Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection | Art & Artists

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

Starstruck

Black and white photo of a woman standing with two elephants.

Starstruck

Floor 7

In the early twentieth century, a variety of new, popular leisure pursuits—vaudeville, theater, cabaret, sporting events, and, above all, motion pictures—thrust performers and entertainers into the public eye as never before. For the crowds that flocked to see them, the stars of these entertainments became larger than life. An array of media outlets, from tabloid newspapers to glossy magazines to radio, sprang up to broadcast their exploits to captivated audiences across the nation.

Artists eagerly delved into these new phenomena, making portraits that stoked the public’s growing fascination with celebrities. Photographers in particular took advantage of the commercial opportunities offered by the booming entertainment industry, creating easily reproducible images that seemed both authentic and intimate. Foremost among them, Edward Steichen introduced the aesthetic of the close-up in his stylish magazine portraits of movie stars and other luminaries, including the examples on view in this gallery. Other works chronicle the rise of pioneering African American performers such as jazz innovator Buddy Gilmore and actor Paul Robeson.

Below is a selection of works from Starstruck.

Mabel Dwight’s lithograph depicts Paul Robeson, who gained fame in the 1920s and 1930s as one of the first African American actors to play leading theatrical and film roles, having first attracted notice in the title role of a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones. Dwight admired Robeson, who posed for an oil portrait during the play’s New York run, and she later revisited the subject in this print. Robeson’s pensive expression and military uniform remain unchanged, but Dwight added a tropical background in reference to the play’s setting on a Caribbean island.

In his writings and photographs, Carl Van Vechten documented the burgeoning cultural life of Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Among white New Yorkers, he heralded the neighborhood and helped promote the Harlem Renaissance while also problematically reinforcing stereotypical associations of the primitive and the exotic with African American life. Yet his portraits of cultural figures brought new attention to their subjects and often are instilled with grace and humanity. This photograph is part of a group in which he depicted the stars of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera written by composer Virgil Thomson and poet Gertrude Stein, during the production’s six-week Broadway run. The opera became a groundbreaking event in the history of modernism, notable for the avant-garde wordplay of Stein’s libretto, artist Florine Stettheimer’s flamboyant costume and set designs, and, above all, the black cast led by renowned Harlem choral director Eva Jessye.

As a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Richard Avedon set the mid-century standard for feminine style and beauty. This iconic photograph of the renowned model Dovima flanked by a pair of elephants demonstrates his signature balance of aesthetic virtuosity and compositional whimsy. The image is a study in contrasts: between Dovima’s diaphanous Christian Dior gown and the elephants’ wrinkled skin, the graceful arc of her figure and their thick bodies, her outstretched arms and their chained legs. Proclaiming the power of an elegant woman, Avedon shows Dovima subduing the great animals through touch alone. Critic Arthur Danto later described the photograph as “so dense with possibilities erotic, aesthetic, and psychological that it stands as a portrait of an inextinguishable wish and a metaphor of empowerment.”

After New York legalized boxing in 1920, it became one of the city’s most popular and lucrative sports. No boxer attained greater fame in this period than American heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, whose aggressive style and hitting power made him virtually unbeatable. This painting depicts the 1923 prizefight between Dempsey and his Argentine rival Luis Angel Firpo—the figure near the top of the composition here—which took place at the Polo Grounds with a crowd of 80,000 in attendance. Although Dempsey was the eventual victor, the artist represented the dramatic moment when Firpo knocked his opponent out of the ring with a tremendous blow to the jaw. The composition’s low vantage point places us among the spectators, including the artist himself, who appears as the balding man at the far left.