In the mid-1970s I came to know an academic named J. Leroy Davidson (1908-1980), a professor who had been the chairman of the Art Department at UCLA and who after retiring spent a little time in Portland. Mr. Davidson and his wife Martha were experts on the art of Asia, and of India in particular, and had a splendid collection of Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese scrolls, sculptures, and artifacts. They willingly talked about their collection and where the pieces came from. And they had some interesting pieces: one Tibetan statue dated back to the 13th century.
Mr. Davidson, who was related to me in a convoluted way,never talked about his past, and I didn't think to ask. Only recently did I discover his involvement in a small bit of Americana that involved Mr. Davidson, the State Department, a $50 Georgia O'Keeffe painting, and President Truman moonlighting as an art critic.
After World War II the State Department decided to sponsor a traveling art show. They determined to gather a collection of American works of art and send them on tour through South America and Europe to build cultural goodwill. In 1946 the Department engaged Leroy Davidson, an energetic man in his late 30s who had been an assistant director of the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, to select and gather two collections of American art.
For the first collection, Mr. Davidson persuaded American corporations with art collections to lend some of their significant pieces to the State Department. These were mainly pieces that, by American standards, would be considered old masters: pieces done by artists, often deceased, with established reputations. Most of their names are recognizable today.
Mr. Davidson wanted the second collection to be more interesting. He persuaded the State Department to let him buy, rather than borrow or rent, the artworks for the second show, and the government gave him about $50,000 toward the task. These are in the dollars of 1946; think about $500,000 or so in today's dollars.
And Mr. Davidson bought art, descending on Gallery Row in Manhattan's 57th Street with the State Department's checkbook. He ultimately bought 117 pieces of modern American art, organized them, and gave the show a title with two meanings: "Advancing American Art."
The names of most of the artists in this show mean nothing today to anyone except the art expert or the serious collector, but the show did include works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and John Marin, all still important names in the history of art. Most of the works were from the Social Realism school, depictions of the grittier side of American life made in the 1930s and 1940s. (Keep in mind that the artists of this period had the Great Depression and the War to use as raw material.) Artists such as Gregorio Prestopino, Pietro Lazzari, Philip Evergood, Douglas Brown, Reginald Marsh, and William Gropper, all more significant then than they are today, were represented in the show, mainly with pictures of city scenes. These were not urbanely cool "Metropolis"-like pictures of American progress and modernization, but of things like gas stations and subway riders. And the show headed for the ruined capitals of Europe.
While the show was in Paris, the American Artists Professional League complained to Congress that "Advancing American Art" didn't represent American art and were full of European radicalism. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee complained to the Secretary of State, and the show (which had made it to Prague but not to its other scheduled stops) was cut short and brought home. Harry Truman himself ridiculed the show, and said of one of the paintings, "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot."
This left the Secretary of State, George Marshall, with a problem. Who would rid him of these troublesome paintings? (He apparently rejected the idea of using them to start a gallery in the State Department.) After some thought, the department offered the paintings for sale by written bid. Private persons who won an item had to pay the bid amount, but qualifying colleges were given the right to buy works at 5% of their fair value, if their bids were accepted. That is, if a school made the high bid of (say) $1000 for a work, the school would have to pay only $50,which is what one lucky school paid for the Georgia O'Keeffe work. The sale wasn't advertised, and attracted very few bidders -- some colleges, and a few individuals who found out about the sale by chance or from knowing someone involved with the exhibition.
The collection was dispersed. Oklahoma University and Auburn University each got about a third of the works, and an assortment of institutions and individuals got the rest. Altogether the State Department received about $5000 for the works that it had paid $50,000 to acquire only two years earlier. Leroy Davidson left the State Department and entered the academic world, becoming a professor at a prominent Southern college, where he built his expertise and reputation on the art of India.
I'm sorry now that I didn't know to ask Mr. Davidson about this interesting episode in his life. But now I think I know -- I certainly suspect -- how Mr. Davidson's Laquedem cousin, who didn't have spare money to buy art with, came to own works by Gregorio Prestopino, Pietro Lazzari, Philip Evergood, Douglas Brown, and Reginald Marsh. William Gropper's painting escaped the cousin's net.
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