George Lindemann Journal
"Portrait of American Taste on the Eve of Dallas"
By
Tom L. Freudenheim
Updated Nov. 20, 2013 12:07 a.m. ET
Fort Worth, Texas
The compelling little exhibition "Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, " now on view at this city's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, provides yet another insight into the presidency cut short a half century ago Friday. There are no assassination conspiracy theories to ponder here. Rather, this exhibition includes 12 of the 16 works that were placed in the Kennedys' two-bedroom hotel suite for their Texas visit, and it's like a mirror reflecting the taste, art and cultural perceptions of that time.
'Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy'
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Through Jan. 12, 2014
At $75 a night (about $550 today), Suite 850 was only the second-most-expensive of the Hotel Texas's accommodations; the Will Rogers Suite on the 13th floor of the Fort Worth hotel cost $100. Compared with what we might expect of today's presidential lodgings, the 1950s "Chinese modern" décor looks like a down-market affair, especially for a venue that would house a president who was perceived as a harbinger of high culture's acceptance in official America: The Kennedys were presumably lifting us above the social and cultural banalities of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Pablo Casals had entertained at a state dinner in 1961, and the following year JFK had invited the Western Hemisphere's Nobel laureates to the White House and cleverly quipped that "this is the most extraordinary collection of talent…that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Small wonder that five days before the president's arrival, a small group of Fort Worth's cultural leaders scrambled to assemble some presentable art from two public and five private collections to tart up the prosaic hotel suite. Given today's astronomical art prices and insurance costs, as well as increasingly restrictive standards for the handling and display of art, it's unlikely that even local collector-philanthropist Ruth Carter Johnson (later Stevenson)—daughter of noted civic booster and publisher Amon Carter —and her art friends would today be able to put together a hotel room display of this quality. But they rose to the challenge, and the cultural elite of Fort Worth were presumably also making a statement about their place in the city's longstanding competition with Dallas. That rivalry, as well as that moment in time at that place, are explored in several excellent essays by Olivier Meslay, David M. Lubin and others in the exhibition catalog. Mr. Meslay, who conceived of the exhibition and is a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art (where it was first shown), is a native Frenchman; Francophile Jackie would likely have approved.
In November 1963, national art magazines were featuring stories on abstract painter Clyfford Still, various artists (among them Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Robert Indiana) discussing Pop Art, and interviews on the "culture boom" with painters as varied as Larry Rivers, Adolph Gottlieb and James Rosenquist. But other than a very small, if fine, Franz Kline "Study for Accent Grave" (1954), perhaps a token bow to Abstract Expressionism, there was none of this available for the Kennedy's delectation in their suite. It's easy to forget that Irving Sander's first comprehensive study of that movement, "The Triumph of American Painting," wasn't published until 1977.
Rather, this exhibition hints at the variegated ways of looking at art that could serve as some sort of "official" (if informal) display fit for a president. It's not even the expected celebration of American artists, since six of the 16 works are by Europeans—Raoul Dufy, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Vincent van Gogh, Eros Pellini and Pablo Picasso. The quality of the works varies greatly, which is exemplified by two small bronzes: Moore's exquisite "Three Points" (1939-40) and Pellini's dreary "A Girl From Lombardia" (1958-59). Both reflect the tone of the entire exhibition in fence-sitting on the matter of abstract art. Mid-1950s dissension over a Picasso exhibition in Dallas had led to a splintering into art factions and the founding of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, which remerged with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the DMA) in 1963. Perhaps this explains why two of this exhibition's finest works—"Manhattan II" (1940) by Lyonel Feininger and "Spirit Bird" (c. 1956) by Morris Graves—were displayed in a corner of the sitting room along with the Kline.
The most iconic work in the exhibition is surely Thomas Eakins's "Swimming" (1885), a view of six naked young men at a swimming hole that fuses a casual sense of immediacy with a classically formal composition.Placed above what was intended to be the president's bed (although apparently Jackie slept there the night of Nov. 21), it suggests all sorts of JFK allusions, as Alexander Nemerov explores in his catalog essay. These include both the celebrated Kennedy athleticism as well as the survival swimming involved in JFK's PT 109 experience in World War II's Pacific theater. Considering more recent homoerotic readings of these Eakins paintings, I wonder whether it would make the cut for a presidential setting today. Yet there's no evidence that JFK even noticed the work. Rather, as writer James Reston reminds us in his recent recasting of the motive for the Kennedy assassination, on the morning of the 22nd the president gazed from the window of that hotel room prior to his brief talk in the parking lot below, and remarked to his aide Kenneth O'Donnell: "Just look at that platform. With all these buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn't stop someone who really wanted to get you."
This poignant exhibition is also a reminder that the museum scene in both Dallas and Fort Worth has burgeoned in the years since 1963. And it reveals bits of the underbelly of how museums operate. Following contentious public debate, "Swimming" was deaccessioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and purchased by the Amon Carter Museum in 1990. On the other hand, a wonderful late Marsden Hartley painting included here, "Sombrero With Gloves" (1936)—one of only two "western" paintings in the show (the other is a Charles Marion Russell view of Indians in a snowstorm)—was deaccessioned by the Amon Carter and is now in a private collection.
By conveying various histories—communal, institutional, taste and art—this exhibition wisely pays homage to, but also moves beyond, commemorating that singularly tragic moment in the American past.
Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian.