Ben Johnson’s Nude Returns to New York With a Fort Worth Scandal Attached
A painting once denounced in Fort Worth as indecent has resurfaced in Manhattan with its history intact. Ben Johnson’s Nude, made in 1957, is now on view at Schoelkopf Gallery in “New York City Circa 1960: Works from the Collection of Robert A. Ellison, Jr.” an exhibition drawn from the holdings of the late artist and gallerist Robert A. Ellison Jr.
Ellison, a Texas native who moved to New York in the early 1950s, became part of the Abstract Expressionist circle and later assembled a substantial collection of Modern and postwar art. He also donated hundreds of ceramics to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. According to Andrew Schoelkopf, whose father was a close friend of Ellison’s, the works in the show were largely acquired directly from the artists.
The exhibition includes early abstractions by Milton Resnick, dense compositions by Pat Passlof, serene nudes by Robert De Niro, Sr. and a vigorous portrait by Elaine de Kooning. Schoelkopf said none of the works on view had been exhibited since the 1960s, giving the presentation the feel of a recovered chapter rather than a conventional survey.
The most charged object in the room is Johnson’s Nude, whose backstory still reads like a small civic drama. When the Fort Worth Art Association declined to exhibit the painting in 1959, Ellison placed it in the front window of Ellison Gallery, which he had established that year with his then-wife Nancy on the ground floor of his family’s furniture store in Fort Worth. He framed the gesture as “a protest for aesthetic freedom,” and a sign in the window announced that the work had been rejected as “vulgar.”
The response was immediate. Coverage appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the El Paso Herald-Post, while letters of support and condemnation arrived in equal measure. One writer praised Ellison’s courage; another, with evident relish, said the controversy made the painting more tempting to see. The Ministers’ Association, however, proved decisive. After four days, the painting was removed.
Johnson continued to exhibit in New York and Chicago before his death in 1967, but Nude now carries a different kind of force: not scandal, exactly, but the residue of a moment when questions of taste, morality, and artistic freedom collided in public. In that sense, the exhibition does more than revisit a collection. It restores the temperature of an argument that once felt urgent enough to stop traffic on a downtown street.
