Adding a Colorful Gloss To a Black-and-White World
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: March 13, 2012
WASHINGTON — Random observations upon strolling through a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery here:
Harry Warnecke Studio for The Daily News/National Portrait Gallery
Harry Warnecke's portrait of Lucille Ball is one of
the photographs in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington. More Photos »
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¶“I Love Lucy” wouldn’t have been as funny in color.
¶Gen. George S. Patton wouldn’t have been as fearsome in color.
¶Charlie McCarthy wouldn’t have been as believable in color.
¶Cowboys ought always to be photographed in black and white after the age of 30.
The exhibition
is called “In Vibrant Color: Vintage Celebrity Portraits From the Harry
Warnecke Studio,” and it consists of color photographic portraits of 24
noteworthy people from the last century whom we’re more accustomed to
seeing in black and white.
Lucille Ball is there, and Jimmy Durante, and Laurel and Hardy. An assortment of military heroes from World War II pose in uniform. Literary and sports figures are represented. Yeah, it’s true: Ted Williams’s socks really were red.
Warnecke, who died in 1984, was a photographer for The Daily News in New
York who understood early — in the 1930s — that a newspaper with a
color photograph in it would have an edge over the competition.
“Warnecke designed and built a one-shot camera that yielded the red,
blue and green separations needed for color reproduction,” the
exhibition explains, and he persuaded the newspaper to build him a
studio suitable for the complex process of creating the images.
Though various forms of color photography had existed for decades, the
Everyman color snapshot was still a ways off, and certainly a color
print in a newspaper was a rarity. People expected to see images in
black and white, and though movies had begun the shift to color (“The
Wizard of Oz,” of course, came out in 1939), newsreels and then early
television would define how the public imagined most of the people seen
in this show.
Many would live and work well into the color age — Durante died in
1980, Ball in 1989 after starring in several color series — but they’re
forever black and white to me and others.
So it’s jarring to see Ball in a red, black and blue striped skirt, her
orange-red hair topped by an even redder hat. The image is from 1944,
when she was in her early 30s. No spit take or exaggerated pout here. In
truth, this greatest of female comics looks a bit sad. And far more
human than she ever did in the television show for which she is best
known.
W. C. Fields,
on the other hand, stayed in character for his photograph, made in
1938. He’s wearing three different kinds of plaid — pants, vest, suit
coat — and a foam mustache, obtained from a frothy amber beverage he’s
holding. Durante,
too, looks just as comical in his gray-blue suit (the image is from
1948) as he does in black-and-white memory. Maybe it’s the nose.
It’s almost as if Fields and Durante were resisting the onset of color
and the honesty it would bring, whereas Ball and others in the
exhibition weren’t, or at least didn’t have their defenses up. That is
certainly true of two personalities caught by Warnecke and his
associates: Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.
They are shown in a 1948 photograph with Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist
who gave them voice. If you watch black-and-white film of Bergen at work,
especially with Charlie, it’s easy to believe that the dummy is alive.
Not here. Sorry, boys, but in color you look kind of wooden.
That, though, is better than the fate that befalls two cowboys and one cowgirl. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Dale Evans are all pictured, the men in images from 1942, Evans in 1947. (No sign of Trigger.) The outfits on Rogers and Evans
are cool enough: brown and red tones for him; a red western-style dress
over a bright yellow shirt for her. Autry wears shiny blue pants that
look as if they belonged in a disco. All three seem way too old to be
doing the cowboy thing. It was acceptable somehow in black and white. In
color it’s a little embarrassing.
And who’s that grandfatherly fellow staring out from another wall? Why it’s General Patton. What? This
is Old Blood and Guts, one of the most fiery commanders in all of World
War II? The image is from 1945, and Patton has colorful military
decorations on his chest, but he looks like a kindly college professor.
Not far away, in the 20th-Century Americans Gallery, a grainy
black-and-white newsreel of Patton is on view. That guy is scary; the
guy in the Warnecke exhibition could work as a department store Santa.
Of all the military men on the wall — Dwight D. Eisenhower is there; so
is George C. Marshall — only the aviator Claire L. Chennault
looks intimidating. It may be a good thing that one important World War
II battle, the public relations one, wasn’t fought in color.
The museum galleries were full of young scholarly types, presumably
college students, earnestly taking notes as they strolled through the
show, which runs through Sept. 9.
If I were a scholarly type, I might write a learned paper comparing the 1941 portrait of Clare Boothe Luce
in the Warnecke exhibition with Jo Davidson’s 1939 terra-cotta bust of
her just a few steps away. It might be possible to mine an entire thesis
out of the juxtaposition of the Warnecke portraits and an early Nam
June Paik work in the adjacent Smithsonian American Art Museum called “Zen for TV,”
which consists of an ancient wood-cabinet television displaying only a
horizontal line of light. It’s a copy of a work from 1963, when
black-and-white television was at its peak but on the verge of being
supplanted by color.
“In Paik’s hands the television set became a sculptural object with a
subtly meditative surface, in which the horizon of light suggests a
timeless continuum,” the display says. Sure; why not?
Rather than try to rediscover my inner academic, here’s one half-baked
observational theory: The black-and-white era is often regarded as a
purist ideal, but the Warnecke Studio’s works show that unless you had a
big nose or a foam mustache, it’s color, not black and white, that
revealed the real you.
In terms of television and film, that makes the last half-century or so,
not the mid-20th century and the black-and-white TV years, the age
worth venerating. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, because with
movies drowning in computer-generated effects and other artificiality,
and television headed that way, it’s now over.
That settled, only one question remains: What was the wistful-looking Lucy thinking when that portrait was taken?
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