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.”
One morning still in a sleep-induced fog, I venture over to the Hirshhorn Museum.
There, I spiral into yet another dream sequence. Sheep, passing by in a herd, beg to be counted and the sight of a man’s chest rising and falling as he sleeps lulls me into synchronizing my own breath with his. Suddenly, I’m barreling around mountains in a train that’s passing through tunnels.
Or are those blackouts just my heavy eyelids blinking? I wouldn’t doubt it. Someone’s rattling in a dull monotone from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the background, and not the part about the madeleine. That part I liked.
Next, I’m off the train and walking through a beam of light bursting through a smoky haze. Yikes! Two men are wrestling in the nude.
And, now, a weird creature with the head of David Bowie and the body of a doll appears. Really?
Bowie’s spouting off orders, but I don’t stick around to find out why because King Kong’s Fay Wray is in one of her screaming fits. She’s convulsing as if she’s being exorcised.
Not long after Wray’s screams fade, I’m hopping through some colorful video game world listening to soundtracks of birds chirping and water rushing. I follow a crowd to a light at the end of a tunnel, ride an escalator down a floor, pass through a revolving door and I’m spit out onto the sidewalk.
Was it all a dream? No. It was the museum’s exhibition “The Cinema Effect: Dreams”—a dark labyrinth of 20 film installations that plays out like a highbrow haunted house, and mentally jars my perception of fact and fiction, and dream and reality.
Now my life seems more fiction than fact, a film in the making. Could that street vendor and those guys unloading the truck be part of the plot? I was putty in the curators’ hands, one of whom said, “The cinematic is in the way we perceive the world, in the way we speak, in the way we dream.”
The exhibit is open through May 11.(Still from Tony Oursler’s Switch, 1996. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Steve McQueen’s Bear, 1993, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Christoph Girardet’s, Release, 1996, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist.Still from Stan Douglas’s, Overture, 1986. Image courtesy David Zwirner, New York.Still from Michael Bell-Smith’s Up and Away, 2006, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s collection. Image courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York.)
The ideal bike rack would be a flashy piece of street furniture, like London’s telephone booths, so you could spot it on the fly. It would have a slot for each bike to avoid one falling and causing a domino effect, and it would be made of a padded (but waterproof) material so that it’s not metal on metal for shiny, new bikes.
But it’s one thing to think it. Up to ten finalists in the CityRacks Design Competition will have to execute it, building a prototype with a $5,000 stipend.
The prototypes will be previewed at Cooper-Hewitt this fall and then installed in the city for a trial period. The first place winner will take away a $5,000 cash prize and have his or her rack implemented throughout New York City. So bikers, play informant for your architect, designer or engineer friends and all you biking architects out there get busy. Registration ends April 30.
So with bike lanes painted and now parking solutions underway, I guess cyclists are left to deal with the ever-so-threatening car door.
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.
Smithsonian magazine intern Kenny Fletcher and I created and entered a standard two-stick, diamond-shaped flyer in the festival’s homemade kite competition. We built it out of magazine covers, dowels, string and a not-so-buoyant amount of tape. The covers were probably a bit heavier than ideal, but we had to represent.
Kenny consulted some Web sites—one of which advertised step-by-step instructions for building a kite like Benjamin Franklin’s. We employed techniques that we thought would better the functionality of our modest kite: tying the dowels in the shape of a cross; notching grooves in the ends to hold a string that created the frame’s border; and inserting a rubber band in the string to act as a shock absorber in case of strong winds.
It looked impressive. That is, until we went outside for a test flight the day before the competition.
The picture (above) is quite gracious, a real test of reflexes for photographer and assistant editor Amanda Bensen given that the kite was airborne for a matter of seconds. Multiple attempts were made and each time the kite would spiral erratically and then nose dive. We thought, should we snip these strings? Or weight the tail with a set of keys? But, with less than 24 hours left before its competitive flight and a huge deadline pending at the magazine, there wasn’t much time to troubleshoot.
I was the designated pilot, and somehow overnight I went from thinking it had a major design flaw to chalking up its poor performance to light winds. I turned hopeful.
At the festival, I sized up the competition. The kids in front of me in the registration line had kites made of construction paper curled, awkwardly stapled and attached to a string. Cute, but I had an edge over them. Mine looked good.
The guy behind me, however, was being photographed with his enormous, hexagonal, hand-sewn kite, as he boasted that he was a two-time winner. I conceded that he might out-fly me.
A number was tagged to my back and I was put in a large penned off area on the National Mall, manned only by five clipboard-toting judges. A commentator spoke over his microphone as I tried to get my kite up, first facing the wrong direction. Once the judges politely sorted that out, I repositioned myself for take two. It did its usual darting and then plummeted, barely missing a judge. After inspecting my kite, the judges informed me that my bridle was on backwards and that the tail could be longer.
I didn’t know my bridle from my spool, so they suggested I see the Kite Doctor at a nearby tent.
Contestant number 123—a mop-topped ten-year-old also sent to the Kite Doctor – consoled me a bit by complimenting my kite. His mother was bent over re-stringing his elaborate assemblage of crepe paper disks. “My circles are supposed to be three times as big,” he grumbled.
Doc re-bridled my kite, and I tried again in a patch of the mall occupied mostly by families. I found a clearing and attempted to get her airborne, but to no avail. A neighboring toddler was flying his Spiderman kite without even looking up.
The story behind the somewhat haunting photo of two young boys really drove the point home for me. Elijah and Isaiah, orphans in New Mexico, faced a rocky start. At ages 4 and 5, they were about to be institutionalized because their “high-needs” status prevented them from entering into Foster Care. When a photographer from the Heart Gallery, an organization that uses photography to bring awareness to adoption, snapped some photos of them, she couldn’t get any smiles, only fearful and icy stares. But a couple saw the photo at a Roswell, New Mexico, exhibition and was so moved that they adopted the boys. For Elijah and Isaiah, it was the click that changed everything. To Heart Gallery co-founder Diane Granito, it was a “single, but indicative, moment in their lives captured with compassion and skill” that had the strength to change the way families are formed.
Find more art-affirming stories at the Click! website which launched just last Friday. The site featuring nearly 20 essays from people of all disciplines weighing in on how photography affects who we are, where we go, and what we do, is a facet of a decade-long research project, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, to make the Institution’s collection of more than 13 million images more accessible to the public. Director Merry Foresta says the stories on Click! “are meant to represent an accumulated archive of different viewpoints and different contexts about photography,” adding that the future holds even more promise of “unique points of view.”
Laurie Anderson’s career has ranged far and wide since her jump from avant-garde performance artist to 1980s pop music star. In addition to experimenting with electronic instruments like the talking stick and the tape-bow violin, she’s written the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for “New York” and recently served as NASA’s first artist in residence. Anderson will be giving a free lecture on Andy Warhol (sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum) at 4:30 in the McEvoy Auditorium on March 15. I got the chance to catch up with her last week.
You started out in the 1960s and 1970s as an artist and you became a pop hit in the 1980s. How was that transition?
I didn’t know anything about the pop world. I was just an artist in New York and I had made a record that I was distributing by mail order. People would call me up on the phone and say, “Can I get this record?” I would go over to a carton, pick it up and go to the post office with it. I had pressed 1,000 records of something I had done on an NEA grant called O Superman. Then I got a call one afternoon from a guy in Britain who said “I’d like to order some records. I’ll need 40,000 Thursday and 40,000 more on Monday.” So I said, “Right. Okay. I’ll get right back to you.”
I called Warner Brothers and said, “Listen, I need to press a bunch of records, could you help me with it?” And they said, “That’s not how we do things at Warner Brothers Records. What we do is you sign an eight-record deal.”
And I was like, “What?”
So anyway, that’s what I did, because I thought that could be interesting. I tried very hard not to be seduced by that kind of world. I tried to have a lot of fun with it and I think I did. You get out of a car and everyone is screaming, it was just funny for me. They were like, “Can I get your autograph? Oh my god!” and “It’s really you.” For me I felt like an anthropologist.
Anthropologist? You’ve also worked in McDonald’s. Is that how you stay fresh, by trying different things?
I had gotten into kind of a rut with my life as an artist. You know how you make these elaborate plans and you start living them out without really getting into the experience?
I thought “How can I escape this trap of just experiencing what I expect?” I try to jump out of my skin. I normally see the world as an artist first, second as a New Yorker and third as a woman. That’s a perspective that I sometimes would like to escape.
So I put myself in places where I don’ t know what to do, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to act. I worked on an Amish farm, a place that had no technology at all. I also worked in McDonald’s. They were all really, really fascinating experiences.
You’re coming down to D.C. next week to give a lecture about Andy Warhol and his “Little Electric Chair” series. Why Warhol?
I feel like we are living in Andy’s world now. It’s the world that he defined in so many ways and his obsessions with fame and violence and ego. You just look around and go, “Wow, he was doing that 30 years ago!”
American culture was going that way and he nailed it. It’s completely fascinating how he came up with those categories and American life became that way.
Why the electric chair?
I think for me it combines a lot of things. One was this idea of tabloid stuff. We don’t allow images of people being electrocuted, for example. Another is the factory image, the multiple stuff, it’s a kind of death factory. People pass through that and it involves technology as well in a way, it’s the power of electricity….
Are you running out of time?
I am running out of time. My assistant is waving his hands, saying “You have to go now or you’ll be dead!”
(Photograph courtesy of SAAM. Saturday’s event is part of the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.)
Ready for another guess-this-picture game? We snapped this mysterious whirligig somewhere Around the Mall at the Smithsonian. Tell us what you think it is.
Is it a propeller on steroids? The world’s coolest water slide? A Frank Gehry gone gonzo?
The American History Museum, under renovation and due to reopen this fall, now has the typewriter from “Murder She Wrote” and Catwoman’s skin-tight suit.
That’s the result of a cache of recent donations by nine actresses whose pioneering work on stage and screen peaked from the 1920s to 1970s.
These “leading ladies” from classic film, theater and television were all “foundations of 20th-century American entertainment,” says curator Dwight Blocker Bowers.
The museum got quite a haul, including an original script from “The Birds” from Tippi Hedren and Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson giving away her “TV Land Award.”
To get some insight, I called Rose Marie, who donated the black bow she always wore in her hair, playing Sally Rogers on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s. While she still always wears a bow (it’s her trademark), she won’t tell why it’s so important to her.
“It’s a very private personal reason,” she says. “I said I would only give up (the bow) if the Smithsonian wants it.”
But what impressed me most was Rose Marie’s appearance when she was just three-years-old in some of the first talking films in the 1920s as a singing and dancing kid wonder. The clips on YouTube show a little girl with a moptop haircut belting out jazz tunes and scatting with the best of them. Sure enough, Rose Marie also donated her childhood dancing shoes.
While she says that being in the Smithsonian was “the greatest honor an American can get,” she definitely felt that classic actresses deserved a spot there.
Performers “are very important to this country. We taught the country to be entertained, we taught them how to sing, how to dance,” she says. “When the depression was on, for a nickel you could go see a movie and forget your troubles. That is our function.”
It was a swinging good time at the Pyramids this past week and no, we’re not talking about a bluesy New Orlean’s juke joint, we’re talking the real thing, the Great Pyramids of Giza.
“It was the big experience of everyone’s life in the ensemble,” enthused John Hasse, the National Museum of American History’s curator of American music, who said that the event was broadcast on the Arab language news network, al Jazeera.
Called “Jazz on the Nile,” the tour was pegged almost to the day when Louis Armstrong, himself, raised his trumpet and performed in front of the sphinx in 1961. A famous photograph recalls the moment.
The orchestra, conducted by the renowned David N. Baker, professor of music at Indiana University and NEA jazz master, was accompanied by singer Delores King Williams and two swing and tap dancers Chester Whitmore and Shaunte Johnson. Playing a repertoire selected from the museum’s collection of Duke Ellington and Benny Carter, the ensemble hit a note of perfection when it ripped into Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” Whitmore and Johnson in full swing reinacted choreagraphy of the period.
“The audience just went wild” said the museum’s director Brent Glass, “one couple danced in the aisle.”
“It was quite an extravaganza,” said Ken Kimery, SJMO’s executive producer, “we performed at the pyramids and did two concerts in Cairo and finished it off at the Alexandria Opera House.” Band members also conducted workshops with school children. “We bridged the language barrier. We were all speaking just one language,” Kimery said. “Music.”
The tour was sponsored by the Ministries of Culture and Tourism of the Egyptian government and the U.S. State Department.
(Photographs of Director Brent Glass, and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, courtesy of the National Museum of American History)
