Instead, Kennedy struck her as “incandescent, golden,” “bigger than life” and inhabiting “a different dimension.” After a single morning she decided he was too intriguing and changeable to capture in one portrait. She had expected, she said, the monochrome man of the newspaper photographs. 31, 1962, she planned on making some quick sketches before finishing the portrait in a temporary studio in West Palm Beach. When she arrived at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate on Dec. The trustees of the Truman Library chose de Kooning to paint the notoriously restless Kennedy because she had a reputation for being “the fastest brush in the East,” capable of finishing a portrait after a single sitting. The story of how she came to paint it is even more extraordinary, and illustrates why capturing Kennedy on a canvas or in a book can be so challenging, and such an obsession, for artists, biographers and historians. Kennedy in the vivid colors and broad brush strokes of abstract art resulted in the striking portrait that is on permanent display in the “America’s Presidents” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America” and “JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.”Įlaine de Kooning’s attempt to capture the essence of John F. Thurston Clarke is the author of “The Last Campaign: Robert F.

The Last Campaign by Thurston Clarke