Skip to main content

Why did LBJ hate this portrait?

LBJ portrait

Not one of the more important questions one might ask about the Johnson presidency, and Caro still owes us a book, but....

 Here's a link.

It's a fact that Johnson despised this painting, by Peter Hurd. A recent article in Smithsonian delves into the question: why?

It is in one respect compositionally innovative. I'm sure Johnson didn't actually model for the painting standing on the roof of the Library of Congress, Hurd placed him there by act of imagination.  The result, a view of the Capitol Dome and environs that makes Johnson seem both towering and reflexive. Not a bad day's work.

Why did Johnson despise it?  Perhaps the simple asymmetry of it. Maybe he had the preconceived notion that the subject of a portrait is 'supposed' to be in the center, with a neutral background.

Maybe the conjoined fact that he's portrayed on a roof, and holding a book, was off-putting, Does the L of C let people take books to the roof with them? IS there even an opening out to the roof? I can imagine these questions occuring to him as he interrogates the image.

The article offers a far simpler explanation that those. It says Johnson may have rejected the painting simply becausre he could, because it amounted to pushing Hurd around: a bully's impulse.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryMarch 4, 2018 at 6:29 AM

    Johnson is not standing on the roof of the Library of Congress or in any other real place. From the standpoint of the Library of Congress, not only, as the article says, is the Capitol Building dwarfed, but it is at the wrong angle, from either of the two Library of Congress buildings from which one can see the Capitol. Nor does either building's roof have a wall of the sort that appears behind Johnson. The painting's setting is not intended to be realistic. I don't think that the book he is holding is real either. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more