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Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Milton Berliner (1907-1993) was a music critic and political reporter for The Washington Daily News. Berliner graduated from Harvard and Columbia University School of Journalism. He was an avid fencer and tennis player, as indicated by the props in Fruhauf's depiction.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Elmira Bier (1896-1976) spent forty-nine years working at the Phillips Collection, including as the personal secretary to Duncan Phillips. She served as Director of Music at the gallery, overseeing the weekly concert series that began in the 1930s and opened to the public in 1941.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Paul Smith Callaway (1909-1995) was organist and choir master of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint Peter and Saint Paul ("Washington National Cathedral") (1939-42 and 1946-77); first music director of the Washington Opera Society; conductor of the Cathedral Choral Society which he organized in 1942. Callaway taught at St. Alban's School, the National Cathedral's school for boys.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Robert Evett (1922-1975) was a composer, and book and music critic for the New Republic magazine. Evett's music was performed at the National Gallery of Art by pianist Harry McClure, who was also caricatured by Aline Fruhauf for this series.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Paul Hume (1915-2001) was music critic for The Washington Post (1947-82); taught music history at Georgetown University (1950-77); was a visiting professor of music at Yale University (1978-83); was host to programs on WGMS-FM; and was a noted author and musician. In his farewell article for the Post, Hume spoke of "the privilege . . . of writing about what is for me the most beautiful of the arts in a newspaper that has cared about the growth of the arts in a city whose public has been responsive, friendly and helpfully corrective." (November 27, 2001; B01) Hume is widely remembered for his review of a 1950 vocal performance by Margaret Truman that provoked an angry handwritten reply from her father, the President. Georgetown University's Special Collections preserves the Paul Hume Papers.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Emerson Meyers (1910-1990) was a composer and pianist who performed with the National Symphony Orchestra and the National Gallery Orchestra; professor emeritus of Catholic University of America; and early composer of electronic music. Meyers won a Fulbright scholarship to study music in Belgium in 1955-56 and directed the Watergate Pops concerts in 1957.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Sylvia Meyer (b. 1907) was a nationally known harpist for the National Symphony Orchestra from 1933 to 1968, and the first woman to perform with the NSO. She performed at the National Gallery of Art about the same time Fruhauf painted her for this series.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Howard Mitchell (1911-1988) was director and conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra from 1949-70. Howard Mitchell is remembered for expanding the number and variety of the orchestra's output of recordings, including three series widely used in school classrooms.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Robert Parris (1924-1999) was a composer, pianist, and professor at George Washington University. Born in Philadelphia, Robert Parris attended the University of Pennsylvania and Juilliard School of Music. He worked with Aaron Copland and Jacques Ibert at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, and with Arthur Honegger in Paris on a Fulbright grant in 1952. His Concerto for Tympani and Orchestra was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra under Howard Mitchell in 1958.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Deane Shure (1885-1962) was a composer of choral works, instrumental and vocal instructor. Dean Shure received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin and his doctoral degree in music at The American University (1952). He was a correspondent for Musical America and Music Courier, and published more than a hundred musical compositions. Beginning in 1921 he served as choir director at Mount Vernon Methodist Church.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Violinist George Steiner was associate concert master of the National Symphony Orchestra; concert master of the National Gallery Orchestra; and chair of the music department at George Washington University, where he is now Professor Emeritus in Residence. He was born in Baltimore where he graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and Johns Hopkins University.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
A native of Lawrence, Kansas, Day Thorpe (1914-1982) was educated at Yale University. He founded a weekly newspaper in Montgomery County in 1939, and during the Second World War worked in the office of Censorship. For twenty-two years he worked as the music and literary critic for The Washington Evening Star. He co-founded the old Opera Society of Washington, and was a board member of Washington Cathedral Choral Society. (Thorpe asked Aline Fruhauf to do this series on Washington musicians.)
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
Pierson Underwood (b. 1896?), former board chairman of WGMS radio station, grew up in Evanston, Illinois and studied at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and the Art Student's League. One of the original members of the staff of Time, Inc., he was also a free-lance writer for magazines such as The Bookman, and contributed to music textbooks. At the time this portrait was painted, Underwood was a prominent member of The League of Washington Composers and president of The Greater Washington Music Council.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
The Reverend Russell Woollen (1923-1994) was a pianist, organist, harpsichordist, and composer; staff keyboard artist for the National Symphony Orchestra; and professor at The Catholic University of America (1948-62) and Howard University (1969-74). A native of Hartford, Connecticut, the Reverend Woollen studied music with Nicholas Nabakov and Walter Piston. His works include Toccata for Orchestra, first played by the National Symphony Orchestra in 1957, Quartet for Flute and Strings, recorded by Transition Records, Inc., as well as several published masses and organ pieces. The Reverend Woollen had recently returned from a four month concert and lecture tour in Central and South America when Aline Fruhauf made this caricature.
An original manuscript by Woollen is on display in Lauinger Library's nearby Leon Robbin Gallery.
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
One of the first paintings Fruhauf made after moving to the Washington area was of a house she admired in Georgetown that reminded her of the quirky drawings of Charles Adams in the New Yorker. She was so taken with it that she made this lithograph from the painting twelve years later.
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Known as "the other Washington Monument," popular socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980) was the daughter of president Theodore Roosevelt, and wife of Ohio Congressman and Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth. Mrs. Longworth had posed for Aline Fruhauf in 1949 for her series on Washington Artists. Although she was neither an artist nor a museum director, Longworth was included in the series at the suggestion of Franz Bader, manager of the Whyte Gallery and organizer of the exhibition. For the sitting, the artist was invited to lunch at Longworth's home and make sketches, but Fruhauf was never satisfied with the results.
"I worked on the caricature up to the very last minute, filling wastebaskets full of drawings that didn't look anything like Alice Longworth. The details of the room, however, were catalogue perfect and I did an excellent job on her legs and feet." (210) Twenty-one years later, Fruhauf glimpsed Longworth walking away from her house on Massachusetts Avenue to a waiting car, which inspired this woodcut:
"Her back view was just as unmistakably hers and was decidedly worth drawing. Eventually I made a pen-and-ink drawing of it and later a woodcut. A print of the woodcut was included in the annual exhibition of the Society of Washington Printmakers in December 1971. It came to her attention, and I was told that she was gleefully autographing prints of it around town." (242-43)
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Composer Joseph Deems Taylor (1885-1966) had more of his pieces performed by the Metropolitan Opera than any other contemporary composer of operas. He was also a music critic and author; and a commentator in the film Fantasia (1941). Fruhauf's boss on Musical America, Taylor had posed twice for the artist: once in 1936 when he came to see her exhibition of New York designers, and again in 1943 at the dedication of the George Gershwin papers at the Library of Congress. In 1960 she translated her caricature into a woodcut. She recalled that Taylor's appearance had not changed much since she knew him in the 30s. She described the image as "a leprechaun in a mackintosh, but the print gave him the decided air of a gentleman from Japan, or at least Titipu." Nevertheless, she sent Taylor a proof of the print, stamped with the han (her signature chop mark). In his thank-you letter Taylor wrote that "It's one of the cutest caricatures I've seen in a long time, and I'm very glad you 'got around' to doing it." (237-38)
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Gift of Erwin Vollmer
This is a rare lithograph made while Fruhauf was studying at the Art Student's League. It is possible that the figure sketching at the second to the left is a self-portrait.
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Fruhauf first met George Gershwin on the occasion of his premiere of An American in Paris in December 1928, which she covered for Musical America. However, when she got to his apartment for the sitting, his appearance presented an unforeseen problem:
"He was slender, athletic-looking, with a dark rosy complexion and a very easy, unassuming manner. For some reason I couldn't fathom, he didn't look anything like his photographs. I soon realized, however, that his hair, instead of being smooth, stuck straight up, inches high, into the air. I told him he looked different from what I expected. 'I know,' he said 'it's my hair; I just washed it.' " (110-11)
The image she eventually published, entitled "Mr. Gershwin sets the pace," showed him darting across the stage for his curtain call at Carnegie Hall.
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
"When Rachmaninoff opened the door for me at his apartment, he was so tall his head barely cleared the doorway. Very solemnly, he ushered me into a dark living room with heavy draperies, dark furniture, and innumerable framed photographs. He sat at the piano, fixed his somber gaze on a photograph of a little girl, and lifted his hands before playing; then came a thunderous cataract of sound. Something by Rachmaninoff, I pinched myself. He didn't say much. It was a short sitting." (104)
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Fruhauf drew Ravel at a press conference at New York's St. Moritz hotel. She described him as:
"a little man with an angular, ruddy face, black brows, small alert eyes, and a casque of beautifully waved white hair. His cheek bones were high, his nose was good-sized and bony, his mouth was small and noncommittal, and he had large, well-shaped ears without lobes. ... He was good natured about posing and had no apparent personal vanity. ... He told the press he was scared to death of American cooking, especially of the fruit salads served at banquets, but thought our red bananas were first rate." (105)
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
Gift of Roderick S. Quiroz
Aline Fruhauf had two encounters with Stravinsky, both at press conferences. The first meeting in New York resulted in a brush drawing published in Musical America in 1934. The second occasion was when he came to Washington to conduct his first opera, Le Rossignol, in 1960. This photolithograph was based on the earlier, published drawing. Fruhauf vividly recalled her first impression of Stravinsky:
"He was a small man with broad shoulders, a slim waist, and a propulsive profile. At first his long, ovoid head suggested an Aztec carving; then it became a blanched almond. At the first meeting, Stravinsky's hair was beautifully groomed, I was sure, with a pair of military brushes. He was well turned out in gray flannels, a chocolate-brown cardigan, a dray striped shirt with a white collar, and a brown foulard tie with copper dots. And his image was punctuated by a large onyx ring on his right hand, pointed black shoes, and a cigarette in a long, black holder." (227)
Quotes are from Making Faces, ed. Erwin Vollmer (Cabin John, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, 1987).
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