Harry Truman excelled at piano lessons, and at a young age, he memorized numerous sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart. Years later, Truman jokingly said, “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. … And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
One of many telling quotes in Matthew Algeo’s breezy new history, When Harry Met Pablo: Truman, Picasso, and the Cold War Politics of Modern Art, the words suggest Truman’s down-to-earthiness and lack of polish. They also bring to mind Truman’s esteem for classical art and by extension, his disdain for modernism, the backstory of Algeo’s latest.
Algeo has published several books like this one. Part travelogue, part history, he follows the footsteps of a VIP and visits the same towns and the same attractions as his subject. In his 2009 book, Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, for example, Algeo records the 2,500-mile drive that the Trumans took in their Chrysler in 1953 after he left office.
In the new book, Algeo covers Truman’s life and opinions, beginning with his Missouri childhood and ending with Truman’s visit to Europe and his meeting with Pablo Picasso. Algeo includes a quick look at midcentury America and the Cold War as well as an overview of modern art in America, beginning with Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer who made taking pictures into an art. Stieglitz opened a gallery for artistic photographs in New York and included works of modernistic art. He introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. and first brought Picasso and his art to the United States in 1911. He was married to painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
Algeo delves into the contention between those promoting modern art and those discrediting it. Critics called Picasso’s Standing Female Nude a glorified fire escape. They also panned New York’s 1913 Armory Show, which inspired artists as well as free verse poets like William Carlos Williams. One of its best-known pieces, Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp, was parodied as “The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway).”
The American Artists Professional League and other conservative artists spurned modern art and attempted to keep it out of museums, while the modernists fought back with programs like the Gallery on Wheels, which brought modern art to military hospitals until government funding was canceled. The Advancing American Art movement promoted U.S. modern art in the Americas and Europe. But funding was terminated because some in Congress considered modern art ugly, saying it did not portray American scenes in a positive light and therefore had a communist connection.
Look magazine published an article with the headline, “Your Money Bought These Paintings,” that included Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Circus Girl Resting. The Chicago Tribune described it as a “beefy female in a state of undress” with leering eyes. The Washington Post called it “the product of an Easter Islander after a bad night.” According to Truman, Circus Girl Resting was created by an artist who stood off from the portrait and threw paint at it. “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot,” he said.
Soon after the Look story came out, Truman purchased The Peacemakers for the White House. This 1868 realistic portrait by George P.A. Healy depicted Abraham Lincoln in a strategy session with advisers, suggesting, according to Algeo, that Truman was unable to appreciate the more cultured modernists.
Truman was a farmer. He had been rejected from West Point because of poor eyesight and had endured a string of business failures. After he joined Missouri’s Democratic Party, he rose in power, becoming a judge and a senator, then vice president. But he felt anxious when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, and he inherited issues of U.S. domestic and foreign policy including the closing chapters of World War II.
Yet his years in office from 1945 to 1953 were successful. He ended World War II and established a strong foreign policy, halting communism in Turkey and Greece, initiating the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Berlin Airlift. He was also a strong leader in his domestic policies. He desegregated the armed forces, established the CIA and the Defense Department, committed U.S. forces to Korea, and contained the war.
Algeo paints Truman’s accomplishments with broad strokes. If one wants a more detailed account of the former president, Algeo recommends the 1,120-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman by historian David McCullough. But Algeo finds it hard to believe that McCullough had nothing to say about the time when Harry and Bess Truman along with their friends, Sam and Dorothy Rosenman, spent the day with Pablo Picasso and his young paramour. As he notes, “none of Picasso’s or Truman’s many biographies have discussed the meetings at any length … McCullough’s magisterial and megasized Truman doesn’t mention it at all.”
Algeo provides interesting (though sometimes extraneous) glimpses into Truman’s itinerary. There’s a discursive recounting of Truman’s visit to the Matisse Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France, for example, which although it could be a book in itself, never quite feels in place here. Algeo also provides an overly long discussion of cruise ships in the late 1950s because the Trumans sailed to Europe by way of the cruise ship Independence since Bess was afraid of airplane travel.
Finally, on June 11, 1958, the retired U.S. president and an aging Spanish artist shook hands beside the doorway of Poterie Madoura, the ceramic studio in France where Picasso created his ceramics, one of which he gave to Truman. Picasso met the Truman party even though he disliked company. He also disliked Truman’s disparaging remarks about modern art. (One of these remarks had come at MoMA, whose founding director, Alfred Barr, arranged the Truman-Picasso meeting.)
The two men were both in their 70s but couldn’t be more different, Algeo writes. Picasso was the preeminent modern artist of the 20th century. Truman saw modern art as “the vaporings (sic) of half-baked lazy people.” One painted Guernica, acclaimed for its profundity as an anti-war statement. The other used the atomic bomb on Japan. One was a sophisticated and highly respected arbiter of taste. The other, though he had occupied the White House, could be an uncouth bumpkin.
Ultimately, Picasso had no love for Truman, and the feeling was mutual. Truman saw modern artists as charlatans and their art as fraudulent. He called it “ham and eggs” art, saying, “I dislike Picasso and all the moderns — they are lousy. Any kid could take an egg and a piece of ham and make more understandable pictures,” and as Algeo portrays him in this congenial history, Truman, although he kept the souvenir from Picasso, never did change his mind about the quality of his art.
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Diane Scharper is a poet and critic. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher Institute.
