Not All That Square

When the Nixons moved into the White House, most art critics thought that they would prove to be as square as a cross section of the Washington monument. As it turns out, the Nixons are not all that square. Not being expert themselves, they may not be too sure about what they like. But they are willing to take the advice of knowledgeable authorities.

In the presidential bedroom, for example, hangs an Impressionistic Flag Day by Childe Hassam, which is a holdover from the Kennedy Administration. Nixon also has a Red Barn painted by a previous occupant, Dwight Eisenhower. Tricia's room features a picture of azaleas, presented to her as 1968 Queen of the Norfolk Azalea Festival. Pat's taste is seen in the private sitting room and long hall. She has kept the Early American masterworks acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy and earlier tenants, but she particularly likes Impressionists and turn-of-the-century Americans. Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum has lent the White House Mary Cassatt's Portrait of a Young Girl, Ernest Lawson's Harlem River, one Sargent and two Monets.

So far as the public areas are concerned, word was passed to the National Collection of the Fine Arts, which furnishes the West Wing's lobby and pressrooms, that the Nixons would prefer something not quite so abstract as the Tobeys and Youngermans featured there under Lady Bird's tenancy. Those particular paintings have consequently vanished, but their replacements are still works by contemporary Americans. The show that has been on during past months includes Wolf Kahn's diffused Yellow House (1967), Roy Moyer's semi-abstract Cypresses (1968), John Button's Hopperesque Lake Erie (1968), and an assortment of paintings by artists from other schools and other parts of the country. Hidden in private offices can even be found a few lithographs by such avant-garders as James Rosenquist and Frank Stella.

Across the street from the White House, the Nixons have permitted, though they did not officially sponsor, what may well be the sprightliest exhibition of contemporary art in town. There, a plain gray plywood fence had been built around Lafayette Park while construction work is going on. Depressed by the sight, Jane Shay, a staffer at the nearby National Trust for Historic Preservation, organized a one-day paint-in by a group of Washington high school art students. The result was a half-mile mural in which green trees, pink pigs, pilgrims, bare-breasted Indian maidens and parades mingle with a modicum of social sentiment. "Stop the war--Jesus and Allah could save," reads a message in the middle of some blazing red, white and blue stripes. Nixon did not object; Tricia was even deputized to walk down on the day of the paint-in and add a few dabs herself.

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