I can’t remember the last time a non-fiction book charmed and moved me as much as “Mona Lisa in Camelot” (DaCapo Press), Margaret Leslie Davis’s wonderful new book about the brief visit of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece to the United States in the winter of 1963.
Davis shows how First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy played a key role in getting the French government (and the Louvre) to lend the Mona Lisa to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan.
The first art museum “super show,” the brief exhibition resulted in close to 2,000,000 visitors filing past the little painting and raised the profile of museums — and art — in this country at a time when gallery gazing was still considered something of an elitist hobby.
“The painting’s successful debut awakened a passion for culture that had been dormant in the national psyche during the provincial postwar years, and the sensational exhibit ignited a national love affair with the arts,” Davis writes in her introduction.
Readers who are baby boomers — or older — will find the slim volume to be a deeply nostalgic journey back to the “Camelot” era of Jack and Jackie Kennedy when the promise of a new era in politics and culture galvanized much of the country (and the world).
Jackie Kennedy believed that the arts were just as important as any other aspect of American society.
“She shared with President Kennedy the belief that art was a great unifying and humanizing experience. To her mind, art was not a distraction in the life of the nation, but rather a testament to its very quality of civilization,” the author points out.
The Mona Lisa visit came as a result of Jackie Kennedy’s passion for French art and culture. When she and the president visited France in the late spring of 1961, Jackie reached out to a writer she had idolized for years — Andre Malraux — who had become his country’s minister of culture.
Malraux and Kennedy formed an immediate friendship — solidified after he visited Washington, D.C. in 1962 — and when she suggested the Mona Lisa be lent to her beloved National Gallery, Malraux put the wheels in motion for a journey that at first seemed impossible.
The Louvre and its staff opposed the idea, fearing the delicate painting would be damaged. Jackie’s friend — National Gallery Director John Walker — also secretly hoped the idea would be rejected because he was terrified of the responsibility of guarding the painting’s safety while it was in this country.
But the charm and determination of Jackie Kennedy — and the power of her important ally at the Washington Post, political reporter Edward Folliard — cinched the deal.
“Mona Lisa in Camelot” shows us how the painting was sent over in the first class cabin of the S.S. France — the French wouldn’t risk having the painting damaged in a plane crash — and was then guarded by the Secret Service the whole time it was in the U.S.
Walker’s anxiety escalated when the French decided that the Mona Lisa should spend a month on view in New York City, too, and the National Gallery Director had his duties of guarding the painting expanded.
Davis hooks the reader on the first page and tells the story with the flair and page-turning momentum of a thriller writer.
The author was allowed access to Jackie’s papers and we get a whole new insight into her humor and powers of persuasion as we read the First Lady’s correspondence with Malraux and Walker.
Jackie’s dreams of an American minister of culture were crushed along with so much else when her husband was murdered nine months after the Mona Lisa returned to France, but she set the stage for the public arts explosion of the late 1960s and 1970s.
