Jenny Molberg with de Kooning books (photo by Jonny Ulasien)
In gathering material and sifting archival sands for the book project I’m currently immersed in, a digression presented itself, as they often and relentlessly do. If you are more laser-focused and on-task than I am, you might have let the impulse go. But that would be you. I couldn’t help myself. So I pinballed from one thing to another.
The first thing I was searching for was a poem by William Stafford, the Kansas and Oregon sage, which he wrote following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The second thing, united to the first by a random leap of mind and of digital data mining, was a portrait of JFK made by the painter Elaine de Kooning. Sixty years ago, in February 1965, she presented the Kennedy portrait to former President Harry S. Truman and his Truman Library in Independence.
Now this bit of local history would most likely have led me to tell the straightforward story of de Kooning’s painting and the happy occurrence of its little-remembered residency in the presidential museum in our midst. (It’s not often on display.) That indeed was the plan. But, again, the underlining thread here is my old and comforting friend serendipity — how chance and coincidence manage to make our lives unpredictable if not ever-intriguing.
It happened like this. At a late summer poetry reading, in a cozy Kansas City cocktail lounge, I listened to Jenny Molberg begin to describe her current interest in reclaiming the stories of female artists who happened to be overshadowed or ignored because they were married to artists who got all the attention. I wondered what she might have known about Elaine de Kooning. Flash forward a millisecond when she revealed that she knew much about Elaine de Kooning, because Elaine de Kooning was a friend of her family. Elaine de Kooning painted portraits of at least four of Molberg’s family members, including her beloved grandmother. That was merely the beginning.
Jenny Molberg, Ph.D., is on the English and creative writing faculty at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. She’s editor of the literary journal “Pleiades” and author of three books of poetry. Most recent of those is “The Court of No Record” (Louisiana State University Press), some of which she highlighted in September in the monthly Speakeasy poetry series at Swordfish Tom’s, the basement-level, hipster-magnet home of high-grade cocktails in the Crossroads. Her poetry is brash, bawdy, brutally honest about violence done to women, and has a self-defined bitchiness. It’s full-throated, 21st-century feminist, that is.
Molberg is also in her second year of a writing residency at Charlotte Street. While on sabbatical last spring she read the book “Ninth Street Women,” by Mary Gabriel, a group portrait of de Kooning and four other painter friends in her New York world. That jump-started her interest. Then, a chance discovery made while talking with a fellow Charlotte Street artist helped her decide that “Elaine was speaking to me.”
Elaine de Kooning was an accomplished though often less-regarded member of the circle of artists who defined the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s, including her husband, Willem de Kooning. She carved out a specialty in figure painting and soulful portraits, making memorable canvases of artists and writers such as Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and her husband. Porter once noted how portraiture liberated de Kooning and well served her unique talents as a painter. In 1963, the year she labored over her JFK project, she also painted a heroically scaled group portrait, stretching nearly 14 feet wide. It presented the figures of nine young, otherwise anonymous men — most were revealed to be patients in a drug rehabilitation facility — titled “The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue.”
De Kooning met and painted Molberg’s family members beginning in the late 1960s, a few years after the Kennedy work elevated her market for commissioned portraits. A great aunt, Yvonne Collins, was married to a Texas insurance mogul and art collector, who commissioned his wife’s portrait in 1967. Molberg’s grandmother Sue Deakins, of Tyler, Texas, sat for de Kooning two years later. She was a onetime English teacher who would instill in Molberg her love of reading and literature. Sue Deakins was deeply interested in the arts, and in 1972 she arranged an exhibit of de Kooning’s portraits at the Tyler Museum of Art. There was a memorable gathering at the Deakins home, Molberg tells me, of which stories are told that largely involve the fact that de Kooning had not yet given up drinking.
Molberg’s family members still possess many works by de Kooning, including several of the countless charcoal sketches, drawings and preliminary paintings she made in preparing for the final JFK oil portraits. Sue Deakins corresponded with de Kooning for years, until the artist’s death from lung cancer, at almost 71, in 1989. Deakins is alive and well, now 89 in Dallas, having moved there recently from Tyler to be closer to her daughter, Molberg’s mother. Molberg, of course, has the family scrapbooks and de Kooning’s letters to enrich her own work.
All of that material evidence and intellectual energy have become Molberg’s passion as she works toward a book of personal essays and poems tracing de Kooning’s presence in her own life. Thanks to an Inspiration Grant from ArtsKC she was able to travel earlier this year to de Kooning’s former home and studio, still largely preserved by a new owner, in the Long Island, New York, enclave of East Hampton.
And she was pleasantly surprised — what? another coincidence? — to learn that de Kooning’s memorable portraits of John F. Kennedy include not only the full-length painting that hangs at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and those in the hands of her family, but also the one right here at the Truman Library.
To Be Continued: More on Jenny Molberg and the Truman Library’s JFK portrait in the January/February 2025 issue of KC Studio.
THREE THINGS
Chuck Haddix is well known as Kansas City’s go-to jazz historian and feel-good radio DJ. Now, add record producer to his resumé. Haddix, who by day directs the vast Marr Sound Archives at UMKC, played a principal role in bringing to life newly released recordings of Charlie Parker, all made in Kansas City. Spanning the decade from 1941 to 1951, these landmark casual and studio sessions find Parker as the progenitor of the inventive and explosive jazz mode known as bebop. Such classic achievements as “Cherokee” and “Body and Soul” remain as freshly rendered as ever. One musician once told Haddix that Parker’s bebop used to be called “crazy music.” No longer crazy, Bird’s music is essential for understanding the currents of American culture in the 20th century. Verve Records: “Bird in Kansas City” out now on CD and LP.
Gillian Flynn is another Kansas City native with a worldwide audience, earned for her sharply drawn, thriller-based novels and other fictional projects about vulnerable, fierce and danger-adjacent women. Start with “Gone Girl” and binge from there. Flynn, long resident in Chicago, returns to her hometown to inspire attendees of the Writers for Readers event co-sponsored by the UMKC Creative Writing Program and the Kansas City Public Library. The program includes the announcement of the annual Maya Angelou Award for fiction Nov. 21 at UMKC Student Union. Ticket and sponsor information here: kclibrary.org/support/wfr.
I saw the large and fascinating Hokusai exhibit last year in Boston, where it originated, and now it’s a thrill to encounter it again at the Nelson-Atkins. It’s a show not only about the Japanese artist’s memorable images, but also about how he learned to create, explored far corners of mythology, culture and sexualized dreamscapes, and how his influence radiated throughout the art world like, well, waves. The Nelson expands on the opportunity by offering a simultaneous show in its Japanese galleries of Hokusai’s work from its own holdings and two other museum collections. Hokusai: Waves of Inspiration from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Jan. 5 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
