Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

At the front of the line at Antiques Roadshow

I've been a fan of Antiques Roadshow since I was young, and it even inspired me to write my tenth grade term paper on English furniture. So I was ecstatic when I heard they were coming to film in the museum's Luce Foundation Center and Lunder Conservation Center. I literally jumped up and down when I got tickets to go to the main event.

I love the show because of the stories it tells. While at Lunder, Nancy Druckman from Sotheby's concentrated on four portrait miniatures from the museum's collection. There was the tragic story of the Bordley brothers, depicted in Charles Willson Peale's miniature. The elder brother Thomas died shortly after the portrait was painted. Then there was the student-teacher relationship behind Sarah Goodridge's portrait of renowned painter Gilbert Stuart, which Stuart said was the only “true likeness” of him; he even went as far as to give the portrait miniature to his mother! Druckman explained how miniatures became more economically available (not only for what she called the "American aristocracy") when artists began to paint on paper rather than on ivory. Druckman pointed out why Captain Noah Rich was painted with his warship—it was because he wanted to be remembered as a valiant captain (which made me think about what I would want in my portrait). And those fanciful clouds around James Sanford Ellsworth's sitters' heads were meant to make his miniatures stand out against the very popular daguerreotypes of the time.

At the main event Saturday, August 21, the lines were endless, but the camaraderie between everyone waiting was interesting to watch—each person’s object had a story and strangers commiserated with each other after finding out their treasure wasn’t as valuable as hoped. I finally found myself standing in front of the appraiser. What would he or she say about my treasures?

The set of ivory boxes, which I had so often looked at on my grandparents’ bookshelf while growing up, were from around 1820. They came to my family via my great-grandmother’s antique shop, where she had marketed them as boxes from the time of Louis XIV, about a century before (it still had the sales tag she had typed). Everyone in the family was a bit upset to learn the truth about the boxes because they had always been so romanticized! My mom’s brooch was from around 1915 and had been part of a larger, Edwardian-style necklace. Too bad it was broken up along the way!

I did catch a glimpse of some of the pieces that will be featured when the episode airs in 2011, but I’m not going to spoil the surprise!

• Antiques Roadshow, Lunder Conservation Center, Sotheby's, Miniatures, American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum

Betye Saar's Wishing for Winter

I admit, it was the title, Wishing for Winter, that first drew me to this work, as I walked around American Art on one of Washington D.C.'s toastiest days. August may have ended, but the summer is not going anyplace just yet. I let the crowds explore the Norman Rockwell exhibit on the ground floor, while I made my way up to three, to check out modern and contemporary works. It was pretty busy up there, too.

Betye Saar, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926, created Wishing for Winter in 1989. It's a mixed-media assemblage: a window with its hinges is divided into five sections, four small forming a quadrant, and one large of equal size. It seems to me filled with summer detritus: feathers and bird wings, one glove, a belt buckle, a small journal or prayerbook, and a few keys. There's an old photo, too, faded beyond recognition. It feels to me like a trip to the family summer house, and wandering through the attic when you come upon an old trunk, filled with keepsakes, mementoes, and hopefully a treasure or two.

In speaking of her own work, Saar has said, "I am intrigued with combining the remnant of memories, fragments of relics and ordinary objects, with the components of technology. It's a way of delving into the past and reaching into the future simultaneously."

This work certainly speaks of memory and ordinary objects. I wonder if growing up in Los Angeles you can't help but always wish for winter. Perhaps if Saar was in D.C. last winter and its record-breaking snow storms, she may not want to wish too hard.

• Betye Saar, Winter, Summer, Weather, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Norman Rockwell Tribute ©2010 Craig Thoburn

Photographer Craig Thoburn, a big fan of Norman Rockwell, set up his own backdrop to make this wild Rockwell Saturday Evening Post homage to the artist. His brother was more than eager to pose. Here's what Thoburn said about Rockwell and our exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

• • •

When I look for inspiration in my own pursuit of photography, I've frequently gone to Rockwell's work. Ron Schick, in his book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, points out that Rockwell was an accomplished photographer whose photography inspired many of his paintings. Throughout his book are photos Rockwell had taken when he was staging his models. Seeing these I came to realize that one thing I really enjoy about Rockwell's work is his studies of people and their emotions.

I recently visited the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. I listened to a short documentary in which two of Rockwell's collectors, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg---modern day storytellers---talked about his influence on them and the inspiration his work had on their lives and their careers. They spoke of his ability to tell a story in a single frame, why they collected many of his pieces and how much they meant to them as they honed their craft.

As I browsed their collection and looked at each piece, I was moved by Rockwell's storytelling ability. I'd seen his paintings many times, but seeing them in person was a completely different experience. There were instances where his original charcoal drawings were hung next to the final paintings. You could see the story evolve as he removed extraneous elements and focused in on his characters and their emotions. I discovered that even his brush strokes contributed to the stories in his paintings. The textures would be smooth and delicate for many of his characters and rough for others. The simple environments had a dimension to them that brought the characters to life. The attention to details big and small stood out in a way they never had before.

I walked through the entire exhibit twice, and as I walked away I was smiling. Norman Rockwell's paintings tell many stories individually, but as a group they tell the best story of all. They paint a beautiful picture of a very special time in our country and our history. A picture of our nation's greatness, our morality and our beliefs.

Last year I decided to create a photographic image as a sort of tribute to Norman Rockwell's work and in the process try to better understand how he was able to capture such emotion. I asked my little brother if he would pose for a photo. Without blinking he ran to his room, put on his best cowboy outfit and proceeded to tell me all about cowboys, as my camera snapped away. My little brother is a great storyteller too.

• Norman Rockwell, Flickr, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Do you prefer cupcakes or salted peanuts? Would you rather untie a knot or a bow? Think carefully, because the answers may determine your place in our new "big" game, Pheon. Pheon is set in the secret world of Terra Tectus, in which two warring factions, Knaves and Staves, struggle to restore balance after the intrusion of Seers, people from the real world. Knaves are pragmatic, self-interested seekers of wealth, while Staves are idealistic conservators and protectors. Both have their good sides and their bad, and both are essential to restoring balance in the world. Once their status is established, players will be challenged to complete various missions based on the museum's collections, exhibitions, and programs in order to win points for their side and propel the game.

Pheon will launch with an event in the museum on September 18. Come armed with your cellphone and a sense of adventure ready to choose a side and enter the world of Terra Tectus. Can’t make it to DC? You can still play the game online, completing missions from anywhere in the world!

• Games, Museums and Technology, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Antiques Roadshow host Mark L. Walberg discusses the shoot with segment producer Sarah Elliott while Nancy Druckman from Sotheby’s looks at miniatures in the background.

Folks from the popular PBS show, Antiques Roadshow, came to film in the Museum yesterday before Saturday’s main event at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. While they were here, they went behind the scenes at the Museum and looked at some of our miniatures in the Lunder Conservation Center. Nancy Druckman from Sotheby's discussed four miniatures on view in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art: Matthias & Thomas Bordley by Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart by Sarah Goodridge, Captain Noah Rich by Unidentified, and Portrait of a Lady by James Sanford Ellsworth. I wonder what treasures they are going to discover on Saturday?

• Antiques Road Show, Luce Foundation Center, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Antiques Roadshow host Mark L. Walberg discusses the shoot while Nancy Druckman from Sotheby’s looks at miniatures in the background.

Folks from the popular PBS show, Antiques Roadshow, came to film in the Museum yesterday before Saturday’s main event at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. While they were here, they went behind the scenes at the Museum and looked at some of our miniatures in the Lunder Conservation Center. Nancy Druckman from Sotheby's discussed four miniatures on view in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art: Matthias & Thomas Bordley by Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart by Sarah Goodridge, Captain Noah Rich by Unidentified, and Portrait of a Lady by James Sanford Ellsworth. I wonder what treasures they are going to discover on Saturday?

• Antiques Road Show, Luce Foundation Center, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Hayley Plack interned in American Art's External Affairs department during the summer. Before she left, she wrote this post about discovering her uncle's artwork in our collection.

Reginald Case's Statue of Liberty

I had known my Uncle Reg was a talented artist, but it wasn't until I began my internship at American Art this summer that I discovered he had two pieces in the museum's permanent collection—Statue of Liberty and Survivor. I have many memories of my great uncle, Reginald Case. As a child, I was amazed by the work that crowded his upstate New York house. There was that six-foot-high Barbie Wedding Cake, a mixed-media piece that highlighted the doll on a pedestal of feathers, beads, glitter, and sequins. I still look at his art with similar wonder and admiration, so I was excited to see it at American Art.

During my internship, I spoke with a curator, registration assistant, and conservator who had experience with my uncle's work. Curator George Gurney met Reg and my grandfather (Reg's brother) at my uncle's artwork storage unit in Rhinebeck, New York, in 2008. George eventually chose the Statue of Liberty as a good fit for the American Art Museum's collection. A few days later, Reg and my grandfather rented a U-Haul to transport it to Washington, D.C. Somewhere en route, the tip of Liberty's torch broke off. The work later found its way to the museum's Lunder Conservation Center, where it became a project for Object Conservator Hugh Shockey. On a tour of the center, I met Hugh, who explained how he had reconnected the torch and some loose beads using a hot-air tool. During its stay at Lunder, the piece even appeared in the Washington Post.

This summer I had the chance to view Liberty at the museum's storage center with Heather Delemarre from the Registrar's Office. (Only about 10 percent of a museum's collection is on display in the galleries, with another 10 percent in the Luce Foundation Center's open storage facility.) The photos I had seen do not do this work justice. One thing I enjoyed learning is that it lights up from within—how fun! My research on the Statue of Liberty held not only sentimental value for my family and me but also afforded me the opportunity to follow the journey of an object from its selection to conservation to display or storage at the museum. Uncle Reg died last year, but his creative spirit lives on in my memory and in museum collections such as this one.

• Reginald Case, Statue of Liberty, Lunder Conservation Lab, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Christo's Package 1961

Just outside the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence is a small earlier piece by Christo. Unlike the outdoor environmental works that he did in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, Package 1961 is a sculpture or assemblage composed of knotted fabric on a wooden shipping pallet. It dates back nearly fifty years and speaks to Christo's early life. Born in Bulgaria in 1935, he left the communist state as a young man, first for Vienna and Paris, and then for the United States. Package seems to speak of travel done not for pleasure, but for necessity, for freedom. Objects such as cans and bottles poke through the cloth, but most things remain ambiguous, mysterious. But the work contains so much more: the artist's history. In a way, we are what we carry.

Earlier this year I had the good fortune of interviewing Christo before the opening of Remembering the Running Fence. We spoke of the work that he and Jeanne-Claude did such as Running Fence and Valley Curtain, projects that used fabric partly as a conduit of light. In those works, the fabric divided, but it also brought people together in a marvelous way. We didn't speak of his early pieces such as Package 1961, where the fabric is linked to a lack of freedom, of being torn or uprooted from everyday life. Perhaps if I speak to him again, I'll ask him what's inside. With any luck, he won't tell me.

• Christo, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

This post is part of an ongoing series on Eye Level: The Best of Ask Joan of Art. Begun in 1993, Ask Joan of Art is the longest-running arts-based electronic reference service in the country. The real Joan is Kathleen Adrian or one of her co-workers from the museum’s Research and Scholars Center. These experts answer the public's questions about art. Earlier this year, Kathleen began posting questions on Twitter and made the answers available on our Web site.

In Jasper Johns's Souvenir he uses a self portrait as his signature. In this group of objects, a flashlight to the right of the lithograph points up at a mirror, which is angled towards a plate bearing the artist’s image, casting light on the artist as both maker and subject.

Question: When did artists begin to sign their works? I would assume there was no need to sign commissions intended for private use. Is there a certain genre of paintings that tends to include signatures?

Answer: Artists began to sign their work toward the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. It was at this time that the collaborative artistic production of the monastic workshop gradually gave way to individual artistic ambition and accomplishment.

John Wilmerding, in his book Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-Expression in American Paintings, writes that an artist's signature can have a great deal of significance. On a work of art, it establishes originality to a dealer or purchaser, even when an unsigned work has all the stylistic and technical characteristics of that artist's hand. A buyer instinctively feels more confident if a signature is present, and its absence can often affect the market value.

An artist's signature does more than just connote authenticity. These inscriptions are often fragments of autobiography, concentrated glimpses of self-portraiture, or more properly, self-representation. Signatures are foremost a mark of individual identity.

Signatures have evolved along with the artist’s work. Artists have been known to sign their works in a great variety of ways, such as initials, monograms, and symbols. As a result, identifying artist signatures and monograms can be a challenging task. Artist's names are hidden within loops and flourishes, scribbles and scratches. Often, the most difficult part is simply determining which letter is which!

For examples of artist's signatures, you might also be interested in the following books: H.H. Caplan's The Classified Directory of Artists' Signatures, Symbols and Monograms, John Castagno's American Artists : Signatures and Monograms, 1800-1989 , and Radway Jackson's The Visual Index of Artists' Signatures.

• Jasper Johns, John Wilmerding, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Silent Orchestra will be performing a live score for the classic silent film Salomé on Saturday, August 7, at 3:00 p.m. Free tickets will be distributed in the G Street Lobby thirty minutes before the program begins.Allison Jessing, public programs coordinator for American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, spoke with orchestra members Carlos Garza and Rich O'Meara about their work.

Silent Orchestra performs a score for Nosferatu. Photo ©Bruce Guthrie.

Eye Level: How do you choose the films that you work with, and what draws you to them?

Silent Orchestra: Often a museum or gallery chooses the films for a live performance. Our style lends itself well to genres that include drama, fantasy, suspense, or darker subject matter. Since we work mainly with silent film, we are drawn to those that have a strong sense of mood or atmosphere that suggests musical interpretation. Silent films that tell their story largely with visuals rather than title cards or written dialogue seem to inspire us more. Some examples are the films of F. W. Murnau, Germaine Dulac, and Marcel L'Herbier.

EL: What musical styles influence your compositions?

SO: We are inspired by many of today's film composers. Some favorites are Thomas Newman, Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Alberto Iglesias, Eric Serra, Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, and Hans Zimmer. We like to combine acoustic percussion with electronic sounds that range from symphonic to music concrete. Other influences of course tend to be artists that use these sounds in different ways or classical composers who have a sharp rhythmic sense and are innovative. Some that come to mind are Brian Eno, Stravinsky, Bartok, Steve Reich, Debussy, Harry Partch, Aphex Twin, Louis Sclavis, Happy the Man, and John Hollenbeck.

EL: How do you begin the process of collaboratively composing for a silent film?

SO: After watching the film a few times, we create a list of cues with timings. Then we discuss how the music can support the meaning in the film by highlighting a character's mood, evoking the period or location, or connecting scenes or characters. For example, we sometimes compose a leit motif, or theme, for the main characters, so that the viewer can identify with the parts of the film in which that character is important.

Sometimes the music is designed to affect the viewer's perception of time or space, as in the travel sequences in Nosferatu (1922, F. W. Murnau). Occasionally, the music is designed to be diegetic, or part of the story, as in the veil dance in Salomé (1923, Charles Bryant), where our score imagines what the band might be playing for Salomé's dance. For L'Inhumaine (1924, Marcel L'Herbier), which we performed at the National Gallery of Art, we added a singer to vocalize for the main character who sings in the story.

We always improvise with the film and record the sessions. Then we can find music that really seems to work and make a notated sketch, so we can recreate it each time. These sections tend to grow as we continue to improvise and see new things in the film.

EL: How do different elements of the film—cinematography, acting, directing—inspire you during the creative process?

SO: As we said earlier, we look at each section of the film and figure out how best to support the story. Sometimes a particular character demands a theme to highlight certain qualities. For Something New (1920, Nell Shipman), we wrote heroic music for the dog.

In Nosferatu, we keyed on Murnau's interest in expressionism and developed the sound palette around some of the materials in the film. For example, we used wooden sounds, warped sounds, metalic scraping, and repeating sections of music at different lengths to evoke the twisted world that the protagonists experience.

EL: Does Silent Orchestra have any new projects on the horizon?

SO: We've scored contemporary short films and performed live improvisation for nonnarrative moving images and look forward to doing that again. We are keen on working with modern directors who experiment across the full range of film elements, such as lighting, special effects, sound design, and of course the use of music to convey meaning.

We have recently released a "revamped" version of our Nosferatu soundtrack from the Image Entertainment DVD. It is available at most online download sites and from CD Baby. We also have plans to release the Salomé score on CD and download.

We have enjoyed playing Nosferatu at AFI Silver, in Silver Spring, Maryland, for several years on Halloween. It has become a holiday tradition. Look for us there. We have also been working on a Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang) score and are looking for an opportunity to bring that to the public.

• Silent Movies, Silent Orchestra, Music, Film Score, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

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A week ago American Art hosted Scouting Family Day to celebrate the Boy Scouts of America and the Girls Scouts of the USA, as well as BSA’s 100th anniversary. Kids took the lead, grabbing a map to guide their families through the museum to see our exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They also took part in games, scavenger hunts, Pinewood derby races, magic acts, and campfire storytelling. Here are just a few photos from the festivities. The event was sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton and the photographs were taken by Daniel Schwartz.

• Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Norman Rockwell, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Horotio Greenough’s statue of George Washington on the Capitol grounds (photographer and date unknown) is from the American Sculpture Photograph Study Collection, Photograph Archives (S0001154).

Before construction began in 1884 on the world's tallest stone structure, the Washington Monument, commemorating our first president, Horatio Greenough had already created the first Washington monument on the National Mall honoring him. The statue was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841 and moved several times after that. In 1963 the statue was moved to its current location in the National Museum of American History (on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

Recently American Art awarded the 2010 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art to Kirk Savage for his 2009 book Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. Savage writes: "Greenough's soon-to-be-infamous statue of a semi-nude Washington, seated rigidly on a huge throne in the posture of Jupiter, has gone down in the annals of American art history as the most reviled public statue ever erected."

Savage explains that allegorical depictions were not as popular in the United States as in Europe. He adds, “Although the works had some eloquent defenders, more often than not they became the butt of deliberate misreadings: Washington with his loincloth slipping down was waiting for his clothes. . . ” Although made fun of, the statue at the time bore testament to the struggling ideals of the nation when it was seeking to define its place in history and its vision for the future.

In the July 4th issue of the Washington Post ("What would you do to change America's front yard?"), four Washington leaders share their vision of the future of the National Mall. James P. Clark, chairman of the steering committee for the National Ideas Competition of the Washington Monument, comments: "The Washington Monument continues to be . . . the centerpiece of the nation's most symbolic open space. . . No matter what, this significant space and what it can teach us cannot be forgotten."

What does the future hold for the National Mall? To understand a little of its past, be sure to see Greenough's Washington monument in the National Museum of American History and also that better-known Washington Monument on the National Mall.

• George Washington, National Mall, Washington Monument, Sculpture, Horatio Greenough, Kirk Savage,
  American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Our Art-O-Mat is now dispensing art in our Luce Foundation Center.

We’re very excited about the shiny new Art-O-Mat that arrived in the Luce Foundation Center this week. Now you can start your very own collection of American Art right here in the museum—becoming a collector has never been so convenient!

In the late 1990s, artist Clark Whittington took advantage of the recent ban on cigarette vending machines and re-purposed one to sell his cigarette-packet-sized photographs. The idea took off and Whittington now oversees 83 active Art-O-Mat machines, including our new addition to the Luce Foundation Center.

The machines are more art installations than they are vending machines, but each one is fully-functioning and sells original art for just $5. Our Art-O-Mat is a late 1950s National Consoline Vending machine that was discovered on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. Check out this Flickr set to see photos of this 60-year-old machine being transformed.

Over 400 artists from ten different countries currently participate in the Art-O-Mat project, contributing paintings, jewelry, prints, sculptures, collages, and mixed-media creations. Each work is the same size as a packet of cigarettes and comes wrapped in acetate. You see a small description of the content on the machine, but you don't know exactly what you will get until you make a choice and pull the handle. The mystery is half the fun! So, what are you waiting for? Come along to the Luce Foundation Center and start your collection today.

• Art-O-Mat, Luce Foundation Center, Art Installation, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Jan Baum discusses her work in the Luce Foundation Center.

We get lots of questions about the craft objects in American Art's Luce Foundation Center. Visitors are often curious about the pieces on display and how they were created. So we seized the opportunity to invite local artists to the center to talk about their work. We've had two wonderful artist talks so far, and two more are planned for August.

Jewelry artist Jan Baum spoke on Sunday, July 11. As she opened one of our pneumatic jewelery drawers to reveal her piece Structure, she told visitors about her interest in the plumb-bob, or amphora, shape and the idea of containment, which she explores by making multilayered objects that can be opened or disassembled to reveal their interiors. She brought in examples of recent and unfinished works that visitors could hold.

Our second guest, Rob Barnard, a potter, spoke a week later. Like Baum, he felt his piece Pot was in "good company" in the Luce Center. He discussed the uniqueness of each object as a result of the firing process and where each was located in the wood-fired kiln. Barnard also said that he is more concerned about the feeling a piece evokes than its shape. His objects, he said, should be "vehicles for carrying feelings to other people." He also commented that they are meant to be used, so he offered everyone his cups and mugs to drink from during his talk.

To hear more about craft directly from the artists, attend the two talks coming up in August: jewelry artists Robin Kranitzky and Kim Overstreet on Sunday, August 8, and ceramic artist Margaret Boozer on Sunday, August 22.

And look for more artist talks this fall!

• Craft, Jewelry, Pottery, Luce Foundation Center, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Steven Spielberg by filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau on August 6, 2008.

Steven Spielberg

Laurent Bouzereau : What was your first encounter with Norman Rockwell?

Steven Spielberg: Whenever my dad would bring home a Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell's work was often the cover art. So often, in fact, that I looked forward not even to opening the Post to see what was inside. I was mainly interested in seeing what story this painter was telling on the cover.

LB: What do you think he managed to capture that was universal?

SS: Rockwell in a way pushed a benign but important agenda of a kind of community, a kind of civic responsibility and patriotism. And he did this in one frame, with one image. And he did it, like Rashómon, from many different approaches to the same theme, which was tolerance of the community, of each other, of parents, of presidents, of Boy Scouts, of our veterans, and of soldiers fighting abroad. He was really one of the greatest Americans that this country has produced since, maybe, Samuel Clemens.

LB: Rockwell was almost like a filmmaker because he cast people to pose for him. He did sketches just like a filmmaker does storyboards. Can you comment on that?

SS: Norman Rockwell was the great American storyteller. And he did his storytelling in a flash; he did it with a single image. And he invites you to explore that image. He draws you into that image, and he invites you, once it makes an impression on you, to question why, simply question why. And as you answer your own question, there are clues throughout all of his paintings. In The Jury Room, you wonder how long have they been trying to convince the only holdout, who happens to be the only woman, to change her mind? You can guess by her position, her straight back, and by the schleppyness of all the other jurors who have found comfortable positions around the table. But then you look on the floor and see all of these cigarette butts, and you understand that this has been going on so long that perhaps she is going to hang that jury.

LB: Talk about Twelve Angry Men. I love the source light in The Jury Room. It's important to you, isn't it—that detail of where he places light in his painting?

SS: Rockwell had a really wonderful sense of source lighting. It was very evocative of the mood that he was trying to communicate. He would use a window, often a single source of light, and he'd be very true to that source. But he would also add a lot of fill light, which is what frequently happens when you light a movie set. You can just imagine Rockwell having fill light, but using his brushstrokes to allow us to get into the shadows, then letting those figures pop and separate themselves from the canvas by outlining them or backlighting them or top lighting them. That's why his paintings are so snappy.

LB: I also love the mischievousness in the painting Pardon Me, where the boy is stepping on the girl's feet while dancing.

SS: I think Rockwell was a great humorist. So many of his paintings are evocative of the humor of the times, innocent humor, not raunchy humor like we have today, but innocent humor like stepping on a girl's toes at the dance. This is something we've all done when we were younger, and we still do at my age. This was Rockwell extolling the virtues of this 1940s, '50s, and '60s innocence, which is how he saw America. Simple values and simple moments. . .

LB: Boy on a High Dive is both funny but so evocative of a little boy facing the biggest challenge of life, with that big blue sky behind him, but no view of the water. What's your take on it?

SS: I've always loved that painting. It means a lot to me, because we're all on diving boards hundreds of times during our lives, taking the plunge or pulling back from the abyss. For me, that painting represents every motion picture just before I commit to directing it. Just that one moment, before I say, "Yes, I'm going to direct that movie." For Schindler's List, I probably lived on that diving board for eleven years before I eventually took the plunge. So that painting spoke to me the second I saw it. When I saw that the painting was available to add to my collection, I said, "Well not only is it going in my collection, but it's going in my office so I can look at it every day of my life."

LB: The Connoisseur is an interesting painting because you have this old man, so obviously an older generation, looking at a Jackson Pollock, the next generation. Can you equate that to the way you felt when you started in the film business?

SS: The Connoisseur is a fascinating painting for me. On the one hand, Rockwell actually had to do a Jackson Pollock. He had to get that drip effect on that canvas. That means he had to completely change the paradigm of his style to accomplish a Jackson Pollack and a very convincing Jackson Pollock, before going back to his sort of conventional human characters. For me that represents how an artist can suddenly change his style and be unrecognizable in one form in another medium and then return to the style that we're familiar with. So personally, it speaks to whether a filmmaker can also have more than one style throughout his or her career.

LB: If Rockwell had been a filmmaker, do you think he'd have been a good one?

SS: I think if he had been a filmmaker, he'd have been a great filmmaker, and he would have been a famous filmmaker. But thank God he wasn't a filmmaker; thank God he painted pictures to inspire other filmmakers to do better work. I think that's what Rockwell has done for all of us who love him and appreciate his paintings. He has made us better artists.

Related Link: Listen to American Art's podcasts about our exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

• Norman Rockwell, Steven Spielberg, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Note: The following is an excerpt from an interview with George Lucas by Laurent Bouzereau, filmmaker, and Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on September 12, 2008.

George Lucas

Laurent Bouzereau and Virginia Mecklenburg: Do you remember the first time you saw Norman Rockwell?

George Lucas: Well, I grew up in the heyday of the Post magazine. We subscribed and every week or so we'd get a picture in. I would enjoy it and I became a fan of illustrators. I liked drawing, I liked art, and I especially liked magazine illustration and comic illustration. So that was my first introduction to art in general. And then as I went on I took history of art and a lot of other things that broadened my range of art appreciation, but at the same time my heart stayed with illustrators. When I graduated from high school, I really wanted to go to Art Center and become an illustrator. My father didn't want to have an artist in the house, so I ended up going into anthropology instead. But eventually that's probably what moved me into film in the first place. But I like the sentiment. I've always been interested in art. I've always been interested in anthropology, and I've always been interested in art that speaks to the time in which it was made.

LB and VM: And Norman Rockwell, specifically to your point, speaks to that.

GL: As somebody that records a time, I think he's brilliant at it. Because it's not just recording it, he captures the emotion and more importantly the fantasy, the ideal of that particular time in American history. So you really get a sense of what America was thinking during those years and what their ideals were, and what was in their hearts.

LB and VM: Rockwell said he painted life as he'd like it to be. Do you agree with that statement?

GL: Well, I'm not sure—that's true, I mean, we say that in movies. When we were in film school, we would say, "We're not making movies about the way things are, we're making movies about the way things should be." And that's the power you have as an artist, to be able to put your spin on reality and make it the way you think it should be. Rockwell created his art to relate to people, but at the same time he showed generations to come what it was like in those years.

LB and VM: You have a number of Rockwell sketches, as opposed to the final piece. Tell me about that.

GL: With Rockwell the pencil sketches are as illuminating and as interesting as the paintings. Sometimes even more interesting. He simplified his style very much during the 1960s and late '50s, and I like his earlier works, and I like the sketches of the later works because they have much more detail in them, and they're much more elaborate.

LB and VM: Tell me about Happy Birthday Miss Jones. Steven has the painting and you have the study. I'm wondering what your emotional reaction is to that particular painting and sketch?

GL: It was one of those nice situations where I actually had the sketch first, and then he went and bought the painting. Again, I like the craftsmanship of the sketch, but the actual painting itself demonstrates that with Rockwell every person is a character, which is what we always aim for in the movies. We have to make sure that the extras and everybody that's on the screen has a personality, a life. They aren't just nameless, faceless drones that walk through the shot. And a lot of artists don't bother with that.

LB and VM: Do you think that one of the reasons why he was embraced so universally is that he showed a love for ordinary people? And that he made everyone seem special?

GL: He really talked about real people. He showed you the way they lived their lives, and I like that about him. At the same time, he had a great deal of sensitivity toward those people's lives, their jobs, and their character. And in so doing, he encapsulated lives that existed at that particular point in time. That idealism, that naïveté, that innocence is Norman Rockwell. He is very emblematic of a certain part of America during that time.

LB and VM: Do you think a Rockwell painting is like an image in a movie, where if you watch it once, you'll take something away from it, but if you watch it twice, you start looking in the corners, embracing other aspects of the same frame?

GL: Norman Rockwell is very cinematic. He is a storyteller, trying to convey an ambiance and underlying themes and at the same time entertain and make sure the story is clear. When we make a movie, we have to put a lot of the same elements in our frames that he puts in his frame. There's nothing that hasn't been thought through very carefully by the art department, by the cameramen, by the actors, etc. Growing up on Rockwell was probably a very big reason that I felt so comfortable when I got into the movie business.

LB and VM: You've used the term illustrator, but I think Rockwell struggled with that and wanted to be seen more as a painter. Do you find an interesting ambivalence about being popular and successful?

GL: My feeling is that all art, pretty much up until the nineteenth century anyway, to make it very clean, is illustration. After that, you start getting into the Impressionists, you get into photography, and you get into other things. Then art split off into illustration, which depicted reality and interpreted it. It eventually turned into a business, like magazine covers and other similar type entities. It's still art. If it appeals to you emotionally, it's art. If it doesn't appeal to you emotionally, then it's not art as far as I'm concerned. And Norman Rockwell was emotional. So whether he was a painter, an illustrator, a guy that did covers, a popular guy is all irrelevant. The point is, he was an artist. He was an artist just like any artist who was painting, say the caves in France and showing you the spiritual value of antelope. Because he wasn't trying to say this is a good representation of an antelope that you would find in a textbook. This was a spiritual painting of an antelope, and that's what Norman Rockwell was doing. He was doing the spiritual paintings of America and American ideals in the 1930s and '40s that went beyond the literal.

LB and VM: What a beautiful way to end.

Related Link: Listen to American Art's podcasts about our exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Next on Eye Level: an interview with Steven Spielberg

• Norman Rockwell, George Lucas, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Summertime,
And the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high

Thomas Moran's Mist in Kanab, Utah

One of my favorite songs is George Gershwin's "Summertime." I must have twenty renditions of it on my iPhone. When the weather gets as hot and muggy as it's been here on the East Coast my wanderlust kicks in and I start longing for an escape from all this atmospheric oppression. It's vacation time!

My road trip isn't until August but if I need a break right now I can saunter over to the museum to breath in the cool mountain air of Alfred Bierstadt's Sierra Nevada, California or Thomas Moran's Mist in Kanab Canyon, Utah.

How about you? Where you off to this summer? We want to know and we've devised an art-related way you can show us where you've been. We've put together a set of artworks from our collection, depicting places around the country. Should you be going to any of these spots, take a photo and post it to our Flickr group: American Art Road Trip. The more the merrier.

I've got to work for the next few weeks. But I'll gladly live vicariously through your road trip pics. Let's see what you've got!

• Summer Vacation, Photography, Flickr, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Steven Spielberg tries his hand at being a shadow artist in front of Norman Rockwell's Shadow Artist. The piece is now on display as part of our exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

All right, Mr. DeMille, Steven Spielberg is ready for his close-up.

• Norman Rockwell, Steven Spielberg, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Laurel Fehrenbach, public programs assistant here at American Art, spoke with Sergeant Kevin Burns from Airmen of Note. The jazz group will be performing Saturday, July 3 and Sunday, July 4, from 1 to 3 p.m. as part of our celebration for the opening of our exhibition, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Airmen of Note will be performing at American Art's Kogod Courtyard on Saturday, July 3 and Sunday, July 4, from 1–3 p.m.

Eye Level: The Airmen of Note is the premiere big band of the U.S. Air Force, and your repertoire and sound have been influenced by the Glenn Miller Orchestra of the '30s and '40s. Can you give us a little history of how the "Note" came to be?

Kevin Burns: Back in 1950, one man recognized the need for a group like the Airmen of Note and made the idea a reality: Brigadier General Sydney D. Grubbs, the Bolling Air Force Base Commander. The United States Air Force Band was one of the units under his command, and he was justifiably proud of that unit. The Band was made up of a number of highly regarded ensembles, including the Concert Band, the Air Force Symphony, the Strolling Strings, and the Singing Sergeants, as well as a variety of smaller groups that could be put together to fit special occasions. But Gen. Grubbs felt that something was still missing—a dance band to bring first-class entertainment to the officers and men of the Air Force, just as the Glenn Miller Army–Air Force Band had done so effectively during World War II. Although the Airmen of Note was formed to carry on the musical traditions of the Miller AAF Orchestra, the relationship had another aspect as well: it was at Bolling Field that the Miller AAF Orchestra made its final broadcast on November 17, 1945. So the Airmen of Note picked up exactly where the Miller AAF Orchestra had left off, geographically as well as musically.

EL: You have a big anniversary this year! How is the Note celebrating sixty years of music?

KB: We have several events that celebrate this landmark year for the Airmen of Note. We have an exciting and unique summer concert series this year . . . in which we are taking a "historical journey" through the various eras of the group. Our musical director SM Sgt. Joe Jackson has been listening to old recordings and digging through our music library to put together entire concerts that focus specifically on the music played with each of the Note’s band leaders.

This will all culminate with a great weekend of events that include as many alumni of the Note as can make it back to D.C. We are having a private alumni dinner and jam session with former members. We are also dedicating our first Jazz Heritage Series concert in early September to our sixtieth year, and will be featuring several alumni at that concert.

EL: Do you think music still has a role in supporting our troops today?

KB: Certainlymdash;we have many opportunities to support our own troops in the twenty-first century. Music in almost any form is such an uplifting experience. It reaches deep into your spirit. There is also no replacement for the live music experience. We regularly use our gifts and talents to support our "internal" audience, whether at local private events or publicly sponsored concerts and broadcasts, or overseas performances that reach our troops deployed to remote areas that are far from family and home. In every instance, we are met with great enthusiasm and invitations to return.

EL: Where in the world have you traveled most recently to perform?

KB: Our mission is primarily in the States. We have traveled literally from coast to coast. The Note’s most recent overseas tour was back in 2002 when we performed for the troops stationed around the Middle Eastern nations of the Persian Gulf. There are smaller groups from the USAF Band that have deployed and continue to tour in those areas. It’s been a matter of logistics with sending smaller groups than the Note to hot spots like that, but we would love to return.

EL: Besides performing at the American Art Museum, how do the Airmen of Note like to celebrate Fourth of July?

KB: Of course throughout our history we have always enjoyed performing for the public on July Fourth. Sometimes we accept an invitation to go out of town, but there is no greater place to play on that day than in Washington, D.C. We’re going to have a great time at the American Art Museum!

• Norman Rockwell, Airmen of Note, July 4th, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Norman Rockwell, Shadow Artist, 1920, oil on canvas, Collection of George Lucas

And the Oscar goes to . . . Norman Rockwell? Not quite, but the beloved American illustrator and painter was well connected to the movie business. In fact, Rockwell once said, “If I hadn’t become a painter, I would have liked to have been a movie director.” Taking a closer look at Rockwell and his working process, the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg shows us how Rockwell went to great lengths to stage his pictures, laboring over costumes for each figure and the individual props that added to the story he wanted the viewer to understand at a glance. He typically made multiple preparatory sketches to get the composition and details right.

Just like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Rockwell was a storyteller. And like the filmmakers, he tried to convey in each painting as much visual information as possible. All three men are linked by a desire to capture particularly American stories and distill life into myth. Rockwell emphasized the heroism of the ordinary man, such as in the painting The Runaway in which a friendly policeman talks a little boy who has run away from home into returning.

The artist was born in 1894, and his work limned a good part of the twentieth century. His last paintings were created in the 1970s, at about the time Lucas and Spielberg were thinking inside a different frame. Had the storytelling mantle been passed from picture frame to movie frame? Rockwell often employed Hollywood themes in his work, and Americans gravitated to them in good times as well as bad, in war as well as peace. His images of soldiers returning from World War II, for example, feel like stills from films by William Wyler, Frank Capra, and of course, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

The exhibition Telling Stories opens July 2, just in time for the long holiday weekend. Come and see Rockwell through a different lens. Popcorn not included.

• Norman Rockwell, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum