custom of dime museum proprietors to station in front of the ‘palatial palaces of public pleasure’ a leather lunged person who lied in a loud voice about the museum’s attractions, seeking to induce the passers-by to purchase tickets for the extraordinary exhibition within. This man’s speech was called a “ballyhoo.” The species is not yet extinct—he stands in front of animal shows, merry-go-rounds, loop-the-loops, midget cities, dime museums, and other art centers, with a small cane, a big black cigar, stripped clothes and a brassy voice, guffawing the glory of his wares to the chin-whiskered public who ’stop! pause! and consider!’ the ferocious falsehoods with which he beguiles them.
So, ballyhoo, or promotion, became the stuff of posters—graphic works used in advertising and marketing, wartime propaganda, presidential campaigns, protest movements and film and music promotion. Check out the ballyhoo in a poster about Thomas Edison’s phonograph. “It Talks! It Sings! It Laughs! It Plays Cornet Songs.”
The museum’s show emphasizes the portraits—of Buffalo Bill Cody, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, even Johnny Depp—in 60 posters from its collection. It’s a graphic feast. Huge, boisterous type sprawls across exhibition walls. Curator Reaves says the poster aesthetic is “fun, vivid.”
And that ain’t no ballyhoo.
(Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery: Thomas Alva Edison by Alfred S. Seer Engraver; Copy after: Mathew B. Brady, Color woodcut poster, c. 1878.)
In fact, the three-time Pulitzer prize-winning political cartoonist judged the “great communicator” rather harshly. In a 1984 portrayal, the 40th President of the United States is transformed into a television pitchman selling America an alternate reality—through the looking glass.
It was a rare president that escaped the wrath of Herblock’s pen and pad—weapons that the cartoonist said kicked the “big boys who kick the underdogs.”
On Tuesday, historian Sidney Hart of the National Portrait Gallery led a sneak peak preview of the Herblock exhibit entitled “Puncturing Pomposity,” which opens on May 2. The 40 cartoons span Herbert Lawrence Block’ s seven-decade career, which included 55 years at The Washington Post. He continued his artful commentary right up until shortly before his death in 2001 at age 91.
Hart said that both Nixon and Eisenhower, enraged by Herblock’s cartoons, canceled their subscriptions to the Post. Nixon claimed he didn’t want his daughters to be upset by the frequent skewering he endured and was even rumored to have started shaving twice daily because of the dark 5 o’clock shadow the cartoonist always gave him.
And while Herblock’s work usually had a liberal bent, the Democrats were granted no immunity. At the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a 1998 rendering shows William Jefferson Clinton, his head held high as he wades ankle deep in the thick mud.
It’s a treat to get an up close look at the original cartoons, which were culled from the archives of the 14,000 pieces the Herb Block Foundation donated to the Library of Congress. The thick black lines of his ink pen on the large drawings stand out sharply. It’s fascinating to examine the places where Herblock pasted a scrap of paper over a phrase, and rewrote a caption.
While the span of Herblock’s cartoons dates from New Deal to Great Society to Watergate, Hart said an election year was a good time for an exhibition to focus on the principles of poking fun at the presidency. A cautionary tale, so to speak, for the three hopeful candidates. What does the next generation of pen and ink critics have in store for them?
The exhibition makes also for irreverent contrast, housed in the hall adjacent to the museum’s stately collection of presidential portraits. Or as Martin Sullivan, the portrait gallery’s new director, puts it with understated elegance: Herblock lets us “explore the presidency in other dimensions.”
Last night marked a new chapter in the Stephen Colbert—Smithsonian saga. American History Museum director Brent Glass has had a change of heart. Stephen Colbert, he says, is a National Treasure.
It started back in January, when the Comedy Central satirist met with Glass and lobbied him to include a portrait of Colbert in the “Treasures of American History” exhibition, alongside Abraham Lincoln’s hat and Irving Berlin’s piano.
Glass rejected the portrait, so Colbert trudged across town to the National Portrait Gallery. That museum accepted the painting and hung it next to the bathrooms where it remained until yesterday, April Fool’s Day.
It was a hit, and crowds streamed in and lined up to snap pictures with their cell phones. Last night on the Stephen Colbert show, Brent Glass phoned in his decision, announcing that Colbert’s portrait will now be transferred to the American History Museum’s exhibit at the Air and Space museum for the next two weeks.
Visitors are greeted to the exhibit by bright graffiti art painted on a trompe l’oeil train, which was the subject of an article in the current issue of Smithsonian.
The exhibit also features spirited black-and-white concert shots by David Scheinbaum, who has photographed more than a hundred hip-hop performers.
Scheinbaum, in his 50s, was first introduced to the music when he took his teenage son to a Del, Tha Funkee Homosapien concert in 2000. He was hooked; “this was the first time since Woodstock that I had seen a community equally as bonded and identified through music,” Schienbaum said in a statement.
He adds that he owes his inspiration to jazz portraitist Roy DeCarava, whose works include images of 20th century jazz icons like Lena Horne and Count Basie.
In addition to Schienbaum’s photos, the exhibit includes vibrant large-scale paintings of rappers like LL Cool J and Grandmaster Flash by New York-based Kehinde Wiley that are modeled after classic portraits by John Singer Sargent, Frans Hal and Ingres, among others. Jefferson Pinder, who teaches at the University of Maryland, produced several video self portraits set to a hip-hop soundtrack.
The show goes further into uncharted territory for the museum, which until recently only admitted portraits of people who had been dead for 10 years. Now portraits of John Updike and Lance Armstrong hang in the same building as classic paintings of the founding fathers.
But in the hip-hop show, the inclusion of a grittier culture has produced discussion. A recent newspaper editorial decried the glorification of graffiti art, and at least one woman at Tuesday’s press briefing asked whether it was right to include rappers who sing about violence and other unsavory topics.
Curator Frank Goodyear’s response is that art isn’t always clean. “There’s nothing marginal about hip-hop,” he said. “Hip-hop is at the very center of our culture… It is one of the key cultural achievements of the last 20 to 30 years.”
And photographer Scheinbaum’s work hopes to show that the negative stereotypes “represent only a small part of the larger significance.”
Asked to comment, the museum’s director Marc Pachter acquiesced: “This is the perfect opportunity to engage more people in the conversation about who belongs in the National Portrait Gallery.”
Last week we asked for help identifying a picture.
Let’s call it a Slight of Flight, space flight that is. The mystery image is of the heat shield from the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia.
In 1969, Columbia carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back for their historic mission. The epoxy-resin ablative heat shield protected Columbia from the 5,000 °F temperatures during its reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.
Russo uses fine art photography to bring out new visual dimensions of the iconic aircraft and spacecraft of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Her unconventional approach reveals new layers of meaning from the whimsical to the profound in some of history’s most revered flying machines. The publication by powerHouse Books features a foreword by Patty Wagstaff and introduction and essays by Anne Collins Goodyear, assistant curator of prints and drawings at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery who specializes in the relationship of art, science, and technology.
Monday night, the National Portrait Gallery gave the retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor the chance to do her own self-portrait—in words, that is.
The portrait O’Connor painted for her audience was less the judicial scholar that one might expect. Her salt-of-the-earth story includes some surprising details. Did you know:
• O’Connor is in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame;
• She grew up on her family’s Lazy B Ranch, straddling the New Mexico-Arizona border. “At the ranch, it didn’t matter if you were a man or woman,” she says. “There was work to be done”;
• She played poker with cowboys, drove a truck and shot a .22. “I didn’t know lawyers or judges. I knew cattle people”;
• She was accepted to Stanford University at age 16 without taking a college entrance exam;
• She once took a creative writing class taught by Wallace Stegner;
• As an undergrad, she wanted to be a rancher and had no intention of becoming a judge;
• When she attended law school, the class was 1 percent female. “[Ronald Reagan] opened doors.” Reagan, she says, deserves some of the credit for the increase of female law students—now roughly 50 percent;
• She bargained for her first job as a deputy attorney for California’s San Mateo County, offering to work for free.
In this new Around the Mall blog feature, Smithsonian curators offer insight into their work as they prepare exhibitions and study the nation’s treasures. Today curator Amy Henderson from the National Portrait Gallery remembers when she visited with the late, great Katharine Hepburn.
Amy Henderson: I contacted Hepburn in the late 1980s to see if she would consider giving a portrait of herself to the National Portrait Gallery. She agreed to meet me at her Manhattan town house, which turned out to be filled with portraits and sculptures of her—she had always known artists, and seemed to enjoy posing for them.
She even picked up a paint brush herself occasionally, and her renditions of seagulls and beach scenes were scattered around the house. She also had done a number of graphite sketches of herself as Coco Chanel when she did the musical “Coco” on Broadway; one of these sketches will be in the exhibition.
The most remarkable thing I saw was her small bronze bust of Spencer Tracy: she kept it on a nightstand next to her bed, and once when she was showing me around, she handed it to me saying, “What do you think?” As I held it and turned it over, I said it was quite good, little knowing that at the 2004 Sotheby’s auction of Hepburn artifacts, this bust would sell (anonymously) for $316,000!
In 1991 her memoir, Me, became number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I visited her during this period and was summoned up to her bedroom, where she was surrounded by stacks of her book that her publisher had ordered her to sign. She hated to sign autographs and was acting as if it were torture—but she was actually quite pleased with herself, and delighted at the book’s number one status.
One thing that caught my eye in her room was how she had some of her signature red sweaters stretched out on the white chairs; for the exhibition, I was determined to have one of those sweaters, and—after digging around in the warehouse where her things are stored—one was ultimately found.
We kept up our conversations about her portraits for several years, and when I would visit she always offered coffee, cookies, and conversation. In her 80s, she was slightly shorter than in her 5-foot-8-inch days, and a bit pudgier (for which she blamed butter pecan ice cream). On the whole, she was largely as I expected her to be— feisty and independent—but with more of a rollicking sense of humor. She would happily roar away if something struck her as funny. Her energy remained palpable, and you could tell that this was the drive that had fueled her life. That and a supremely healthy ego that never quavered with age: as she told Dick Cavett in a 1973 television interview, “I am absolutely fascinating!”
That she was.
This Thursday, November 2, 2007, the National Portrait Gallery opens Henderson’s exhibition on Katharine Hepburn. Entitled, “Kate: A Centennial Celebration,” the show runs through to October 5, 2008.
(Photograph of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in “Woman of the Year,” MGM, 1942. Production still, Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California and the National Portrait Gallery.)
