Court Painters to JFK

Some years ago, a young editor became angry because I wanted to write about Clement Greenberg for NY Arts. Greenberg, he complained, was "historical," and therefore not worth coverage.

By Piri Halasz

Some years ago, a young editor became angry because I wanted to write about Clement Greenberg for NY Arts. Greenberg, he complained, was "historical," and therefore not worth coverage. But a small wave of art historians and collectors much younger than me has come along who value color-field painting of the early 60s precisely because it is "historical," an evocation of an earlier era. Mostly between thirty-five and fifty-five, these art-lovers were children or yet unborn when the paintings were first exhibited. One such scholar is Alexander Nemerov of Yale, born around the time John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Nemerov gave an interesting talk at the College Art Association conference this year, called "Morris Louis, et al.:Court Painters to Liberal America."

He talked about "feeling" as the subject of abstract painting. I found this idea liberating in 1968, though by then few commentators spoke of it. Warhol and Lichtenstein were "cool," and postmodernist scholarship similarly tended to deny emotion. It was great to hear Nemerov reintroduce it, but he wasn’t altogether out of the postmodernist groove when he suggested that the post-painterly color-field painters were merely creating an "academic portrayal" of emotion, as contrasted with the more passionate brush stroke of de Kooning. True, the color-field painters dispensed with the brush stroke, but "academic portrayal" implies that they were merely illustrating feeling, not expressing it, and obeying external convention instead of inner conviction. To me, the loose brush strokes made by the second-rate, second-generation abstract expressionists imitating de Kooning in the 50s were conventions that only claimed to express emotion, and the stain technique of color-field painters enabled them to make fresher, hence more deeply felt images.

Louis, Kenneth Noland and Paul Feeley, according to Nemerov, might be described as "court painters" during the liberal Presidency of JFK, just as Charles LeBrun was a court painter to Louis XIV. Their canvases were the modern-day equivalents to LeBrun’s "history paintings" because their "lightness" and "cheerful impersonality" reflected the "sunny optimism" of the Kennedy Administration, just as LeBrun had expressed the ideals of the Sun King. Nemerov argued that JFK – like Louis Quatorze – might be seen as a patron of the arts, though he conceded that none of the color-field artists were well enough known in the early 60s to receive official commissions, and described them as "apolitical." He told how the President had included Robert Frost in his inaugural ceremony, and invited Rothko to his inaugural dinner, but (with the advantage of having actually been an adult in the 60s) I’d like to offer a few more thoughts.

I’d agree that color-field painting is generally affirmative rather than negative or ironic, as postmodernist painting so often is. I’d agree that the early 60s were happier than the later 60s, but even the early 60s had its problems (the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, etc.) Many people thought of JFK as latter-day royalty (though he was far from an absolute monarch). Partly it was because he and Jacqueline were so young and glamorous, little statues on top of a wedding cake (decades before Jack’s indiscretions became widely known). Both he and Jackie came from wealthy, socially prominent families, but even more important was how they made a pageant out of politics, something that Americans hadn’t had, and that they’d envied the British for. Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth-century English economist, argued that British government was superior to American because it had two leaders, one for the "efficient" side of government (prime minister) and one for the "dignified" side (monarch). Ordinary people wanted the ceremonial trappings that the monarchy gave them, and having the monarch take care of this left the prime minister free to run the country. JFK’s Administration fulfilled the dignified role of government better than any other I’d known – with the aid of JFK’s beautiful wife.

Jackie more than Jack directly patronized the arts. Neither the NEA nor the NEH were created until after Lyndon Johnson became President, but Mrs. Kennedy set up a White House fine arts commission, hired a White House curator, and redecorated the mansion with early nineteenth-century furnishings, museum quality paintings and objets d’art, creating a spectacle that 56 million television viewers saw in 1961 when she gave a guided tour of the restorations. She also hired a French chef and threw classy parties, inviting musicians, artists and intellectuals as well as leaders of government. True, her taste in contemporary art was unenlightened, but her husband, however brilliant as a politician or perhaps as a statesman, was even less highbrow than she was. His tastes in fiction ran to Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

Court Painters to JFK – By Piri Halasz

Court Painters to JFK