National Gallery of Art John Walker Great Paintings of the World
8-v years agone, eight paintings by the Postimpressionist main were bequeathed to the nation's presidents — works subconscious, often in plain sight.
Just a week before astronaut John Glenn'due south maiden voyage orbiting the Earth in 1962, a record 46 million people sat downwardly before their black-and-white sets to scout Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy conduct the outset televised White Business firm bout.
The mansion's $1.5-million renovation was her debut project equally kickoff lady, restoring "an emblem of the American republic," as Kennedy breathily described the stately residence.
Midway through the program, the photographic camera scanned the elegant Green Room. Kennedy walked to a corner and stood abreast a marquetry card table — a very fine antiquarian, she explained, that dictated the room's Federalist decor.
Hanging above the table on a silk damask wall was a park-like landscape in faceted brush strokes of green and blue. Paul Cézanne's "The Forest" is a sterling example of the artist'due south mature Postimpressionist way, widely credited with launching an artistic revolution.
CBS newscaster Charles Collingwood asked Kennedy to signal out a few objects of special involvement.
"Well," she replied, "in that location's this sofa, which belonged to Daniel Webster."
Kennedy gracefully glided away, saying non a word near the Cézanne.
As the pair left the room on their way upstairs to the Lincoln Bedroom, they passed a second great Cézanne by the doorway. The vivid landscape of a business firm past a river was likewise ignored.
Perhaps the omissions represented the public relations savvy of a young but seasoned political wife. She knew the art'due south importance, having studied French history at the Sorbonne in Paris, only may have thought it impolitic to draw attention to Modernistic French paintings in an American Neoclassical house.
Or maybe there was another reason. The beginning lady was among a handful of people who knew the dark hugger-mugger of how the paintings came to Washington.
Eighty-five years ago, Charles A. Loeser, an American living away, gave the White Firm eight Cézanne paintings, a bequest that would have been the envy of any museum in the world.
Loeser donated the six landscapes and 2 still lifes "to the President of the The states of America and his successors in office for the adornment of the White Firm" and required that the paintings exist displayed together, every bit an ensemble.
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy stands with with Philippa Calnan, the donor's granddaughter, in front of Cézanne's "Business firm on the Marne" in the White House's Green Room on June 28, 1961. (Robert Knudsen / White House / John F. Kennedy Presidential Library) More than photos 
Yet only 2 of the eight — the two that Kennedy ignored — have spent a significant amount of fourth dimension within 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. At least 1 has never hung there.
The White House's art drove is mostly American-themed fine art, including fine works past Gilbert Stuart, Jean-Antoine Houdon and John Vocalist Sargent. The presence of the French masterpieces is lilliputian known, fifty-fifty amid experts.
Asked recently about them, Paul Schimmel, former museum curator and fellow member of the presidentially appointed Committee for the Preservation of the White House, responded: "What Cézannes?"
The tale of the paintings is a tangled ane, and some puzzle pieces are even so missing.
But this much, at to the lowest degree, is known: John Walker III, primary curator of the National Gallery of Art, surreptitiously diverted the Cézannes from the White House to heave his fledgling museum'southward collections. To get them, he afterward admitted, he bamboozled Loeser's daughter and President Truman.
Every bit Jacqueline Kennedy wrote the curator in her final days in the White Business firm, Walker had even "violated poor Mr. Loeser's will."
Loeser, heir to a Brooklyn department store fortune, was one of Cézanne's outset collectors.
He graduated from Harvard in 1888 and moved permanently to Florence, Italy, where he assembled an impressive collection of European Renaissance and Bizarre fine art. In the 1890s, when Cézanne was petty-known, Loeser began to purchase the creative person'south paintings. Past the time he was done, he had 15.
Loeser died in 1928. In his will, he fabricated iii handsome bequests. Two were of Renaissance and Baroque art. Harvard received 262 drawings, forming the core of the Fogg Art Museum's outstanding collection. Sculptures, paintings, furniture and decorated earthenware went to the metropolis of Florence, where they are now housed in the Palazzo Vecchio.
The White House was allowed to choose viii of his Cézannes. Loeser gave his daughter Matilda, and so fifteen, a life interest in the paintings, which meant they would be sent to Washington upon her decease — or earlier, if she wished.
Two years after Loeser died, John Walker, a recent art history graduate of Harvard, moved to Florence. His mission was to oversee the transfer of the drawings in Loeser's collection to their shared alma mater, and he met frequently with the collector's widow and the couple's daughter.
Walker saw the Cézannes many times at the Loeser villa. Because he had a copy of Loeser's will, he knew that it outlined a plan to give the paintings to the White Business firm.
Two decades later, Walker, past then curator at the newly created National Gallery, was in New York meeting with Adele Levy, a collector of French Modern fine art whose brother was amidst the museum'south founding benefactors. He was stunned to find her most contempo acquisition: a Cézanne still life of cherries and peaches from Loeser'southward collection.
As he would call back years later, Walker believed that Loeser's daughter Matilda had sold the still life illegally. In his interpretation of the volition, all 15 Cézannes in the villa at Loeser's death should remain together until the White House chose its 8.
He also sensed an opportunity: He would visit Matilda, persuade her to relinquish her life interest in the paintings and then try to divert the Loeser heritance away from the White House and to the National Gallery. At the fourth dimension, the museum had no Cézannes.
Walker's account of his scheme is contained in an extraordinary mea culpa, a fourteen-page brief titled "My Most Infamous Intrigue: The White Firm Cézannes," which is now kept in the archives of the National Gallery.
In the memo, Walker says he traveled to Florence in 1950 to see Matilda. He quizzed her on whether the Cézannes were being properly cared for and worried aloud that if anything happened to valuable regime belongings, she was liable.
He fifty-fifty claimed that, every bit National Gallery curator, failure to protect the federal government'due south art could cause him to "end up in Leavenworth prison" for negligence.
Matilda became frantic. Take the paintings, he says she insisted, "the sooner the better."
Matilda died in 2000 in La Jolla at historic period 87 after a modest late career as a Hollywood character actress. She left no account of her meetings with Walker.
What Walker called his Cézanne intrigue was first mentioned in a 2008 book, "Mona Lisa in Camelot," past Margaret Leslie Davis. The curator omitted it from his published memoirs; The Times obtained a copy from the National Gallery archives.
Her but direct descendant is a daughter, Philippa Calnan, a onetime public affairs manager at the J. Paul Getty Trust, where a 14th century Paolo Veneziano painting that Loeser once owned hangs in the permanent collection. Calnan recalls that the Cézannes always seemed a brunt whenever her mother mentioned them. But, she added, she never knew why Matilda relinquished her interest in them half a century earlier she died.
The total text is arresting. Walker, who died in 1995, expresses profound regret for his deportment. "I still feel ashamed," he wrote. "I behaved abominably and frightened a dear friend nearly to expiry."
Walker urged President Truman to decline the bequest, and the president took the advice of his National Gallery curator. And then Walker had the Cézannes shipped from Italy to Paris. But Ambassador David Bruce — the old son-in-police of National Gallery founder Andrew Mellon and an quondam Walker friend — said he had no suitable place to hang them.
So Walker offered to have them. He estimated the combined value of the Loeser Cézannes at as much as $3 million in 1951 — the aggrandizement-adapted equivalent of $27 one thousand thousand today.
On Jan. 7, 1952, the viii paintings arrived by transatlantic shipment at the National Gallery of Art. Inside a twelvemonth, a new president was headed to the White House and a new ambassador to Paris, further roofing Walker's tracks. The splendid paintings hung undisturbed in the museum for nearly a decade — until suddenly two turned upwardly in Jacqueline Kennedy's televised tour.
In the 1890s, Charles Alexander Loeser, a wealthy American living in Florence, Italia, became one of the first major collectors of paintings by French artist Paul Cézanne. Loeser bequeathed viii Cézanne paintings to the White Business firm in 1928. (Courtesy Philippa Calnan) More photos
How did the Cézannes get from the National Gallery to the Kennedy White House?
A March 3, 1961, memo from Secretary of State Dean Rusk brash the president of the potential for a lawsuit over the mishandled Loeser bequest. Someone, all the same unidentified, had diddled the whistle on Walker.
In the wake of Rusk'south memo, the art-loving, Francophile kickoff lady promptly telephoned the National Gallery. Walker confessed to his scheme.
Kennedy expressed sympathy for the museum's needs and, according to Walker, agreed to share the Cézannes. The ii best paintings were sent to the White Firm, with plans to later rotate the remaining vi.
Kennedy hastily invited Matilda to Washington to see that part of her father's bequest was existence showcased in the Green Room. Matilda's daughter Philippa, and so a 22-twelvemonth-onetime fine art history graduate from Bryn Mawr Higher, went in her identify.
"I was agog," she says now.
The plan to rotate the Cézannes never came to pass. President Kennedy was assassinated, and seven days later the country funeral, as Jackie packed to leave Washington, she reminisced about the paintings in a frank but poignant farewell alphabetic character to Walker.
"We all know what yous did to poor President Truman — making him sign away the eight Cézannes that were left to the White House," Kennedy wrote. Walker, she added in the eight-page correspondence, which is besides stored in the National Gallery's archives, "had violated poor Mr. Loeser's will."
Then she begged, "Please please this letter of the alphabet is always to exist secret," underlining the first words twice.
Kennedy wrote that Lady Bird Johnson expressed no interest in the masterpieces that Kennedy and so loved. She worried that considering Cézanne was foreign and the paintings did non have themes from American history, the Johnsons would remove the stellar works. She implored Walker to help protect her frail legacy equally a force for art and culture in the Us.
Today, three of the Cézannes hang in the National Gallery and five are in the White Firm family unit quarters. According to the White House curator'southward office, the 8 have never been installed together as an ensemble, as the Loeser heritance directs.
Matilda'southward girl Philippa subsequently embarked on her ain museum career, working first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art then the Getty. Calnan knew Walker professionally, merely she knew none of the history of his role in diverting her grandfather'due south bequest.
She retired in 1995. Told the story recently, she expressed shock.
"I tin't believe information technology," Calnan gasped as the details were described. "I just tin can't believe it."
A terminal irony likewise astonished her: The painting that launched Walker's subterfuge, Adele Levy's Cézanne still life of cherries and peaches, has hung at LACMA for more than l years, a souvenir of Levy's movie-producer son. Calnan had seen it a grand times at her former place of employment.
Until now, she didn't know that the painting in one case hung in her childhood dwelling — together with the White House Cézannes.
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Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-cezanne-20130901-dto-htmlstory.html
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