Director's Letter Winter 2013

Many years ago I became fascinated with the complexities that underlie what may appear to be one of the more straightforward artistic genres—that of portraiture. In a classroom at the Institute of Fine Arts, Robert Rosenblum provoked me to think beyond the surface to consider the myriad ways in which portraiture reflects the broad societal values, movements, and concerns of its time, as well as the influence that portraiture can have (in ways both subtle and direct) on our understanding of individual character and on larger societal shifts. 

While Bob’s influence particularly drew me to the art of the Enlightenment—and significantly shaped what became my Ph.D. thesis and ultimately my first book, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood—the habit of looking he instilled is one that has had unexpected consequences. From considering the historical precedents for modern-day phenomena such as the Hollywood celebrity-making machine’s penchant for manipulating images, to the urprising linkages between the politics of representation in eighteenth-century England and present-day America, I continue to be compelled by the ways that portraiture operates in the context of social values and change. The road from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, painted in a conscious act of eighteenthcentury popular manipulation, to a cover of Vogue featuring Michelle Obama is not such a circuitous one.

I have thus been particularly intrigued by the work of Karl Kusserow, our curator of American art, on portraiture and its role in place-making and the construction of power in the early American Republic. Karl’s exhibition Inner Sanctum, held in 2010, was a fascinating and thoughtful exploration of these questions from a particularly Princeton angle, examining the collection of Princeton portraits that adorn the walls of Nassau Hall’s Faculty Room and, by extension, that room’s role in Princeton’s evolution into one of the world’s great research universities. Returning to these themes, Karl has been at work on a long-awaited volume exploring the portrait collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce.  Considering these portraits as historical documents, Karl investigates the ways in which that collection linked commercial development—and the Chamber’s business interests—with cultural progress. Whether enhancing, sanitizing, or stabilizing a successful entrepreneur’s reputation, downplaying or aggrandizing his wealth, or engaging in damage control (think of these as the nineteenth-century equivalent of going on the talk shows), the Chamber’s portraits fashioned a public identity for its subjects that met the corporate and civic needs of its time.

Arguably, of course, this is what portraiture does. But a consideration of such images seems particularly timely in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–09, of our concerns for the influence of Wall Street on American culture, and of our broader awareness of our own media-saturated, image-savvy era. With thoughts of the national and local election battles recently fought and of rival views on how to achieve economic health fresh in our heads, it seems germane—even essential—to consider the insights we can glean from an American business culture that strove for egalitarian virtue even as it remained committed to free-market capitalist principles. Such a contradiction, seemingly rooted in the Chamber from its inception in 1768, may now be seen as inherent to the American way of life—and thus to American image making. 

In that spirit, we are delighted to seize the opportunity offered by Karl’s research—and his new book—to present Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture in exhibition form, opening March 9. Assembling many of the highlights of the Chamber of Commerce’s collections and presenting them Salon-style in the Museum’s Sterling Morton Gallery, Picturing Power considers these visual documents afresh as the human faces of business, sitting at the intersection between self-interest and the public good. In doing so, the exhibition positions the Museum’s central gallery as a true public space—a kind of civic plaza—and advances the Museum’s commitment to operating at the heart of campus and public life, provoking us to consider how and what images mean and to ask questions that go to the heart of citizenship.

James Christen Steward 
Director