Nude painting sparks controversy

RAYMONDVILLE — A painting that depicts naked shipwreck survivors will remain on display at the Raymondville Historical Center despite the protest of a former art teacher, museum board members said.

Elmer Kochert Jr., a retired Lyford High School art teacher, asked the museum board to remove the painting that depicts survivors of the 1554 shipwrecks of three Spanish galleons on Padre Island, near Port Mansfield.

Board members said the painting would remain on display in the museum but could be removed temporarily at the request of teachers whose students tour the museum.

“He (Kochert) calls it pornography — that we’re showing pornography to school children,” said Ruth Reagan, president of the museum board. “This problem was very upsetting to us.”

The controversy sparked a fiery letter exchange between Kochert and the museum’s board members, who aired their views in local newspapers.

The “historical museum board has been displaying a gross nude picture in one of the backrooms for many years,” Kochert wrote in a letter to the Valley Morning Star. “Our docents have been ushering our elementary (and) other students … through the historical museum for those many years with a lack of conscience about moral values.”

Kochert could not be reached for comment despite numerous telephone calls to his home Monday and Tuesday.

In a Nov. 18 letter to the Star, Reagan described the painting as part of a state exhibit that showcased the 1554 shipwrecks, the oldest scientifically excavated shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere.

“The fact is that we never intentionally show that picture to schoolchildren, period,” Reagan wrote.

“It is part of a display done by the Texas Historical Commission to tell the story of the three Spanish galleons that were grounded off Port Mansfield in 1554,” she wrote. “The picture is 14 inches by 11 inches and is hung at adult eye-level and is not in the flow of traffic. It portrays a massacre. That is why we feel it is not appropriate for children.

However, it is part of the saga and needs to be told.”

The painting depicts a massacre that became part of the region’s earliest history, said Glenn Harding, a local historian who serves on the museum board.

“I’m amazed and shocked that an artist would take a position against a well-established museum concerning this picture,” Harding said Monday.

In a letter to the Star, Harding writes that Kochert objects to the painting’s depiction of male genitals.

“The frontal nudity is the problem in question,” Harding writes, adding in an aside to Kochert that the depiction “worries you Elmer, day and night, as sinful.”

In April 1554, three Spanish galleons carrying 300 men, women and children along with tons of treasure grounded on Padre Island after a storm carried them away from the coast of Cuba, according to the National Park Service.

After Karankawa Indians attacked survivors, the Spaniards removed the clothes they believed the tribe wanted, Harding said.

“At the time this was the greatest disaster to ever befall the Spanish fleet in the New World,” the National Park Service said of the incident.

“First of all, the wrecks were the first documented occurrence of Europeans on the Island and one of the first occurrences of Europeans in what was to become Texas,” the agency said on its Web site.

A priest who survived the massacre journeyed into Mexico, where the government sent an expedition to search for the wreck, Harding said.

“The salvage operation was the first documented instance of Europeans intentionally coming to the Island and staying for an extended period,” the National Park Service said.

The “three ships that wrecked … are the oldest shipwrecks ever found in North America (excluding the Caribbean and Latin America),” it said.