Angus Trumble is pictured with a marble bust of the first Viscount Cremorne by Joseph Wilton in the entrance court at the Yale Center for British Art.

From Mona Lisa to Marilyn,
curator traces the art of smiling

Until a few months ago, Yale curator Angus Trumble was a man whose professional life was situated in the world of art, and who was known in museum circles as a scholar of Italian old master paintings and 19th-century British sculpture.

Now, he has achieved notoriety in far-flung parts of the globe as an expert, of sorts, on a different -- and universal -- mode of expression: the human smile.

Since the publication of his book "A Brief History of the Smile" earlier this year, Trumble -- curator of paintings and sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art -- has been interviewed by newspaper, magazine, television and radio journalists throughout the United States and his native Australia, and in countries around the world. He has repeatedly been photographed as he flashes his own smile, and while cameras are clicking, has even demonstrated the range of different smiles he explores in his book: the polite, the lewd, the flirtatious, the smirk, the sneer, the mirthful, the wise and the false (contrived or calculated).

Newsweek described Trumble's book as "a charming romp through the evolution of the grin," and Publishers Weekly hailed it as an "eclectic and engaging look at the phenomenon [of smiling] throughout art and history and across cultures." Various reviews touted the Yale curator's ability to combine scholarship, personal anecdotes and witty descriptions in the book, while in a tongue-in-cheek vein USA Today wrote of Trumble: "Dare we suggest here is the rarest of creatures, an academic scholar with a sense of humor?"

For his part, the Yale curator is somewhat mystified and amused by his newfound fame.

"I think everybody is taken a little bit by surprise by the degree of interest in the book," says Trumble. "But the most surprising aspect of it for me is that for the whole time that I was working on it, when I told people what I was doing, they would simply smile. So there was this 'voodoo' aspect where I felt I could make people smile simply by telling them that I'm working on a book about smiling.

"On the rare occasions where someone would look at me blankly, I would realize that look was a very reliable indicator of a complete and radical humor bypass," he adds, grinning widely.

Ironically, Trumble's book was born out of a talk he gave to a group of dentists and maxillofacial surgeons at a 1998 conference. He was then curator of European art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the dentists had invited him to lecture about the evolving perceptions of artists since the 18th century on what constitutes a beautiful face.

He focused his talk on teeth and how, until about 100 years ago, the state of people's teeth had nothing to do with whether or not they were judged to be beautiful. The advent of aesthetic dentistry -- along with advances in photography -- changed that, says Trumble, so that today, "good teeth are considered an indispensable part of a beautiful face."

Trumble's audience of dentists received his talk warmly, inspiring him to expand on the topic. While exploring various works of art to illustrate the changing notions of beauty for his talk, he was surprised to discover smiling faces in all kinds of artworks, and he wanted to delve further into the evolution of this human facial expression.

"I started out thinking it was very rare to find, particularly in the Western tradition, any smiling faces at all," recalls Trumble, who came to Yale less than a year ago. "In that tradition, particularly in portraits, the sitter's mouth was kept firmly shut. But as I investigated further, I began finding, in large numbers, images with smiling people." He decided to write his book about "the broad subject of smiling," using works of art to illustrate his themes.

In his book, Trumble covers topics ranging from the mechanics and physiology of the smile to the ancient Japanese custom of tooth-blackening, which came to be a reflection of high social status. He describes the grinning matches that were once common in British pubs and a modern equivalent called "girning" -- also practiced in some English pubs -- in which toothless people make grotesque faces. He also touches upon the subject of canine grins and their representation in Western portraiture; the origins and uses of the ubiquitous "smiley face" emblem; and the serene and saintly smiles evidenced in depictions of Buddha, angels and other religious figures, among other topics.

In his research, Trumble turned up all kinds of quirky facts and tidbits. For example, he looked into the history behind the use of the word "cheese" in Britain and America as a way of encouraging people to smile for a photograph. Discovering that it was first used around 1920 in English public schools, he set out to find out the equivalent to "cheese" in other cultures and learned many are also food-related. The Danes use "appelsin" (orange); the Swedes say "omellette"; the Finns use "muikku" (a type of fish); and the Koreans smile in response to "kim chi" (cabbage). The Japanese, paradoxically, use the English word "whiskey."

"Sometimes, when I asked people of different cultures what word they say when being photographed, some of them would look at me strangely," Trumble recalls. "It was a rather painstaking process. One moment that I felt especially silly was when, after posing that question to the ambassador of Cambodia to Australia, he replied, 'When we want someone to smile, we just ask them to smile.'"

In his book, the Yale curator illustrates aspects of smiling in relation to famous artworks such as Leonardo da Vinci's iconic "The Mona Lisa" and Frans Hals' "The Laughing Cavalier" (who, in Trumble's estimation, is not laughing at all). He also remarks on the smiles of famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Ozzy Osbourne and Theodore Roosevelt -- who, he notes, was the first American president to become famous for smiling broadly. Previously, presidents tended to maintain a more somber appearance, he says. While he has often been asked by journalists to assess the smiles of today's presidential candidates, he mostly declines to make public comments on this subject.

Even though his book is complete, Trumble still ponders the extent to which smiling is a reflection of a person's true emotional state. "That is one question that will stay with me for a long time," says the curator.

There is no doubt, however, that a smile -- one of humans' most instinctual and spontaneous actions -- is "a very powerful form of communication," Trumble says.

One of the curator's next projects is to organize an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art on 18th- and 19th-century animal painter James Ward. He continues to take tours for his new book and will soon speak to a new group of dentists, this time on the Yale campus.

"I have never had so much exposure to dentists," quips Trumble. "There is a wonderful symmetry to my addressing another group of dentists since the book's publication. That is, after all, how it all got started."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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