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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.
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  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.

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