Exhibit at National Portrait Gallery
han...@aol.com
There is an exhibit at The National Portrait Gallery in DC that Chaplinites
should find interesting: Caricature in America.
Here are Chaplin-related excerpts from a review and commentary in the Sunday
Washington Post, by Henry Allen:
"They started a religion called "celebrity." It was a very easy religion. All
you had to do was go to the movies, listen to the radio and read magazines,
maybe catch some shows if you got to New York. It began around 1900, and it
got really big in the '20s and '30s. ... Imagine: One Mae Murray was once so
famous that Paolo Garretto could caricature her with no nose or eyes, just
lipstick and the silhouette of her airbrushed hair and chin. It seems she was
a film star of the late 1920s. Now she's just a caricature on a museum wall,
in the way the pottery deities that archaeologists find in tombs are just
figurines. Who are Alexander Woollcott and Paul Whiteman? To know, you have to
be middle age or older, or a scholar of the period. ... There was a beguiling
democracy to celebrity, which equated presidents with slapstick comedians, and
high art with low. ... As Vanity Fair caricaturist Ralph Barton said, "It is
not the caricaturist's business to be penetrating, it is his job to put down
the figure a man cuts before his fellows in his attempt to conceal the
writhings of his soul." ... Cagney was sort of a caricature of himself. So
were so many of the celebrities here: W.C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, H.L. Mencken,
Mae West. Maybe that was why caricaturists liked them. Walt Disney even made a
series of cartoons in which Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck disported themselves
with celebrity caricatures, who after all were nothing more than drawings
themselves: stereotyped renderings of Charlie Chaplin, Bela Lugosi, the Marx
Brothers, Greta Garbo and so on. The Disney cartoons play continuously during
the show. ... The show takes us up through the mid-1950s. ..."
"Caricature in America" runs through 08/23/98 at the National Portrait
Gallery.
The article can be found at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-04/19/063l-041998-idx.html
Hannah
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