Resorts at Sea: December: n/s Savannah

Part of President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, the Savannah was the first commercial ship powered by a nuclear reactor. Militarily, we had the Nautilus (a sub) and the Enterprise (an aircraft carrier). Just as the Savannah in 1819 was the first steam powered vessel across the Atlantic, the Savannah of 1962 promised a new age in merchant ship propulsion. French Line’s France was said to have the capacity to be converted to atomic power, as was the Italian Line’s Leonardo da Vinci and the proposed, but never built, sister to the United States.

Several pieces of art were commissioned for the Savannah, and though passenger ships are sometimes described as “floating galleries” because of this commissioned art, the Savannah actually had an honest-to-God art exhibit on board as stated in the August 1962 Marine Engineering/Log article introducing her. However, details were sparse. Sculptor Jean Woodham created Progression, a six-foot tall work in welded nickel silver, and a chronology in the back of her 50 year retrospective catalogue referenced a selection of works from the Whitney Museum.

 

Savannah's Main Lounge, shown in a brochure dated May 1964.

 

A search turned up a newspaper article from May 1964 listing 14 works in this exhibit. One artist – Louis Bunce – did work for the late 1950’s Mariposa and Monterey; all others are new to this study. These paintings were created between 1925 and 1962 and were chosen by John Gordon, curator at the Whitney.

 

Now the Marine Engineering/Log article says this exhibit was to be rotating. The Savannah’s service record was erratic and short-lived, and I don’t know yet whether this was the first exhibit, or one of the rotations. If it was one of the rotations, then the photo above was dropped in just before the brochure went to press, or is one of the earlier exhibits. 

Fun fact: the table in the foreground is a 30-inch slab of petrified wood from the Petrified National Monument in Arizona.