The scandal occurred when I was six years old and I remember my mother and father talking about it. Either my memories were incorrect or my mother’s version of the story was different from what really happened. In any case it turns out that what I thought happened was a country mile from reality. I’ve done some research and here is the real story.
I suppose we have to start, as many Texas stories must, with two cowboys named Goodnight and Loving.
The Goodnight-Loving Trail sounds less like a cattle route than a firm of frontier attorneys specializing in unpaid whiskey bills, but Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving managed to turn it into one of the great Texas enterprises: pushing longhorns north and west through country so dry the trees chased dogs and selling beef to soldiers, miners, and anyone else who was willing to pay cash for something that could walk to dinner under its own power.
Their story had everything Texas requires for legend—cattle, dust, danger, Comanches, bad water, worse judgment, and men with beards who considered sleeping indoors a sign of moral decline. Loving died after being wounded on the trail, Goodnight kept his promise to bring the body home, and the whole thing became the sort of story Texans admire because it proves that if a man is stubborn enough, he can turn dehydration, bankruptcy, and poor road planning into glorious heritage.
The story of Goodnight and Loving, and their work with their friend John Chisum, became the foundation for dozens of movies, countless books, and, more or less, the beating heart of Lonesome Dove. Texans have been dining out on the story ever since.
By the 1890s, the grandson of Oliver Loving had opened Ellison Furniture Store in downtown Fort Worth. It became a profitable business and, by the 1950s, occupied an eight-story building at the corner of Seventh and Throckmorton. I remember being in that store…Dimly, but I remember it. There was a different kind of furniture on every floor and there was an art gallery (which seemed to me at the time like something adults had invented so children would learn patience).
By the time I went into the store, it was run by Bob Ellison, the great-great-grandson of Oliver Loving. I think the cowboy heritage had petered out by the time Bob was born; he had a degree in philosophy and had spent extensive time touring art museums in Europe. It was his wife’s suggestion that he turn the first floor of the furniture store into an art gallery.
In 1959, artist Ben Johnson submitted a painting called The Song to the Fort Worth Art Association. It was an abstract, colorful depiction of a nude woman. The Art Association rejected it on the grounds that it was vulgar. This pissed off Bob Ellison, who was unimpressed by the cultural judgment of the local fig-leaf brigade, so he displayed the painting in a street-facing window of his furniture store as a protest for artistic freedom.
Perhaps there was a little cowboy left in Bob after all.
This instantly caused a furor in Fort Worth, a city that was deep in the center of the Bible Belt. Fort Worth had its own movie censorship board tasked with making certain that Hollywood didn’t undermine the morality of the frontier metropolis. The city had churches over a century old, one of which was the First Baptist Church, which was the largest church in the United States and the home of Frank Norris, the nationally-known, fire-breathing fundamentalist preacher famous for leading the fight against “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution."
Naturally, the Fort Worth Ministers Association stepped forward. This was a group deeply committed to making certain that no one in the city accidentally had any fun without proper supervision. They began a concerted effort to have the painting removed on the grounds that it was vulgar, obscene, and a threat to the morals of a cowtown that had built much of its early reputation on whiskey, whorehouses, and gun fights.
Letters to the editor described The Song as obscene graffiti or etchings suitable for an outhouse. Of course, the publicity did what publicity always does. Citizens of Fort Worth flocked to see the painting for themselves. Some viewed it from across the street, presumably so that if moral contamination occurred, it would have to travel through traffic. Many were outraged and some even returned several times to see if they were still outraged. Vehicle traffic on Seventh Street slowed to a crawl.
There is no spectacle quite like a city insisting it does not want to look at something while lining up for a better view.
However, there is another Johnson painting that was included in the show at the Ellison Furniture Store. This painting, known simply as Nude (1957), gives us an excellent idea of what the missing painting looked like.
Evidently, Bob Ellison thought so, too. He moved to New York City, where he continued to collect art. A few years later, he sold the Ellison Furniture Company. When he died, part of his collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not surprisingly, Ellison did not leave his collection to the art museums of Fort Worth. One suspects he had decided that if Fort Worth did not want to see a painting in 1959, there was no need to trouble the city with the burden of seeing the good ones later.
We may never know what happened to The Song. It might be hanging quietly in someone’s house, or rolled up in an attic, or misidentified in storage, or gone forever. But if you would like to see Johnson’s Nude, you can travel to New York City and walk down Broadway to the Schoelkopf Gallery, where it has been on display.
You should no hold your breath waiting for it to be shown in Fort Worth.