Mona Lisa in Camelot

On Sunday, October 14, 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft detected what might be SS-4 nuclear missiles situated in Cuba and returned with pictures that were about to shake the world. Working through the night, analysts confirmed the existence of Soviet mobile missiles with nuclear warheads with a range of 2,500 miles that could destroy Washington, New York, and other eastern cities. By Tuesday, “a secret, self-dubbed think tank of a dozen men was hard at work, modeling the counterthrust that would shock the opaque Kremlin,” reported Look magazine.

Half the world away, officials at the Louvre were summoned to a meeting conducted by Cultural Minister André Malraux, who announced his plan to send the Mona Lisa to the United States. The shocking news “fell upon the Louvre like a bomb,” reported Madame Madeleine Hours, head of the Louvre’s prestigious museum laboratory.

“The Minister of Culture considered this important enough to come and explain the project to the curators, during a special meeting,” Hours recalled. Since her first days at the Louvre, she had practically lived with the masterpiece, constantly checking the small picture like a mother hen. One of the first women to achieve high-ranking status at the venerated Louvre, Hours had dedicated her career to the care and protection of great works of art. Armed with the tools of her scientific laboratory, she penetrated the inherent mystery found in every work of art. “Pictures, like people, lead two lives: one face is public and formal, the other is private and more secret,” she said.

Leonardo da Vinci had painted the image of the young wife of a Florentine businessman on a single plank of poplar wood coated with arsenic and linseed oil. Because wood is a hygroscopic material, it easily absorbs moisture and careful consideration had to be given to the picture’s atmosphere. Madame Hours felt that the idea of shipping the painting to America was extremely foolish. “I had had many opportunities to see how fragile and how sensitive to differences in temperature the painting was,” she said.

The flimsy poplar panel was already warped, and there was a split in the upper part of the picture. Small death-watch beetles had burrowed thousands of tiny holes into the back of the painting two to three millimetres long and the masterpiece had undergone a series of other assaults and mishaps. In 1911, when the painting was stolen from the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had been hidden in a cupboard in a small Parisian hotel. The picture was returned to the Louvre on New Year’s Eve 1913, where a special commission of experts had convened to examine the picture. Four scratches to the varnish had been detected: one on the landscape near the lady’s neck, one on the subject’s hair, and two on her shoulders. After much debate, the picture was gently cleaned without solvents and put back on display.

One year later, the Mona Lisa was moved again when she was hurriedly packed and taken to a secret hiding place as General Alexander Von Kluck’s German army marched on Paris in August 1914. Millions of dollars worth of art were secretly hidden in the back of a wine dealer’s cart and taken in the middle of the night to the city of Toulouse in southern France. Some of the treasures were returned to the Louvre in poor condition, including a number of paintings that had grown moldy from sitting in wooden cases inside a damp church basement.

The picture was removed from the Louvre yet again for safekeeping during the onset of World War II, but this time it was strictly monitored. On its return, light damage to the picture was observed, including a slight “lifting and swelling apparent on the right side” in addition to “vertical and horizontal curling,” according to laboratory records.

In 1952, another commission of experts convened to investigate the status of the work and what, if any, action should be undertaken to preserve the painting. Officials approved a procedure in which four cross pieces of wood covered in felt were put in place behind the picture to impede any further buckling of the panel. Some minor touch-ups to patches of varnish were executed in the upper portion of the painting’s sky, and at the same time, experts at the museum’s laboratory took numerous direct-light photographs and X-rays and compared them to images that had been taken in 1933 during a routine inspection.

The Mona Lisa rested safely on the walls of the Louvre until December 30, 1956, when a delusional man hurled a rock at the picture, breaking the glass and damaging the portrait near the elbow. The strike of the blow and the breaking glass lifted “both the paint layer and ground layer” at the point of impact. These were “reaffixed using a putty of glue and whitening,” and painted in with tempera. Museum records show that a double layer of burnt umber was delicately painted in tiny strokes on the putty and isolated with retouch varnish, followed by a layer of ivory black mixed with cobalt and cadmium green. Around the spot where the rock had hit the wood, there was a halo where the paint surface was “deeply disturbed as if it had been heavily abraded.” This was also gently repaired with a coat of light tempera, then a thin layer of retouch varnish was spread evenly over only the restored areas.

In her scientific analysis Madame Hours and a team of experts evaluated the Mona Lisa’s current condition and reviewed a number of critical issues including “the tendency of the panel to absorb moisture, its reactivity to any atmospheric variations, its considerable warping, the crack toward the panel’s top and the associated butterfly-shaped brace, and the upturned edge of the paint layer.”

The picture was deemed “relatively healthy,” but also very fragile. Under all circumstances it had to be kept in a stable atmosphere, where it was subject only to slow and minor fluctuations in temperature. The Louvre itself was not air-conditioned, but its giant cavernous-like interior provided the perfect stable conditions for the Mona Lisa and the museum’s other works of art. “Any contraction and relaxation of the panel resulting from over-sudden atmospheric variations could prove fatal,” Madame Hours told colleagues.

With the museum’s curators assembled in the laboratory’s State Room, the painting was delicately removed from its frame and placed horizontally on trestles. The team examined its front and back and attempted to show Minister Malraux the crack on the upper part of the panel that had been visible since the eighteenth century. “I made quite an accurate summary of the possible hazards,” Madame Hours explained. Minister Malraux listened to her analysis, then asked her to describe the findings in a written report.

The rarefied world of fine art had played a central role in Madeleine Hours’s life since childhood. Born in 1913 in the Fourth Arrondissement, a central district of Paris that includes Notre Dame Cathedral and other medieval landmarks, she grew up in a family home that dated to the early seventeenth century. Her father, Lucien Miedan, supported the family as a civil servant after squandering his considerable inheritance during France’s jubilant belle époque in the decades around 1900.

“Life seemed narrow to me in a financially ruined, melancholy family, where there was a longing for former days, and where a love of the past and an interest in history were instilled in me,” she recalled in her memoirs. As a child she was taken once a week to the Tuileries, where she and her mother would visit the Louvre. She was particularly fascinated by the mysterious and ancient artifacts found in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities. Madeleine never got over her first encounter with a pair of winged bulls that guarded one entrance, and, even years later when she headed the department, she “could never see them without emotion.”

At her local high school named for French activist hero Victor Hugo, however, she was a distracted student who frustrated her teachers and ended up getting expelled. “Take your daughter back,” the directoress said in an imperial tone to Madeleine’s mother. “She’s just about good enough to become a seamstress.”

Fortunately her mother, Suzanne, ignored the advice and put Madeleine in private classes. On a fateful day in 1933, a heated discussion on the merits of Rembrandt and the characteristics of Dutch master works left her feeling so ignorant that she decided to study painting and finished her education at the I’Ecole du Louvre and Paris’s famous university, La Sorbonne.

In 1937, she was hired as a laboratory assistant by the Louvre, where she rose through the ranks of museum connoisseurship in a fiercely competitive male-dominated environment. In 1946, she was named head of the Research Laboratory of French Museums (later known as the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France or C2RMF). By 1962, Madeleine was the mother of three boys and divorced from Jacques Hours. She had a soft side, but at the Louvre, where her work consumed her full attention, she was known for her emotionless style based on reason and logic. Her work ethic was unmatched, and she spent so much time at the museum that her coworkers referred to her as “Madam Hours of the Louvre.”

She was meticulous about her appearance and wore a crisp, white laboratory coat over her stylish street clothes. Of medium height and build, she had piercing brown eyes offset by wavy brown hair and a tinge of grey along the temple. She wore sensible shoes and worked long hours without complaint. Conducting her meticulous work inside the Louvre’s laboratory, she “shook off the dust of centuries” through her probing scientific examinations of the world’s great works of art.

Her scrupulous analysis of the Mona Lisa’s condition anticipated the worst possible harm that could come to the masterpiece were it allowed to travel. She felt certain that her alarming conclusions would discourage the authorities, but her report accomplished the exact opposite. Malraux dismissed the concerns as exaggerated and announced his decision that the exhibition would proceed as planned.

Malraux’s unusually close bond with de Gaulle was vital to the plan going forward. This Jupiter-meets-Prometheus alliance was stronger than ever, and if Malraux wanted the Mona Lisa to visit America, he would get his wish. President de Gaulle desired a gesture of solidarity to the Americans that didn’t require alterations to his independent nuclear weapon program, and the Mona Lisa, the ultimate icon of French cultural superiority, could serve as the roving ambassador of French goodwill.

To Madame Hours’ horror, once the final decision had been made, Minister Malraux assigned her the agonizing task of organizing the packing and transport of the fragile masterpiece. “Our tactics had backfired,” she recalled. Filled with apprehension, she was forced to undertake the difficult job of figuring out how the painting could be shipped safely to Washington across the Atlantic Ocean during the freezing winter months.

On Tuesday morning, October 16, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger entered President Kennedy’s office and found him in a “black mood.” The President was seated at his desk, “drumming his teeth impatiently with his fingertips.” The night before, the CIA had examined aerial photographs that confirmed that Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction in Cuba, when completed and armed with warheads, would be capable of targeting cities throughout the southeastern United States. “By the President’s own definition, the offensiveness of the weapons was undeniable,” noted one scholar. “And Kennedy had pledged to take action if such a situation arose.”

During the next few days, Salinger kept a tally of the senior government officials who met with the President in secret sessions, including Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Douglas C. Dillon, CIA Director John A. McCone, former USSR Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson, State Department Soviet Specialist Chip Bohlen, and General Maxwell Taylor, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This group of close advisers became known as “EXCOM,” or the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Over the next few weeks the chilling deliberations of this extraordinary group would grip the nation’s attention.

At his town home on N Street in Georgetown, John Walker struggled with his decision whether to accept Jackie’s request to protect the Mona Lisa. It was a deeply painful conflict that could end his career. Unable to make a final decision, he called Jackie at 3:15 P.M. on Wednesday October 17, in the hope of dissuading her from moving forward with the exhibition. The details of their conversation remain unknown.

That same day, Walker sat alone in his office. His mind went one direction then another, and after writing several drafts, he dictated his final letter to President Kennedy. In his letter of acceptance, the words Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother were never mentioned:

My Dear Mr. President:

I am very honored to act as your personal representative in connection with the loan to you and Mrs. Kennedy by President de Gaulle and The Minister of Cultural Affairs for France, André Malraux, of two paintings for exhibition in certain American museums.

I have been in touch with Ambassador Alphand and plans for the shipment of the pictures are progressing. I am sure the exhibition of these two masterpieces will be deeply appreciated by the thousands of people who will see them.

Very sincerely yours,
John Walker

At 2:45 P.M., after the letter had been posted, he telephoned Jackie at the White House to inform her of his change of heart and to apprise her that he had already sent the letter to the President.

Walker never disclosed why he changed his mind, but he always maintained that the exhibition should never have taken place. “My only excuse,” Walker later said, was that the initiative was that of the lender, and to have refused to accept the loan would have “deprived the American people of the opportunity” to see the masterpiece.

By any measure, it was an awesome responsibility. The exhibition of this single artwork would consume Walker’s full attention for the next five months. Unlike any other museum show, this one would be watched by all the world.

On October 20, from his desk at the Washington Post, Edward Folliard telephoned Press Secretary Pierre Salinger at 10:08 P.M. and informed him that columnist Walter Lippmann had just told New York Post editor Al Friendly that the nation was on the brink of war. Salinger immediately called the President, who reacted with anger. “This town is a sieve,” he said.

On October 22, Salinger requested that the three television networks prepare for a presidential address of the “highest national security.” From the National Gallery, John Walker placed telephone calls to Jackie at the White House at both 9:20 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. During one call, Jackie cancelled her planned visit to the National Gallery dinner and preview connected with the exhibition of the old master drawings from the Devonshire collection. Although Walker’s opening-night dinner at the Sulgrave Club for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire took place as planned, there were many empty chairs as the crisis escalated.

That evening Kennedy informed the nation that nineteen Soviet ships with bombers, nuclear warheads, and missile parts were steaming toward Cuba. He announced that he was ordering a blockade of the Soviet ships and was in negotiation with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. If the ships did not turn back, he would order an attack. For the next thirteen days, the world teetered on the brink of an unknowable nuclear engagement.

Walker waited nervously as the nation’s leaders met in frantic all-night sessions. He was overwhelmed by the security needs at the museum, directing his staff to prepare to move the institution’s most important pieces into a specially contructed windowless bunker known as “Vault X” should the need arise. In the event the unthinkable occurred, America’s most important artistic treasures would endure.

Walker and his staff remained glued to radio and television news reports during the unfolding crisis. The museum remained open, but it was by no means business as usual. Like many Americans, Walker was deeply moved as he watched television reports showing Jackie as she remained in the White House. The President “wanted her and the children to be there when he was making these awful decisions,” recalled family confidante and British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore. Jackie did her best to keep up a sense of normality on the home front and not add to her husband’s concerns, even though John Jr. was sick with a fever.

B-52 bombers were kept aloft in continuous shifts with instructions to bomb specific targets if the order was given. Civil Defense agencies across the country swung into action, with officials admitting that there was no possibility of surviving a direct nuclear hit and only some possibility of escaping radioactive fallout in adjacent areas. Citizens made confused evacuation plans and stormed markets for bomb shelter supplies.

On October 25, with the crisis still dire, Jackie stuck to her prepared social schedule, including a morning visit with the Maharajah of Jaipur and his wife. In the afternoon, Scottish aristocrat Robin Douglas-Home was an invited guest who kept Jackie company as she was being filmed by NBC for a television program on the planned National Cultural Center, which would later be renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. After the filming, Caroline showed up carrying a large hollowed-out pumpkin and asked Douglas-Home to carve a Halloween face on it.

Meanwhile, the world waited in suspense and terror over the prospect of a nuclear conflagration. In tense top-level negotiations, Kennedy agreed to pull U.S. missiles out of Turkey if the Soviets would stand down in Cuba.

On Sunday, October 28, Kruschchev broadcast a message to Kennedy on Radio Moscow, thanking Kennedy for his “sense of proportion” and promising to turn the cargo ships around and dismantle Cuban missile launching sites. Kennedy’s steady, statesmanlike performance under extreme pressure is widely regarded as one of the high-water marks of his presidency yet remains the subject of protracted scrutiny and fierce debate.

At the same time, back in Paris, Madame Madeleine Hours was conducting numerous scientific tests to determine how best to protect the Mona Lisa. Plans for the picture’s transport provided the laboratory expert with a complex set of problems. She started with a study of the current exhibition conditions in the Louvre and determined that if a similar temperature and humidity level could be maintained in Washington, the painting might successfully make the trip. The most difficult matter would be planning the best method of transportation with the best possible conditions. “We had to create a new type of packing case,” she noted in her report, “which could minimize as far as possible any vibration which would render fragile the preparatory layer of paint.” The case also had to be designed so that the painting would never come into contact with another surface.

To increase security, Hours decided that the case had to be small enough to easily be carried by two men, but impossible to be carried by only one. Moreover, the travelling apparatus had to be unsinkable in the event the painting had to be thrown overboard into the sea.

A firm specializing in the construction of packing cases manufactured a prototype that pleased her. According to museum records, the container, which was double-wrapped, was made of a sandwich of aluminium panels with a core of expanded polyvinyl chloride (also known as Klegecell). The picture was held inside with a core of polyvinyl chloride plates. Measuring four feet three inches high and three feet three inches wide, the container without the painting weighed 160 pounds.

“I knew that if the liner France were to catch fire or to sink,” Madame Hours added, the packing case would have to be tossed over the side. “So I had the French flag painted on it, to show that it was French property.” Hours worried that without the markings, maritime law concerning the salvage rights of property retrieved outside territorial waters might allow the painting to be wrenched from the possession of France.

Hours and her team carefully tested the experimental case with a real work of art. “With a go-ahead from the Painting Department, we placed inside the packing case a painting on wood dating from the sixteenth century and a thermo-hygrometer. Once the case had been shut it was subjected to variations in temperatures from -5°C (23°F) on the balcony of the entry of the Laboratory and 25°C (77°F) next to our radiators.”

To her surprise, the thermo-hygrometer showed no variations in humidity and extremely minor differences in temperature. The results were positive for the picture, and Hours observed neither “condensation nor any foxing of the varnish.”

The tests of her “guinea pig” were satisfactory, and Hours came to the conclusion that the Mona Lisa could attempt the journey in relative security. Of course she could not guarantee how the painting would fare under real-life conditions, and she continued to voice her concerns to Minister Malraux and other museum officials. With the winter approaching, the atmospheric conditions of its temporary home in Washington were still to be determined.

Minister Malraux asked Monsieur J. Jaujard to visit Washington and examine conditions at the National Gallery. (Jaujard had successfully organized the evacuation of the Louvre just prior to World War II, and now served as General Director of Arts and Letters.) At the last minute a decision was made that Madame Hours would accompany Jaujard in order to make a precise assessment of all of the technical conditions.

The two art officials arrived in Washington on November 28. “We hardly had time to put our suitcases down,” she recalled, before the team’s scientific experiments were coordinated. The duo first visited the French Embassy at 2221 Kalorama Road to meet with Ambassador Alphand to discuss plans for the exhibition. “I was most concerned with finding the ideal placing for the painting,” Hours recalled, which would enable the public to move freely but still provide the utmost security.

In early meetings with John Walker and his staff at the National Gallery, Madame Hours provided a laundry list of concerns and security measures she wanted put in place. She insisted on a bank vault with an independent air-conditioning system, ready at all times, in case of “any blackout, strike or any other difficulty.”

Walker stared at her in disbelief. He had managed the exhibition of many master works during his long career, and even the display of the ancient treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamen loaned from the Cairo Museum didn’t require such conditions. Walker had placed the artifacts in a series of glass cases in the museum’s rotunda and, despite the crowds, the ancient objects at the conclusion of the exhibition were in perfect shape.

He threw up his arms when he heard Madame Hours’s demand that in the case of a labor strike or loss of electricity, she would need to be connected to an emergency hospital or the Pentagon. By the end of the afternoon, she had succeeded in so completely terrifying Walker with her extensive details about the painting’s delicate condition that he felt deeply uneasy. She further explained that the entire museum staff at the Louvre was horrified over the idea and were angry at Minister Malraux for forcing them to send so fragile a picture across the Atlantic.

She also confided to Walker that a few years earlier, when “the maniac” had attacked the picture, she had taken it to her laboratory office to see whether any damage had been done. And, indeed, because of the change in relative humidity, within just a few hours the panel had curved so badly it nearly broke.

Walker wondered if she was exaggerating the facts to alarm him, but his stomach pains worsened when Hours made him look at the X-rays she had brought with her from Paris. When held up to the light, the grainy black and white sheets clearly showed there was “an incipient split in the panel” that, if extended, would run “right through the celebrated smile.”

“After listening to her,” Walker wrote in his memoir, “my horror far exceeded that of the officials of the Louvre.” Despite his outwardly cool demeanor, over the years Walker had suffered from chronic anxiety and endured frequent migraine headaches as well as neck and back aches. His medical problems, he explained later, were the direct result of the enormous pressures attached to running a major art institution. The added responsibility of safeguarding the Mona Lisa in addition to his normal duties as director of the National Gallery could only raise his blood pressure and exacerbate his condition.

Despite his high anxiety, Walker tried to keep his French visitor happy while keeping Jackie fully informed. On November 29, he spent a few quiet moments with her following the White House tea for her Fine Arts Committee, and they spoke again about the exhibition in a telephone call placed the following day. To help ease the tension, Jackie sent Walker one of her breezy personal notes laced with humor. She had developed a keen understanding of the power of interpersonal relationships and how best to maneuver them to her full advantage. As scholar Elizabeth J. Natalle observed, Jackie utilized rhetorical strategies to achieve her personal goals for the arts and culture, and one of these was her widespread use of handwritten letters and notes. Her humorous birthday card, written to Walker on November 29, referenced understandings between the two of them and was a perfect example of the power of her technique.

Dear Mr. Walker,

I forgot your birthday this year—and so to make up for that—I am sending you under separate cover—TWO Cézannes—sorry it couldn’t be more,

Affectionately,
Jackie

Walker laughed out loud when he read the note. His birthday, as she well knew, was December 24. Unlike previous leisure-filled celebrations, however, this Christmas Eve would be consumed with the task of ensuring the safety and security of Jackie’s enigmatic visitor from Paris. He well might have preferred two Cézannes.