This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014. Edgar Jerins, who participated in our interviews last autumn, created the work David and Anita Visiting Daina for the 2013 competition.

Edgar Jerins / Charcoal on paper / Collection of the artist, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York City

Q: Where are you from, where do you live now?

A: I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. I now reside in Manhattan with my wife, Alana, and my two daughters Ruby and Sterling.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: For years, I worked primarily with oil and pastel, and now the balance has shifted to primarily charcoal on paper.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: I begin with a story or situation that someone I know is going through/facing.

Then, having secured my subject participation, I begin the process of photographing them in their environment. This involves many shoots and often results in me not moving forward on that image. When I do find a compelling image, I photograph detailed shots of the entire setting. Lighting is carefully controlled.

I unroll a very large sheet of paper and begin blocking out my composition using vine charcoal. When I have it roughed out, I blow the vine charcoal out of the paper with compressed air and switch to charcoal pencils. I rely heavily on erasure and move things around until the drawing is complete. Although using photography is necessary for the level of detail in my work, I use as much lifework as possible.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts right after high school. PAFA has a skill-based program that relies primarily on working from life from the figure. This training enabled me to use photography correctly as a tool for my work. Upon graduation in 1980, I lived solely on the sale of my work until recently. Four years ago, I began teaching part time.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: Through the New York Foundation of the Arts.

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: David and Anita Visiting Daina is set on a farm porch in Lindsborg, Kansas. It depicts my first cousins and their inner conflicts. Daina and her husband Doyle are raising Anita’s three children. Anita is trying to woo them back. Anita and David, despite early talent and promise, have become victims of depression and substance abuse.

The emotional loyalties and relationships change daily, if not hourly, with potential breakdowns and explosions held at bay by Daina and Doyle providing practicalities.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: My large, narrative drawings cover thematically dark subject matter. The subjects are facing various crises including addiction, divorce, alienation and violence. Recently I have been exploring mental illness in my work.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: My latest drawing is of my brother Tom. He is a chronic alcoholic and presently is homeless. To capture the danger of his situation, he is standing in our mom’s front yard in the snow.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: Up until 2001, my work was primarily oil with a more classical or timeless approach. In 2001 I began this series of drawings where the goal is to portray the world as it is now. My narratives also became contemporary.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had has an artist.

A: When I was fourteen, I began formal study with Dimitar Khruschev and drew my first nude from life. This began a lifelong pursuit of the human figure.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: This changes over time. When I was young, it was Botticelli, Goya, and Dali. In art school, I looked at everyone with an open mind. Later, Ingres and 19^th century realism became significant to me. Recently, my focus has been on Durer and the artists of the Weimar Republic: Dix, Gross, Shad, etc.

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: Sir John Everett Millais painting “Ophelia”

Q: What inspires you?

 A: People rising above adversity.

Self-portrait with Tom, Mom and Cat by Edgar Jerins

This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.

Louie Palu, who participated in our interviews last autumn, created the work Night Raid for the 2013 competition.

Night Raid / Louie Palu / Pigment print, 2010 / Collection of the artist

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: Mostly photography, with the occasional audio and video piece.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: Straight raw documentary approach when using the camera.  Multiple modes of dissemination. In no specific order, traditional print/online placement in editorial media (magazines, newspapers, websites), traditional print exhibitions. Experimental installations of all kinds, including projection, incorporated audio, or using disposable prints or posters. 

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I started out as a painter and did a lot of drawing. My high school had a special advanced art program where half of my classes were in visual art. I discovered photography at the age of sixteen and since then have used it as a means of connecting to the world around me and expressing myself.

My parents are immigrant laborers who lived through war at an early age; I grew up hearing many of their stories. The issues around immigrants, the working class, and conflict have been a part of my subject matter ever since.

Q: How did you learn about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition?

A: I frequently go to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and several other galleries, including the National Gallery of Art, as part of my research and love of art. I saw the last exhibition of the Portrait Competition at the Portrait Gallery [2009] and was so impressed. There is no bigger gift as a practicing artist than to have such a remarkable collection of work to reflect on and study just a short bike or Metro ride away.

One Sunday I saw a documentary on the history of the Medici family (Renaissance art patrons and bankers) and had my interest in Sandro Botticelli renewed. The National Gallery of Art has several of his pieces, so that same day I rode my bike there and was able to study some beautiful examples of his work. 

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: I took this photograph at night in a U.S. Army Medevac helicopter after a bombing in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2010, not far from where 9/11 was planned. The helicopter had just come under attack and was nearly shot down. A special blue cabin light came on while the medic worked on the casualty. We are in the air flying while a battle took place on the ground. The blue light gives a surreal quality to the image, and for me it is a portrait not only of the soldier, but of war itself.

Photographing casualties of war to understand America’s most painful moments dates back to images from Antietam, one of the most savage battles of the U.S. Civil War, photographed by Alexander Gardner and exhibited in New York City in 1862.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: This image belongs to a body of work titled The Fighting Season, which is a study of conflict that takes place mainly in Kandahar, where I worked between 2006 and 2010. Before this I spent twelve years documenting gold- and nickel-mining communities in northern Canada in one of the richest mining regions in the world. 

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I am currently in the midst of photographing the drug war in Mexico and its effects on the U.S.–Mexico border. I am about halfway through the project and have produced a special traveling concept exhibition that can be hung anywhere in public. It is funded by a fellowship through the Washington–based New America Foundation and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: Outside of some maturing in the understanding and use of my materials and my process, what has mostly changed is me, not really my work. Any change in how my work looks comes from within me. After being a practicing artist for more than twenty years and making a living from my art, I feel a confidence and spiritual maturity I always craved as a young and sometimes frustrated artist.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had has an artist.

A: Meeting and getting editing advice from John G. Morris in France at a photography festival.  He was the photo editor for Robert Capa’s iconic images from the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He also worked as a photo editor at the New York Times and Washington Post. I think he made such an impression on me with regards to editing photographs and was such a great teacher that I was forever changed as a photographer.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: Michelangelo Buonarrotti for his heart and soul. I have to mention filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola for making the film Apocalypse Now as well. 

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: I think I would like to do an installation with English poet John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost. My definition of an artist includes writers. 

Q: What is your favorite artwork?

A: At this moment, the first work that comes to mind is Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. 

Q: What inspires you?

A: People who struggle to survive through pain and loss.

Medics treating wounded on the front lines in a forward operating base in Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan by Louie Palu

Paul Laurence Dunbar / William McKnight Farrow / Oil on canvas, 1934 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The National Portrait Gallery is proud to call the District of Columbia home, and equally proud of the great collection of portraits we have of DC residents past and present.

On May 29, you can test your knowledge of famous locals at the museum’s monthly collections-based trivia game, Pop Quiz! This month’s Pop Quiz theme is “Hometown Heroes,” featuring questions about the sitters in our collection who have called DC home.

Pop Quiz can be played individually or in teams of up to 6 people. Festivities begin at 6:30 p.m. The Courtyard Café will be open, and snacks and beverages will be available for purchase. Below is a sneak peek at the 10-point bonus question for this month’s Pop Quiz trivia:

Michael Jordan / Gary Nolton / Black and white halftone poster, 1989 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Michael Jordan is the winner of numerous NBA awards, a two-time Olympic gold-medalist, Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, and even, briefly, a minor-league baseball player. In 2001 Jordan came out of retirement to play two seasons for the Washington Wizards. What number did Jordan wear while playing for Wizards?

a)    12

b)   45

c)    23

d)    25

Pop Quiz trivia occurs once a month in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard in the National Portrait Gallery.

Helen Hayes / Furman Joseph Finck / Oil on canvas, 1966 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist

This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.

Saeri Kiritani, who participated in our interviews last autumn, created the work “One Hundred Pounds of Rice” for the 2013 competition.

100 Pounds of Rice / Saeri Kiritani / Rice, rice noodles, Elmer’s Glue, epoxy glue, wood and metal sticks, 2010 / Collection of the artist

Q; What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: My name is Saeri Kiritani (My artist name is Saeri only, no last name).  I am from Japan.  Presently, I live and work in NYC.

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I use many forms of media.  I use any objects if they suit my needs for my art work.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: I have a BA degree from San Francisco State University, a BFA degree from San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA degree from University of Pennsylvania. Meeting many talented, interesting people from school gave me encouragement to be an artist.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I am working on performance video / photography pieces.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: I started to think about my background and how I fit into this 21 century.

Q: Tell us about a seminal experience you’ve had as an artist.

A: It is very difficult to survive as an artist.  Now I understand how, for example, somebody like Van Gogh suffered to be an artist.  I think artists have to sacrifice a lot in order to create works of art.  It could be painful but it could be a good thing too.

Q: Who are your favorite artists?

A: Goya, Caravaggio, Joseph Beuys, Ito Jakuchu (Japanese painter from 18th century)

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: I would like to work with Kerry James Marshall if possible.

Q: What inspires you?

A: Life, people, and the human psyche generally inspire me.

Shuwashuwatt by Saeri Kiritani / Digital photograph, 125 x 200 cm (49.2 x 78.7 in.), 2012

By Eden Slone, Intern, Office of Collections Information and Research, National Portrait Gallery

A native Californian, William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) began his career in publishing when he obtained ownership of The San Francisco Examiner in 1887 from his father, George Hearst. Over many years, he added other newspapers to his growing business. In fact, “empire” may be a more appropriate term, as approximately 25 percent of Americans received their news from a paper owned by Hearst at his entrepreneurial zenith.

He later expanded his empire to include other forms of media and entertainment, particularly movies, television, and radio. In 1902, Hearst even dabbled in politics, representing New York in the U.S. Congress and mounting a fruitless gubernatorial campaign four years later.  In 1904 he even sought the Democratic nomination for president.

Despite his business genius, Hearst’s most enduring legacy seems to be his designation as an art collector. It is believed that Hearst, unaccompanied, “accounted for 25 percent of the world’s art market during the 1920s and ‘30s.”

His collection was diverse, ranging from medieval Italian armor to Navajo weavings to objects from South East Asia. Much of the art he owned and subsequently sold is of museum caliber and can be found at many institutions across the nation, including his Enchanted Hill in San Simeon.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, credits Hearst as its “greatest individual donor” and in 2008 organized an exhibition of nearly 170 objects in his name. Other notable institutions that now own Hearst objects include the Louvre, MoMA, the National History Museum of Los Angeles County, the University of California’s Bancroft Library, and Long Island University’s C. W. Post campus.

The cartoon seen above caricatures Hearst and William Jennings Bryan’s complicated political relationship. Hearst followed in Bryan’s footsteps and ran for president in 1904. Hearst presumed he would receive Bryan’s West and Midwest followers as well his endorsement, but he did not. Without Bryan’s support, Hearst could not win the Democratic presidential nomination. However, the rivals allied in 1924 against Al Smith, “the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.”

The photograph below illustrates Hearst’s intense focus and determination in both the political and business realms. Hearst successfully developed an influential news empire and made his mark on the Democratic Party of the early twentieth century.

Images:
William Jennings Bryan and Willaim Randolph Hearst / Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell / Watercolor on paper, 1908 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

William Randolph Hearst / Erich Salomon / Gelatin silver print, 1930 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Cited:
Hearst Castle. “William Randolph Hearst.” Accessed April 9, 2013, http://hearstcastle.org/history-behind-hearst-castle/historic-people/profiles/william-randolph-hearst/.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Hearst the Collector.” Accessed April 9, 2013. http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/hearst-collector.

Muchnic, Suzanne. “Hearst, Off the Hill.” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2008.

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Robinson, Francis W. “A Gift of Arms and Armor From the Collection of William Randolph Hearst.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 33, no.1 (1953–54): 1–5.

The Frick Collection Archives. “Directory for the History of Collecting in America: Hearst, William Randolph, 1863-1951.” Accessed April 9, 2013. http://research.frick.org/directoryweb/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=6219.

Whitaker, Kathleen. “Art from the Navajo Loom: The William Randolph Hearst Collection.” African Arts 22, no. 2 (February 1989): 98–99.

This is a continuing series of interviews with the forty-eight artists whose work was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.The third OBPC exhibition opened on March 23, 2013, and will run through February 23, 2014.

Paul D’Amato, who participated in our interviews last autumn, was named a commended artist of the 2013 competition.

Lillian, New Covenant Church of Deliverance, Chicago, 2011 / Paul D'Amato / Ink jet print, 2011 / Collection of the artist, courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago

Q: What is your name, where are you from, where do you live now?

A: Paul D’Amato. I’m from Boston, went to college in Oregon, and now live in Chicago

Q: What medium(s) do you work with?

A: I’m a photographer who still works with film and the amazing range of cameras that film allows, principally a 4 x 5 view camera or a 6 x 7 handheld rangefinder. I make work-prints in the darkroom because it’s fast and gives me an idea of how the light wants to be in the final print. Then for images I know I’m truly interested in, I scan the negative and print digitally.

Q: Tell us about your technique/creative process.

A: My creative process involves throwing myself into communities that aren’t technically where I live—that is, if we abide by narrow geographic definitions of where we live. But I consider the whole country, the planet even, to be where I live—I’m part of all of it and responsible to varying degrees for many aspects of it.

“For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body” (1 Corinthians).  My creative process begins with truly believing that. That belief is my passport. After that my job is to honor that experience with all the things that inspire me as an image-maker. We’ll get to that later.

Q: What is your background (education, career, etc.) and how does it contribute to your art?

A: Three things from my past shape my values as an artist.

1. My working-class family’s interest in politics, education, and the all the arts—musical, literary, and visual.

2. The value placed on the humanities at Reed College, where I received my BA.

3.  What I learned from having to travel cross-country either by hitchhiking, hopping freight trains, or cramming in a car for days with other students who couldn’t afford to fly all the time between the West and East Coast. I learned to talk with anyone and everyone and to quickly read people I’ve just met. I learned, too, that everyone has a story. Not only was this something that was a perfect antidote to any kind of elitism that may have been festering from the schools I attended, but these lessons and skills are things I use every day I photograph.

After that, I’d say that attending Yale for my MFA, where we heard more about Robert Frost than anything about career, where the emphasis was on how an image worked rather than how it would work in the art market.  And too, my students at Columbia College, where it is such a pleasure to teach and have people interested in what’s taken me a lifetime to know.

Photo by Paul Morigi for AP/National Portrait Gallery

Q: Tell us about the piece you submitted to the competition.

A: The portrait of Lillian was made in a church on the west side of Chicago in a nondescript function room off of the sanctuary. I was principally interested in Lillian’s friend, who I had arranged near the room’s large windows facing the street. Lillian was just off to the side waiting for her turn in the spotlight. But then I noticed that where she was, against that yellow wall, getting only part of the direct sunlight coming into the room was, in fact, a lot more interesting than what I had arranged.

I noticed too that she, Lillian, at that moment looked a lot more striking than her friend who was more conventionally beautiful. I told her to stay where she was and then, between poses that we were inventing together, she stretched her fingers to relieve some of the tension from being paid so much attention to. I asked her to do that again which, in the end, restored some of the tension that had charged the whole collaboration to begin with.

All of it—the picture and everything leading up to it—was the result of looking outside of conscious intention. For me, it’s the things just to the left or right of preconception that is always more interesting than what I hope to do or find.

Q: Tell us about your larger body of work.

A: The portrait of Lillian comes from a larger body of work that I have been working on for the last eight years on the west side of Chicago called HereStillNow. It’s a community like a lot of communities in every urban area of the country—African American and poor—that thousands of people drive through, drive around every day of the year. There’s a tacit acceptance that this is the way it is and that it will probably always be that way.

And sure enough, through the last Bush administration and the first term of President Obama, very little has changed here. These communities are the collateral damage of capitalism, and even though I know that I can’t change the economics that perpetuate this, I feel strongly that there is inherent value in paying attention. I want every one of my photographs to show that each of my subjects is as important as any that have ever been seen in art.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I’m trying to edit and sequence the thousands of pictures I have made here since 2004 into a coherent body of work. The project is composed largely of portraiture, but there are also many detail images and the occasionally larger view of things that set the stage for everything else. I am also in the process of collecting written statements from my subjects, from the pastor of the Original Providence Baptist Church, and from writers outside the community as well.

My hope is that, taken all together, there will emerge a sense of how collaborative and multifaceted the process of imaging this community has been. A large survey of this work with an accompanying catalogue will be at the DePaul Art Museum next September.

Q: How has your work changed over time?

A: As I have gone from photographing with a 6 x 7 (mostly) handheld range finder to the much slower way of working necessitated by a view camera, my work has gone from being candid and intuitive to being a lot more collaborative, thoughtful, and deliberate.

The work has also grown from seeing my subjects as part of a perpetual human theater to seeing them as all having a unique psychological presence. Instead of having the sense of how someone feels by the way they act, you now have that sense by the way they look at the camera, by the way they hold their hands, by the way the light amplifies a certain shift in mood and makes visible what is essentially impossible to truly know from a picture.

Q: Who is your favorite artist?

A: I don’t have a favorite artist; I’d be surprised if anyone could say they did, since there are so many that we collect along the way. What I have done over the years is found my tribe. And I bet if they were all able to be in the same village that they’d all get along or fight like brothers and sisters. They would all know that they’re up to the same game and either collaborate or compete.

This tribe would include lots of painters, who early on were my principal inspiration, painters like Francisco Goya, Caravaggio, Richard Diebenkorn, Bruegel, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns and photographers like Helen Levitt, George Brassai, Josef Koudelka, and Larry Sultan.

All of that sounds kind of highbrow, but if I’m going to be truly honest, I’d say that what has always inspired me is the music I grew up with, and that starts with the Beatles, the Who, the Stones, the Band, Miles Davis, the Clash, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, John Coltrane, Richard Thompson, the Allman Brothers, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, and Hank Williams. I’m fairly sure that Goya would love the Clash and be a huge fan of Fellini and Truffaut too.

I have a favorite living artist and it’s the one I live with, Anne Harris, who is also in the show, and who every day comes in the house smelling of oil paint, reminding me that if I don’t have the patience to be a painter then at least I can be around her and we can do all of this together.

Q: If you could work with any artist (past or present) who would it be?

A: Hanging with Brassai in Paris during the thirties has always been a fantasy, but then again being with the Beatles when they were recording Revolver and Rubber Soul would be tough to beat, too. The only down side is that I wouldn’t be able to call my wife and tell her what I did that day because she would be only four years old.

Q: What inspires you?

A: To be in awe, which is a feeling that is best defined as a moment that makes you forget everything about yourself. To stand in front of someone, or something, or to be in a situation and have that feeling and be conscious only of the need to honor that moment with the best picture I’m capable of.

First Lady, Garfield Baptist Church, Chicago, 2009, from the "HereStillNow" series by Paul D'Amato

Merwin (Merf) Shaw / Mary Borgman / Charcoal on Mylar, 2009 / Courtesy of Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

It’s always exciting to open another window on the artistic process. The new program series Studio Time offers adults the chance to take an art lesson from a contemporary artist whose work the museum has collected or displayed. The first three sessions—on May 11, June 8, and July 13—will be led by, respectively, Mary Borgman (charcoal on Mylar, her work Merwin (Merf) Shaw is above), Mequitta Ahuja (collage drawing), and Jennifer Levonian (animation).

Studio Time builds on the great momentum of our serial exhibitions “Portraiture Now” and “Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition,” which show the current state of the art of portraiture and offer visitors a special opportunity: the chance to discuss a successful artist’s inspiration, materials, and technique with her (or him).

NPG programs, including the popular Family Days, Be the Artist, and Gallery360, have made those discussions a regular occurrence—indeed, a point of emphasis. For example, after presenting a Gallery360 talk for us, artist John Kascht made a short film, Funny Bones, that reveals his process in rich and humorous detail. However, seeing so many unsupervised adults in the line for child-friendly art-making activities made it clear that the time had come for us to arrange a studio program of your own.

And so it begins this Saturday, when 20 visitors will have the museum—and Mary Borgman (right)—to themselves for a memorable art lesson. Whether you sign up to sharpen your own artistic vision, to experiment with unfamiliar materials, or just to have as much fun as the kids at our last Be the Artist program, carve out a little Studio Time for yourself this summer!

There is a $50 fee for registration and materials. The program is limited to 20 participants per session. E-mail studiotime@si.edu for registration and payment instructions. This program is intended for adults ages 18 and over.

Studio Time is sponsored in part by The Reed Foundation, Inc. Support also comes from the Reinsch Family Education Endowment.

A Pyrrhic victory is one that arrives at a great cost, and is named in tribute to King Pyrrhus (318–272 BCE) of Epirus. Plutarch records that while the king achieved a great victory over the Romans at Asculum, he sustained great losses in the effort. Robert E. Lee’s victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville is widely characterized as such a victory.

The plan seemed like it was a sound one. General Joseph Hooker had led his men across the Rappahannock in late April 1863 in order to catch Lee off-guard. Hooker’s plan was to take Lee’s army from two sides and envelope him.

Lee, however, split his troops and went around Hooker’s flank, and at the end of the day on May 2, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (above)—Lee’s partner in this highly unorthodox plan—urged his own soldiers to press the advantage. Hooker’s plan to crush Lee between two mighty arms of the Union army had backfired, and instead Hooker and his 70,000 men were about to be crushed between two substantially weaker Confederate forces.

As Jackson reconnoitered the Union positions early in the evening on the second of May, his own troops mistook him for the enemy and fired upon him. Jackson was wounded and would die several days later, though every attempt was made to save him, including amputating his left arm.* For the next two days, the Confederate troops pushed Hooker and the Union army back across the Rappahannock.

Historian E. B. Long notes, “Lee had triumphed over numbers and . . . had made Chancellorsville a battle that would be studied the world over.” Lee had won the battle, certainly. Confederate losses, however, told another story. In securing the southern position between Washington and Richmond, Lee had lost about 20 percent of those troops available to him in northern Virginia. Unlike the northern army, which was replenishing its numbers with fresh recruits daily, the South could not suffer such casualties.

Coupled with the loss of Jackson, Lee’s strategic gem was tarnished by the grim fact of wartime attrition—deaths, injuries, and men gone missing were hurting the South, and the status quo of occupying Virginia was rapidly becoming a defensive liability. As he had done in the summer of 1862, Lee decided to go on the offensive; he took the token of a victory he had in his pocket and set his eyes toward Pennsylvania. Inside of two months, the great armies would converge once again, this time at a little-known hamlet called Gettysburg.

*Jackson’s arm would receive its own burial plot. Retrieved from a pile of limbs outside the battlefield hospital, it was buried in the family cemetery at Ellwood Manor near Chancellorsville, and is marked by a stone.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Photo by Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery

Cited:
E. B. Long, The Civil War, Day by Day (New York: De Capo, 1971).

Thomas Jonathan Jackson, / Adam B. Walter, Copy after: Nathaniel Routzahn, / Mezzotint on paper, c. 1862 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Robert E. Lee’s victory at Fredericksburg in December 1862 was a thorough one, and enough to put the Union army to bed for a few months. By late April 1863, however, it was time for a fresh campaign. The previous January, General Joseph Hooker (above) had replaced the defeated Ambrose Burnside at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Hooker remained encamped at Falmouth, Virginia, until spring broke, which gave him time to organize his command and to prepare to take his own offensive against Lee’s Army of Virginia.

Possibly more critical than the Battle of Fredericksburg, the battle at Chancellorsville would secure Lee’s legacy as a strategist; the victory in this small Virginia community would propel him toward Gettysburg and rush the Confederacy into the war’s most pivotal moment.

Chancellorsville would also serve as the first and only installment in the command of Joseph Hooker. Hooker was a soldier’s soldier, and he took care of his men. He was not as kind to his superiors, however, and he had a reputation for being cantankerous, mouthy, and insubordinate. His soldiering and leadership were products of his time at West Point; his insubordination was a product of his time under leadership that neither rose up to his vision nor equaled his tolerance.

Hooker’s goal was to confront Lee at the site of the previous defeat, but this time from two sides—the north and the west. With a sizable contingency remaining in Fredericksburg to face Lee’s troops, Hooker pushed 70,000 men across the Rappahannock well west of the town. This part of the Union army hoped to surprise Lee on his flank and crush him into submission.

However, as with any large logistical operation, the movement of troops in this war was rarely a secret. As Hooker established his position on the ground at Chancellorsville, Lee divided his troops, leaving a force to defend Fredericksburg and taking about 40,000 soldiers to meet Hooker.

On May 1, Lee and his most dependable general, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (right), created one of the gutsiest plans of the campaign in order to thwart Hooker’s attack.

“That night,” historian E. B. Long states, “Lee and Jackson talked. Out of that cracker-barrel conference came one of the most daring decisions of military history. Lee would split his army once more, disobeying the laws of strategy and tactics.” Lee and Jackson would further segment the Confederate forces by sending Jackson, with 30,000 troops, around the southern edge of Hooker’s line in order to outflank the would-be outflankers.

The number of men who pitched war in this moment was great; the Union army counted around 130,000 while the Confederates had less than half of that many, placing about 60,000 soldiers in the field. The numbers, however, would belie the result.

Next: Chancellorsville, Part Two: The Confederacy’s Pyrrhic Moment

—Warren Perry, Natioanl Portrait Galery, Catalog of American Portraits

Images
Stonewall Jackson / J. W. King, copy after: George W. Minnis / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; given in memory of Lieselotte Richardson

Joseph Hooker / Mathew Brady Studio / Modern albumen print from wet collodion negative, c. 1863 (printed 2011) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection

Cited:
E. B. Long, The Civil War, Day by Day (New York: De Capo, 1971).

One of the aims of traditional curatorial practice is to display works of art so that the efforts of the curators, conservators, art handlers, and installation team are invisible. Hiding those efforts is part of the “museum magic.” Once the evidence of the museum team is gone, the viewer ideally experiences the art without the distraction of hanging hardware, exposed wires, and the trappings of engineering. Sometimes, however, getting a piece of art onto a wall is an act of artistic and engineering merit on its own.

In the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition “Portraiture Now: Drawing on the Edge,” the works of Mequitta Ahuja compelled a treatment that combined no small amount of smoke and mirrors. Ahuja’s larger works are fragile and unwieldy; two of them—Mocoonama and Meecoo Mocoo—are monumental, each measuring more than five feet horizontally and six feet vertically.

Moreover, handling them is something of a task, as they consist of collaged vellum paper with acrylic, colored pencil, and enamel. Framing of works this size is cost-prohibitive in many cases. Conservator Rosemary Fallon said that the works “could have been displayed by traditional means but yes, it would have been expensive. In my opinion there is something about the pieces that are almost mural-like, meaning that they invoke a more immediate response from the viewer.”

Michael Baltzer, NPG exhibition designer, also recently discussed the installation of the Ahuja portraits. Baltzer commented, “The collage works by Mequitta Ahuja presented a challenge that’s common in contemporary art installation: how to install large unframed/unprotected works on paper at multiple venues in a way that doesn’t cause preventable wear or infringe on the artist’s aesthetic sensibilities.” Of the process, Fallon said, “This was a creative solution to make the drawings appear as if they were floating; i.e., suspended in air.”

In this case, the answer was to suspend the works with a support structure that is invisible to the viewer; the drawings were mounted with Japanese paper hinges and reversible adhesive at regular intervals on the back. They were then attached to wood frames using magnets covered with soft Tyvek and then mounted on the gallery walls.

The visual effect of the installation is that of a portrait that seems to be floating away from the wall. The paper hinges were aligned with metal plates inset along the sides of the wood frame; the hinges were folded down onto those metal plates and secured in place with the Tyvek-covered magnets.

“By creating a support system that’s simple to assemble and disassemble with recessed steel plates, and mounting the work with a series of hinges and magnets, we were able to ensure that the work would be installed over and over with minimal risk and wear,” Baltzer added.

--Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, with special thanks to Rosemary Fallon and Michael Baltzer for their help in preparing this article

Mocoonama / Mequitta Ahuja /  Enamel, acrylic, and glitter on stamped and collaged vellum, 2011 / Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France