The kind of art that had burst upon the public with New York’s Armory Show of 1913—the first big American exhibition of modern paintings, which included Marcel Duchamp’s sensational Nude Descending a Staircase— had no appeal or meaning for Harry Truman. “Ham and eggs art,” he called it. He liked the old masters. His taste in American art, not surprisingly, ran to the paintings of Missouri riverboatmen and Missouri politics by George Caleb Bingham, or the western scenes of Frederic Remington, who had once owned a saloon in Kansas City.
