“John F. Kennedy,” by Elaine de Kooning (Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum)
This is the second of two articles. The first appeared in KC Studio, November/December 2024. See kcstudio.org/how-the-story-of-an-artist-a-painting-and-a-poet-unexpectedly-intertwines/.
On Feb. 11, 1965, Harry S. Truman met the painter Elaine de Kooning for the first time as she presented her new portrait of another American president, John F. Kennedy, to the Truman Library in Independence.
In the preserved video of the dedication ceremony, there is laughter during a photo op when Truman is encouraged to move from where he stood on one side of the painting to join De Kooning on the other end.
In the moment, Truman refrained from commenting on the painting per se, but he thanked de Kooning for the hard work and noted how the portrait would expand the institution’s holdings relating to the history of the U.S. presidency.
De Kooning said she was honored to have her work in the vicinity of Thomas Hart Benton’s recent-vintage library mural, “Independence and the Opening of the West,” which she called “his masterpiece.” And she expressed hope that Truman would “get used to my portrait,” recognizing its expressionistic freedoms and jaunty colors as a departure from traditionally heroic, realistic renderings of important people.
She went on to describe her painstaking process over many months to capture the radiant essence and dignity of the late president as a man ready to spring into action.
The Truman Library’s painting — and all of de Kooning’s other JFK paintings and sketches she made at the time — began as a commission suggested in 1962 by a New York art dealer, Robert Graham. Graham was visiting the library that fall with Benton when the discussion began with its administrators. Graham had a schoolboy connection with President Kennedy, which helped move things along.
If Graham expected pushback from either Kennedy or Harry Truman on his promotion of de Kooning as the portrait artist, it never materialized, according to the gallerist’s correspondence in both the Archives of American Art and the Truman Library.
And as Cathy Curtis, author of a recent biography of de Kooning, writes, “In a practical sense, her reputation for rapidly completing a portrait made her the ideal artist to paint a famously restless head of state.”
At the time, when the subject was brought up at the White House, the president was too busy to sit for an artist, though an opportunity arose during the Christmas holidays while the Kennedy family would be at the winter White House in Palm Beach, Florida.
De Kooning spent a reported 20 hours over nearly two weeks jumping from her sketchpad, where she put charcoal to work, to her easels, where she began oil paintings. Her sessions with the president were often informal but also took place when he was conducting business. During one meeting, a conference on Medicare, she sketched him while she was standing on a ladder. After the live sessions, she spent most of 1963 working on nothing else but her multiple canvases — “thirty-six canvases going at once,” she’d say.
In the spring of 2024, Jenny Molberg, a Kansas City poet and teacher on a yearlong sabbatical from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, stood in the high-ceilinged, naturally lighted studio space in East Hampton, Long Island, where de Kooning eventually settled. Molberg has been following a trail that begins in the 1960s, when de Kooning painted portraits of Molberg’s grandfather and uncle, a great-aunt, and her beloved grandmother, who remained a friend of the artist for many years. De Kooning once gave a JFK sketch to her uncle as a memento, and it remains a cherished family possession.
Molberg has been working on poems and essays springing from her exploration into de Kooning’s life and work, planning eventually to produce a book.
“I’ve been really interested in what Elaine says about men as her subjects,” Molberg tells me, “especially in light of the fact that portrait painting may have seemed ‘domestic’ to her male contemporaries in the Abstract Expressionist movement. I think she thought a lot about the gender dynamics of a woman painter making portraits of men, when for so long men were the sole possessors of the muse/the nude female body/the sexualized body in art. Elaine once said, ‘Men always painted the opposite sex, and I wanted to paint men as objects.’”
One day last fall, Mark Adams, the Truman museum curator, and John Miller, its registrar, brought de Kooning’s JFK portrait out of temperature-controlled storage and placed it on a chair in a conference room. I sat across from it to see what I could see, to see what doesn’t come across in photographs or reproductions as I’d been encountering them in books and elsewhere.
I’d hoped to share the viewing with Jenny Molberg but our timelines didn’t mesh — my travels and deadlines, her travels and back surgery — and I knew she would have another opportunity during her own project’s trajectory.
As I sat there with the painting, I thought about that horrible day, the one that for those of us alive at the time, can’t be forgotten — Nov. 22, 1963. I was 10 years old, sitting in the fifth-grade classroom in the Longfellow School, Sanford, Maine, where a black-and-white television was soon rolled in on a cart.
I thought about Camelot, the promise of the “New Frontier,” the mythic aura of the Kennedy presidency with which de Kooning’s modern sensibilities aimed to connect on canvas. I thought, sorry to say, about the despicable caricature of a human being who has disrupted American life for a decade now in a narcissistic search to fill presidential shoes that have not and will never fit him.
My eyes searched the painting up and down — it’s about 4 feet wide and nearly 5 1/2 feet tall — to finally focus on the four-ring binder where Kennedy’s hands seemed to rest in mid-executive action.
I thought about the brilliance of de Kooning’s strategy to incorporate streaks of bright white, remnants of the Palm Beach, Florida sun, which splashed through the patio where JFK sat and squirmed as she sketched and painted in early January 1963.
The white space offers breathing room in the painting, as if the light from above were telling us something about her subject, as if she were inviting viewers to fill those open areas with their own memories, visions, thoughts and feelings about the fallen president and their own lives. Others may see in it a sense of incompletion that rightfully accompanies a life cut short.
The writer Thurston Clarke, speaking a decade ago about his book “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” found a different conclusion in de Kooning’s experience. “I don’t think you can ever get as far as you want to with Kennedy because he was secretive and so complicated, and he compartmentalized so much,” he told an audience at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. “In fact, if you look at the beginning of the book — I open with Elaine de Kooning, who was essentially driven crazy by trying to capture his essence into a single portrait for the Truman Library and ended up doing nothing but painting Kennedy for a whole year, doing 30 oil paintings, covering the walls of her studio with drawings and sketches and everything of Kennedy. So you can never get to the final thing.”
We can certainly wonder whether Clarke thought de Kooning’s project fell short. Nevertheless, the evidence in front of me, in the Truman Library conference room, happens to argue otherwise.
In the end, the vectors of memory are unpredictable as they zing through that infinite universe between our ears. Artists and writers might be especially attuned to grasp those signals as they pass.
Anxiety over de Kooning’s portrait project increased after Kennedy’s death. De Kooning felt a new obligation to get it just right, but was somewhat paralyzed to continue, according to some accounts. Within days of the assassination, Truman Library officials were hoping her portrait could be in their hands to go on public display as soon as possible. Yet it would be another year before Graham and President Kennedy’s inner circle agreed on which of de Kooning’s paintings they preferred to go to the Truman Library. Another one would soon be acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy, and other versions eventually landed at the Kennedy Library in Boston, development plans for which were already underway, and the National Portrait Gallery.
De Kooning recounted her experience making the portrait in her introductory remarks in Independence.
“When I first laid eyes on President Kennedy, December 28, 1962, at ten o’clock in the morning, I arrived carrying the world’s image of him. The one thing wrong with that image was that it missed the great color. The image was black, white and grey, and it missed the great scale, the tremendous physical presence of the man. So for one split second I did not recognize him. He was bigger and more radiant than any reproduction had indicated.”
She also summed up her idea as it evolved: “The colors were chosen, not to convey a realistic sense of a gray flannel suit worn by a man with a tan — but rather to attempt to communicate the brightness and high color of the man as I saw him. Also, I wanted to capture his quality of readiness, as though he was about to spring from his chair. And to get the frown and the smile at once — the sharp, appraising glance.”
The day after the presentation in Independence, de Kooning’s painting took center stage in an exhibit for the public at the Kansas City Art Institute’s Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery. The sunny and striking portrait of Kennedy was accompanied by 38 other sketches and paintings and one abstract bronze sculpture. The exhibit ran for three weeks.
Jenny Molberg joined me on a brief research visit to the library at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where we paged through the catalogue of that KCAI exhibit. Here was a full-page reproduction of the Truman painting; here was a photograph of de Kooning beginning a sketch of the president in Palm Beach; here were sketches dated Dec. 28, 1962, the first day of her project and the same date as the one in her family.
Molberg’s reflections on de Kooning certainly embrace the JFK period, but she is traveling far beyond it.
“I’ve started thinking about the lyricism in her abstract paintings,” Molberg says, “but maybe more importantly about the narrative aspects of her portraiture. How is she reaching back into the history of portraiture, engaging with the canon (as it were)? How is she flipping gender expectations?”
Perhaps some of those questions will now come to mind whenever the public has a rare opportunity to view de Kooning’s JFK portrait at the Truman Library. I’m told there may well be a one-day event to do that in February, 60 years after it arrived.
ONE THING
The prospect of seeing a second-century cave that once housed a proto-Christian church was a major attraction of a recent journey to Turkey. But add a candlelight performance by two Kansas City musicians and you’ve reached a level of magic that’s hard to match. Beau Bledsoe, the founding guitarist of the cross-cultural musical group Ensemble Ibérica, and cellist Ezgi Karakus, who’s a native of Turkey, were the featured performers.
The concert space is outside the town of Görome in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey. The history is palpable in the walls of the carved-out volcanic stone. It’s one of hundreds of cave dwellings, refuges and erstwhile churches that provide the area with so much deep connection to the human experience.
Bledsoe and Karakus tapped into that resonant stream with their hour-long performance, including renditions of works by Turkish masters and four Karakus originals that served to fuse Western and Eastern sounds and rhythms. The cellist’s “Izmir” is a heartfelt, subtle tribute to the inspirations of her hometown. Find a video of the performance here: https://youtu.be/Gn7ZfEymSrY
Along with presenting a rich series of concerts around Kansas City, Ensemble Ibérica has become active in the patron-tour business, taking along small groups in guided journeys to the places that inspire them. Next stop, later this year, will be Portugal. Find their current concert schedule and more at ensembleiberica.org.
