As I sat coloring with my son the other day, I remembered a story on NPR about President Eisenhower’s love for Paint by Numbers. He had his Cabinet each do one for the Presidential gallery and other famous people contributed as well. If I remember right, Ezra Taft Benson was reluctant in his effort (rumor was that his aids did it). I couldn’t find the story online to verify this, but I did find this interesting article.

It is a 2003 Interview with William L. Bird, Jr., curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Disapointingly, it did not describe a potential prophetic (i.e., that of future Prophet Benson) antipathy towards kitsch. It did, however, have some analysis that might be potentially analogous to our church acculturation.

Maybe I’m putting too much on it, but do you think the notion of artists individualizing their paint by numbers is a kind of quiet dissidence?

Yes, even more so when critics express objections and the artists reply, “To hell with that. I enjoy this. I couldn’t care less what you think.” You can look at paint by numbers as a metaphor for 1950s stay-within-the-line conformity—this argument has been made over and over—but I hope to introduce a deeper look at the phenomenon, especially at these people you mention, painters who are blending, shaping, and in some cases, continuing the subject out onto the frame. By expressing preferences and making choices, these painters are taking the first steps toward art. I think you can charitably argue that in these cases it was art.

I think many (including myself on occasion) label church culture forever in the 50’s. And while I am a huge proponent of cultural evolution, perhaps there is something that those critics who “have pronounced [painting by numbers] to be completely worthless” are missing. Perhaps there are some activities that need to be accessible by all and if that makes them kitsch, then so be it.

Bird elucidates this propensity in a brief account:

What paint by numbers did, it often did it in quite unanticipated, unexpected ways. First of all, it democratized art supplies. If you were a little kid in a small town in Alabama someplace, you may have never seen anything like this before, but all of a sudden you had twelve colors of paint and a brush. For $2.50 (which was still an exorbitant amount of money for some), people of rather modest circumstances could have access to the apparatus of art. The reminiscences on the website really confirm this; there was one story from a woman that especially touched me. As a child, she wanted to paint a picture for her grandparents’ anniversary. She begged her drug- and alcohol-dependent parents for the money to go to the store and finally walked to the store alone to buy the kit. But she was too young to know anything about tax, so then she had to walk back home and beg her parents for the extra pennies. First they refused, but they finally grudgingly handed her the pennies and she went back to the store and bought the paint by number. Then she read the instructions and learned that you needed linseed oil to keep the paints from drying out. Her parents refused to give her more money but without linseed oil, try as she might, she barely got the picture completed. To finish it, she resorted to gluing the dried up paint fragments onto the picture. Can you imagine that? And the whole time her parents are saying things like, “You’re worthless,” that kind of thing. When she finished, she wrapped it up, gave it to her grandparents, and they proudly displayed it. Now she’s an artist. To me, that story’s the most illustrative of what the meaning of this stuff really was. It exposed people to something they might want to try, but was otherwise completely unavailable. This is what eluded the era’s cultural critiques, and I think it eludes most people even today.

Maybe I just don’t see beyond the numbers and pre-drawn lines of our community.