State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:17:13 +0000

Image Credit: Kim Leeson / George W. Bush Presidential Center

Last year, an adventurous hacker found and leaked pictures of paintings made by former President George W. Bush, including two revealing self-portraits from the shower. Now, the private hobby has been made public by President Bush himself. The George W. Bush Presidential Library, up the road in Dallas, has just opened an exhibit, The Art of Leadership: A President's Personal Diplomacy, which features portraits Bush painted of the world leaders he once encountered as President, paired alongside mementos from his travels and his musings about statecraft. However, what makes these paintings remarkable for viewers?

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

It’s not their particular styling, for one. Look at the portrait of Tony Blair above: the pose (facing forward, including head and shoulders) is fairly standard. His formal outfit—blue jacket, blue shirt, red tie—belongs in a professional headshot. If his artistic intention was, as he told his daughter in a Today interview, to capture “the unique personalities with whom he served,” his art perhaps fails to rise to this level. The art itself is fairly generic. These portraits are something like outsider art, as painted by the ultimate insider.

Rather, here, the interest comes not from the art, but the artist. If, as hinted in the exhibit’s copy, “this exhibit tells the story of his relationships with these leaders,” it comes from Bush’s presentation of his work. The exhibit frames the art as the result of personal diplomacy in practice; displayed above various gifts he received from these officials, the portraits become another kind of tribute. His interview with his daughter Jenna Bush Hager focuses significantly on his intentionality—what he felt as he painted the works and what he feels about the individuals.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

For example, Bush and his daughter discuss at length his portrait of Vladimir Putin. Bush recounts a story about when Putin “dissed” the Bush family dog Barney, and explains that “Vladimir is a person who views the US as an enemy. I felt that he viewed the world as US benefits and Russia loses, or vice versa.” This binaristic attitude might well be reflected in what Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post described as Putin’s “creepy scabs of eyebrows” and “the murky mud-mask of the rest of the face.” But any personality the viewer might find in the portrait might come more from the viewer than the art. Because we know about President Bush, because this art might reflect his own insight, we can read into the art some meaning. Even if the craft is not high, the art is there, in the viewer’s mind.

Image Credit: Grant Miller / George W. Bush Presidential Center

These portraits, like outsider art more generally, raise interesting questions about interpretation. What can we read into such work? What attention should we pay to the artist’s intentions? If this gallery seeks to instruct its viewers in the art of leadership, that art is one that is difficult to visualize. But these self-expressions on Bush’s part might in fact suggest legitimate insights about statecraft: the tenuousness of personal connections, the struggle to engage, to produce real intimacy, to turn it to public good. Portraiture is often judged based on the likeness—does this portrait of President G.H.W. Bush, done by his son, capture him? What it does preserve, however unskilled, is the son’s engagement with his own father’s legacy, and presents it for the public view. At least there’s some interesting vulnerability there to enjoy. I for one can’t wait for Barack Obama’s post-presidential poetry chapbook.

“And yet, every photograph cries out for an interpretation …”

John Jones — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:32:17 +0000

At his New York Times blog, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has posted interviews with the head photo editors of the AP, Reuters, and AFP on the photographic record of the Bush administration. Morris asked each interviewee “to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration” and then discussed the photos with them along with the reasons each chose the photos they did.

With Standard Operating Procedure Morris has shown an acute interest in understanding the different ways in which the image is used to create reality, along with the ways in which that reality can be interrogated. In these interviews, Morris and each interviewee seem to share a different approach to how these images should be interpreted and what they mean. Although the discussions can sometimes be repetitive, they were a reminder to me of how much my judgments about our last president were based on these photo-ops.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Why do you like the picture so much?

VINCENT AMALVY: We don’t understand what is going on. Why does the shadow appear? I suppose it’s a shadow of somebody else beyond the corner. But the picture is only of two guys walking. It’s a profile of George Bush and Barack Obama. And he’s near the Rose Garden of the White House. And so in the back is a shadow of somebody who says, “Bye-bye.” And it is looking like a joke, but it is amazing.

via Word Presser

viz. - George W. Bush

State-Craft or The Art of Leadership in George W. Bush's Paintings

“And yet, every photograph cries out for an interpretation …”