7
THE QUEENLY VOYAGE
When the SS France departed Le Havre, Walker was nervously concluding a weeklong trial in conditioning the air of the National Gallery to the precise range of humidity and temperature of that found in the Louvre. Although the Louvre was not air-conditioned, its huge open spaces assured little change in the temperature and humidity. This relatively dry environment was the condition that the Mona Lisa was accustomed to and any slight change might bring disaster.
Under Walker’s specific directions, engineers at the National Gallery delicately adjusted the controls of the ventilation system so that the atmosphere of the Mona Lisa’s temporary home simulated the air she had “breathed” in Paris. Every few hours engineers at the Gallery checked the readings of the hygrothermograph (a self-contained instrument that measures and records ambient temperature and relative humidity), which provided atmospheric data on the museum’s interior conditions.
In anticipation of the painting’s arrival, Walker had instructed workers to temporarily move some of the Gallery’s prized sculptures, including a sixteenth century bronze, Bacchus and a Faun, to make room for the Mona Lisa. Walker meticulously designed the setting in which the painting would be displayed—against a background of burgundy velvet and mounted on a special wall erected along the Gallery’s West Corridor west of the Great Rotunda. The new partition would close off the view of the rest of the west wing. Visitors would first glimpse the portrait as they walked down the long, marble corridor. All of the other artworks would be removed, and no other paintings would be visible.
Walker selected a deeply hued wine velvet for the dramatic baffle to hang behind the painting, and he decided to add a new fireproof material to the hundreds of yards of drapery affectionately nicknamed “Mona’s Kimono” by the museum staff. He hired the best drapery installers in the business, who hung a stupendous three-part sweeping curtain from the ceiling.
As the arrival of the painting drew near, Walker found himself running from one urgent problem to the next. A soothing telephone call from Jackie helped calm his nerves, but Walker continued to suffer from severe migraine headaches and sleeplessness. He tried to keep his anxiety under wraps, but the depth of his torment was obvious to those who knew him best.
On the morning of December 17, the French Embassy announced that, following the picture’s exhibition in Washington at the National Gallery, the Mona Lisa would be placed on display at the Metropolitan Museum from February 7 until March 4. French officials had apparently deemed the newly installed air-conditioning system and resulting “climatisation” at the Metropolitan Museum satisfactory. The New York Times immediately printed a feature announcing the forthcoming exhibition, which triggered world-wide interest.
The responsibility of a second exhibition was surely the last thing Walker wanted, but it was exactly what he got. Forced to leave behind his ongoing preparations at the National Gallery, he traveled to New York for meetings with Metropolitan Museum of Art Director James J. Rorimer to coordinate the complex arrangements. No records exist documenting the conversations between the two renowned museum authorities, but they were undoubtedly filled with tension. It was widely known that Walker intensely disliked Rorimer and, on occasion, seriously questioned his judgment.
While in New York, Walker was surprised to receive a telephone call from Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary. The topic of conversation, however, did not involve the Mona Lisa. When President Kennedy came on the line, he told Walker that several friends had mentioned to him that there was a watercolor drawing by Constantin Guys at Wildenstein & Company, a major art gallery in New York City, that they thought Mrs. Kennedy would like as a Christmas present. The President asked Walker to examine the drawing and tell him what he thought. Kennedy also asked him to keep it a secret.
Walker immediately ventured to Wildenstein’s, saw the drawing, and decided that it was not of outstanding quality, but he arranged to bring it back to Washington along with several better works by the same artist. When Walker showed them to the President, he recalled, “At a glance, he recognized that the drawing he had been told about was inferior.” The President, however, didn’t like any of the others.
Kennedy asked whether Walker could arrange for someone from the gallery to meet him at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and bring some additional selections. Walker contacted Wildenstein & Company and, on the following morning, Daniel Wildenstein visited the Carlyle Hotel. The President looked at a number of pictures that Wildenstein thought might be a suitable gift for Mrs. Kennedy. Following the President’s return to Washington, he asked Walker to come to the White House to look at what he had selected. Walker later recalled that: “He was very diffident about his taste and said that he thought I would probably think he had made a foolish choice. I was surprised and pleased when he showed me an exquisite small painting by Maurice Prendergast which he had chosen himself.
“It is one of the best works by Prendergast I have seen, and it is a picture I would be only too delighted to include in the collection of the National Gallery of Art.”
Walker anticipated that Jackie would fall in love with the Prendergast handpicked by her husband. It was a role Walker relished—museum curator advising and guiding an eager pupil. Walker could hardly wait for Jackie to open it on Christmas morning.
Ernest R. Feidler, the Gallery’s administrator, had started to work out the specific details for the Mona Lisa’s convoy once it arrived safely in New York, and it was decided that the Gallery’s longtime driver, Hillary Brown, would drive the Gallery’s panel truck with the masterpiece. There would be seven cars in the motorcade in addition to the Gallery van, including two passenger cars, one station wagon, one security vehicle, and two cars for the press (one with Edward Folliard and Jean White of the Post, and the other with three French reporters and one writer from Life magazine).
Feidler notified the commissioners and superintendents of each police force within Mona Lisa’s route from New York to Washington in order to alert them to the sensitive situation. Feidler wrote Commissioner Michael J. Murphy of the New York City Police Department:
On December 19, 1962, a motor convoy carrying an extremely valuable work of art having implications of international political amity will move from New York to Washington.
We would like to have an escort for this convoy by the various jurisdictions through which it will pass. We should be grateful if you could provide such service from the French Line Pier, North River, to the Lincoln Tunnel.
The Mona Lisa would pass through the jurisdictions of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. To ensure her safe passage, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel would need to be closed. All traffic would have to be rerouted and blocked from entering the normally bustling Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
Back in Washington inside the director’s office, Walker fretted over the mushrooming VIP guest list for the exhibition’s opening night. When he read Jackie’s near-final list for the Embassy dinner preceding the unveiling ceremony, he noticed that an important collector had not been invited. Always attuned to moments when a potential donor could be coddled, Walker acted to correct the mistake by immediately contacting Nicole Alphand.
“Everything seems to be progressing well,” he told her. “You can imagine my eagerness and excitement. I don’t know whether your dinner party is too large, but if you find you have room for Bobby Lehman it might be a good idea to invite him. He gave an interview to the press in support of the loan, and as you know, he lent all his collection to Paris several years ago.” A quick fix was made to Nicole’s guest list. (Six years later, the Robert Lehman Collection, considered “one of the most extraordinary private art collections ever assembled,” would be donated to the Metropolitan Museum following the collector’s death.)
Lloyd D. Hayes, the Gallery’s assistant administrator, was suffering from his own Mona Lisa problems. Hayes was responsible for installing a hygrothermograph recorder in Vault X in order to measure the room’s temperature and humidity. The bomb shelter-like room with reinforced steel doors looked like a large prison cell with a catwalk and glaring lights. As the vault was not normally air-conditioned, Hayes activated the vault’s two special air-conditioning units so that proper readings could be made once the space cooled. To his knowledge, the vault had never been air-conditioned in the Gallery’s history, and he could not guarantee what would happen.
In conducting experiments inside the West Hall to get the temperature and humidity levels as demanded by French officials, Hayes found he was getting readings in other galleries that exceeded acceptable limits. In nervous conversations with chief curator Perry B. Cott and restorer Francis Sullivan, they determined that the humidity levels in Gallery 8 were too high and posed a serious threat to the other paintings.
After frantic debate, Hayes tried raising the humidity levels in the West Hall through the use of one or more room-type humidifiers. The machines, which could be hidden near the temporary partition so that they were not visible, were supposed to alleviate the problem, making the temperature readings in the nearby galleries safe for the museum’s regular collection and at the same time approximating the conditions found in the Louvre. According to Madame Hours, at the moment of Mona Lisa’s departure the temperature was 17°C, and the humidity was 45 percent. It remained to be seen whether Hayes could replicate these conditions. Madame Hours was expected to arrive in Washington on December 28 to measure the museum’s atmospheric conditions and inform French officials of her findings. “I hope all will go well,” she wrote John Walker from Paris.
As the celebrated lady’s voyage aboard the SS
France continued, Edward Folliard’s imaginary encounters expanded. In his second installment for the
Post, he imagined that Lisa had escaped from her crate and stood leaning against the starboard wall as she told the reporter her life story. When she was 24 years old, she suffered the loss of her only child. A year later her husband, a merchant named Giocondo, commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint her portrait.
“What’s new?” Lisa asked the reporter.
Folliard hesitated but decided to tell her about a story that recently appeared in a newspaper saying that Leonardo’s model for the Mona Lisa was not a young woman but a young man.
“Oh là là,” exclaimed Lisa. “That, as you have taught me to say, is one for the birds. And you, Edouard, do you believe it?”
“Heavens above, no,” he replied. “I think you are the most utterly feminine creature I have ever known—that is, except for some ladies at my home and some associated with the Washington Post and the White House.”
“That is nice, but I perceive, cher ami, that you are très discret.”
On the next evening of the voyage, Edward Folliard dreamed that he sleepwalked into Mona Lisa’s luxurious cabin. This interlude, he told his readers, had been brought on by the evening’s rich dinner entrée, “Quartier d’ Agneau de Grave Roti Périgourdine,” which when he was a boy was known as “rack of lamb.” The mysterious encounter with the inscrutable lady went something like this:
“Edouard,” Lisa told him, “tell me about this National Gallery of Art in Washington where they are taking me. It is very large, I suppose?”
“No not nearly as large as your home in the Louvre. But it is very beautiful, especially in the rain, when its Tennessee marble turns pink. There is a very nice story behind the Gallery.”
“Oh tell me about it, please.”
“Well, back in the 1880s, two young Americans who were determined to become giants in the industrial and financial world made a grand tour of Europe. They were Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon.
“In their travels they visited the galleries in London, Rome, Florence and Paris. They developed an interest in art that became a passion with them. You may have had something to do with this, Lisa, because it is almost certain that they saw you.”
“You think so? How nice.”
“In time both Frick and Mellon acquired great collections of their own. But they disposed of them in different ways.
“Frick provided in his will that his Fifth Avenue mansion in New York be converted into a museum for the public and that it house his collection of masterpieces. It is now called the Frick Gallery and always will be, I suppose.
“Mellon, who was known as the Pittsburgh Croesus and who was Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover—well he had a different idea. He decided to establish a gallery in Washington. He gave $15 million for its construction along with his collection valued at $50 million.
“The big difference was this Mellon wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt offering the gallery and his collection to the nation—that is to all the people. He asked that it be called the National Gallery of Art, and was very emphatic in saying that it should not be called the Mellon Gallery.
“His hope was that owners of other great collections would add theirs to his. He could hardly expect them to do so if it were called the Mellon Gallery. Why should they thus add luster to his name?
“Now Lisa, we come to the best part. What Mellon hoped for came true. Other great collections have been turned over to the Gallery, those of Samuel H. Kress and Rush H. Kress, Joseph E. Widener, Chester Dale and many others.
“Well that’s the story, Lisa.”
“Monsieur Mellon,” she said, “was very generous and very magnanimous, eh?”
“Yes, but I think he is more appreciated now than when he was alive.” Folliard’s Lisa sighed and remarked that life is often like that. Then she giggled. She said she was wondering what her husband of 450 years ago, Francesco del Giocondo would think if he knew what was happening to his Mona Lisa now.
The hours ticked by in rapid succession, and only minutes before he was to leave for New York to be present when the SS France docked at New York Harbor, Walker received gut-wrenching news: Longtime Gallery benefactor Chester Dale had died.
The New Yorker once wrote that Dale was the only man in the world who had had his portrait painted, seriatim, by the likes of Jean Lurçat, Diego Rivera, and Salvador Dali. He had displayed his works of art with total “gusto,” amassing a collection of historic size and value.
“As long as Chester was alive, the Chester Dale collection was never committed to any institution,” Walker recalled. “But as hope springs eternal in museum breasts, there were several directors who felt at one time or another that they were destined to be the ‘Proud Possessors.’ They too thought, as did Chester himself occasionally, that ‘permanent loan’ meant ‘irrevocable gift.’”
The great collector who had tormented Walker for so many years was gone. Walker could hardly believe it. Outwardly aggressive and hard-hitting, CHESTERDALE was inwardly sensitive and emotional. “When I think of him I have so many blocks I need a psychiatrist,” Walker said.
For the moment, the delicate issues of what would become of Dale’s great collection, so coveted by the Gallery, were put on hold, and Walker walled away his emotions for the passing of his difficult friend. The care of the Mona Lisa required his full attention now.