The Critic's Choice

From the first, the President and the portraitist hit it off together like a pair of cowpokes. Both, after all, were men of the Southwest, both ranchers, both devoted to the austere horizons of the high desert.

They had met before, but first got to know each other at close range in late 1964, when Peter Hurd and his wife Henriette, sister of Artist Andrew Wyeth, were jointly commissioned to execute Lyndon Johnson's portrait as the Man of the Year for TIME'S Jan. 1, 1965 cover. During a two-hour session, the President talked brilliantly, flitting from subject to subject, while the Kurds, fascinated, tried to concentrate on sketching him. Later Johnson took the Hurds through the White House's private quarters, proudly pointed out a Hurd landscape hung on the wall opposite the presidential bed. To Johnson's eye, it captured perfectly the look of Texas ranch country.

"Mr. President," said Hurd, "that's New Mexico."

"Well," replied Johnson, a bit crestfallen, "it looks like Texas to me."

Promise to Bird. Johnson professed not to like Hurd's TIME portrait of him, complaining that one shoulder seemed elongated and that he had a "squinty" look. However, he appeared to be mollified by the artist's explanation that the narrowed eyes were characteristic of men who rode in the Southwest sun all their days. Rumors spread that Peter Hurd would be selected to do the President's official portrait, but the first Hurd knew about it was when he went to the White House in May 1965 and was introduced by Johnson to South Korean President Chung Hee Park. "I want you to meet my friend Peter Hurd," said L.B.J. "He is going to do my portrait." Shortly afterward, Hurd, now 62, received a letter from the White House Historical Association officially awarding him the assignment--at $6,000, half his usual fee.

Johnson's first sitting was a year and a half ago at Camp David outside Washington. The President showed up exhausted. "That massive head of his fell forward on his chest, he was so tired," recalls Hurd. Johnson's head nodded several times, and Hurd pitied him. "This is terrible," he said. "I wish you'd go have a siesta." "No," insisted Johnson. "I promised Bird that I would give you half an hour and I will do it." His head fell forward again, and at the end of exactly 30 minutes Hurd said compassionately: "That's all, Mr. President."

400 Hours of Labor. Hurd had only one other session with Johnson, this time at the Texas ranch while the President was conferring in the dining room with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, whom he had just named Ambassador to the United Nations. For 40 frustrating minutes Hurd watched L.B.J. get up from his chair, sit down, get up, pace the floor, tug at his ear, rub his nose, wipe his brow--in short, do everything but sit for his portrait.

Realizing he could never get from the President the 25 to 30 hours he usually demands of a subject, Hurd decided to work from eight photographs. For verisimilitude, he persuaded a friend, J.O. ("Bud") Payne, who looks like Johnson and has hands like his, to make the 140-mile round trip to the Hurd ranch near San Patricio, N. Mex., in order to pose for him. Hurd spent about 400 hours on the picture, five times longer than his usual total labor. The result was. if anything, flattering. Done in egg tempera and subdued in tone, it shows the President in three-quarter profile gazing soberly into the distance and clutching a book. In the background is the floodlit Capitol dome.

Forgotten Majesty. In April, just before the portrait was finished, Hurd wanted Johnson to have a preview. He and his wife were invited to the ranch, and he shipped the painting ahead by rail express, cautioning that the President should wait to look at it until he could display it in the proper setting and light. "When we arrived, it was plain that the picture had been openly discussed," says Hurd. "It had been taken out of its crate and propped up leaning back under a bank of cold fluorescent lights. It looked like death warmed over. We marched in single file as if we were about to review the remains. There was a deathly silence. I guess his excellency fired the first shot. He said, That's the ugliest thing I ever saw.'

"I sizzled. I guess that for the moment majesty was forgotten." Hurd asked: "Just what do you like, Mr. President?"

"I'll show you what," replied Johnson. Striding over to a desk drawer, he pulled out a portrait of himself by Illustrator Norman Rockwell. Purred Hurd: "I wish I could copy a photograph like that." Johnson insisted it was not a copy, that he had posed 20 to 30 minutes for it. "Nonsense," snorted Hurd. "He couldn't have painted that in one half-hour with 19 more hands."

The atmosphere was frigid. Nobody spoke. Johnson jingled some change in his pocket, staring at Kurd's portrait. Finally the artist snapped to his wife: "Let's get out of here, Henriette." The Hurds flew back to their ranch. A few weeks later, a distraught Mrs. Johnson called them there and confessed that she hoped never to go through such an ordeal again if she "lived to be a thousand." "The only thing that didn't go wrong that day," she lamented, "was that the government of Viet Nam didn't fall." Mrs. Johnson said that the President thought the Capitol background was too bright and asked Hurd to make it a "little more misty." He refused.

"Very Damn Rude." The portrait arrived back at the Hurd ranch--c.o.d. Nevertheless, Mrs. Johnson persuaded Hurd to try a smaller portrait, 30 in. by 36 in., based on the President's favorite photograph. The picture was taking shape when, to Hurd's dismay, he discovered that "that photograph was in every little bureaucrat's office in America--including the post office in San Patricio. I couldn't plainly copy such a picture. I lost interest." However, he finished the large portrait and shipped it off to Washington. Several months later he got a letter from the White House Historical Association informing him that the portrait would not be the President's official one--because, it was finally explained last week, at 40 in. by 48 in., it was too big. A $6,000 check for the painting soon followed. Hurd sent it back.

The President, says Hurd, "was very damn rude. I worked my tail off. He hasn't the least concept of how an artist works." Yet he insists that he really harbors no ill will and still likes L.B.J. "He's a dynamic visionary. I'm surrounded by Johnson haters, but I'm not one of them."

The President, in public at least, maintained a stoic silence. Unlike Winston Churchill, who so hated his 80th birthday portrait by Graham Sutherland that he kept the original hidden until his death, Johnson cannot conceal the "ugliest thing" he ever saw. Hurd is putting the painting on public display this week in the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts, and--thanks to its recent publicity--it eventually will be seen across the country. Meanwhile, the current wisecrack in Washington is that artists should be seen around the White House--but not Hurd.

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