Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy

Dallas Museum of Art

Through Sept. 15

This small exhibition in Dallas offers “a strange but fascinating look at a strange moment in time,” said Scott Cantrell in The Dallas Morning News. On the morning of the day he would be assassinated, President John F. Kennedy woke in an “otherwise dreary” Fort Worth hotel suite to discover that the rooms he and his wife had slept in were decorated with paintings and sculptures by such masters as Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Eakins, and Pablo Picasso. The 16 pieces had been borrowed from local museums and art collectors by two civic-minded locals who hoped to delight the First Couple, and the do-gooders’ reward would be a call of appreciation from the president placed just hours before he was killed. Seeing 13 of those 16 pieces gathered again here—including the Eakins below—it’s natural to experience “a swirl of emotions.”

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You might even feel as if you’ve been hit by “a grenade of grief,” said Christina Rees in Glasstire.com. Viewers are greeted by floor-to-ceiling photos of Jack and Jackie being thronged by Fort Worth and Dallas well-wishers. Nearby, there’s also “a really touching photo” of young philanthropist Ruth Carter Johnson and a friend cheekily strapping a seatbelt onto a bronze Picasso statue known as Angry Owl. Suddenly you’re aware that Dallas wasn’t a city of hate on Nov. 22, 1963: “The sense of everyone pitching in for such an event (and that people were so unjaded as to think of a president’s visit as special) is heartbreaking.” The artworks’ modest scale strengthens that effect. You feel as if you’ve tiptoed back into a special morning. “It’s easy to get close to the pieces and linger. It’s easy to feel quite sad.”