Art: An Original Ike

For the size of the crowds, the public library in Hutchinson, Kans. might have had the Mona Lisa on exhibit last week. “They want to keep looking,” said the librarian happily. “We have to shoo them out.” The big attraction at the library’s annual all-Kansas art show: one of the first U.S. exhibits of an avid Sunday painter and onetime Kansas boy. His name: Dwight D. Eisenhower. On opening day, 1,500 people flooded the library’s tiny gallery; by week’s end, 3,500 more had come to see how Ike paints.

Ike sent only a single picture. When Kansas Republicans asked for a sample, he chose the one he liked best: a solid architectural study of St. James’s Chapel at Warwick, England, based on an old lithograph. Ike painted it with an engineer’s careful eye to the details of masonry and buttressing. Ike’s colors were sober browns, reds, blues. In the distance, he had sketched in four black-robed clerics.

The 86 other artists in the show, mostly professionals, were glad to have Ike aboard. But as an artist, they thought, Ike still had a lot to learn. Said one: “It is more draftsmanship than art. The perspective in form is fair. The color is not so good, and—most disappointing—there is no luminosity in the painting. But there is a lot of method, and for a Sunday painter Eisenhower is very serious.”