In Woody Allen’s latest film Midnight in Paris, a modern-day writer finds himself repeatedly traveling back in time to Paris at the height of the 1920’s. While there he meets a number of the period’s famous writers and artists, from Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. Seeing this film made me want to learn more about the fascinating lives of these people, so I decided to research Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who in the film introduce us to the world of Paris in the twenties.
Author: Doug Litts
Doug Litts is the head of the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library.
The 1962 edition of Current Biography (Wilson) states “The most celebrated woman painter in the United States today, Grace Hartigan, is a leading member of the New York School of abstract expressionists.
Few owners of a Major League Baseball team have been as colorful as Charlie Finley, the owner of the Oakland A’s team that won three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974.
Grant Wood, most famously known as the painter of American Gothic, became one of the United States’ most famous artists in the 1930s when the canvas made its splash at the Art Institute of Chicago’s forty-third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture.
Hundreds of books have been written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States and the only person elected to the presidency four times.
Next month the annual conference for the American Library Association comes to Washington DC. Four of the twenty branches of the Smithsonian Libraries will be having tours: the Botany-Horticulture Library, more »
Attending the American Library Association conference in June? Come join us on Monday, June 28, from 2-4 PM for an informal open house of the Smithsonian’s resources for American art more »