viz. - portraits

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.

The Many Leaning Subjects of Arnold Newman

Calliope — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:39:51 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Porch and Chairs, West Palm Beach Florida, 1941

In between portraits of famous luminaries at the Harry Ransom Center's Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibit, there are a group of images from the photographer's early career that feel anonymous and private. They include pictures of landscapes, nameless figures, and modest structures--all subjects that seem to have been chosen for their compositional character rather than the associations they bring to mind. The above photograph from that period of a decontextualized porch and chairs resists our curiosity to see the whole house and place it in a particular setting, focusing us instead on form and line. The un-forthcomingness or formal starkness of this picture seems dramatically foreign to the photography of Newman's later career, the period of his well-known "environmental" portraits, which situated iconic individuals in settings that explained or extended their identities. (Rachel's post further glosses and complicates this term). Despite this, I'd like to point out some unifying threads between this quaint little study from West Palm Beach and a few, more recognizably Newmanian photographs, all of which are currently on display at the Ransom Center.

"Porch and Chairs" derives its charm from a few compositional elements. The first is the picture's close crop. Newman left a very small margin around the porch, especially to the right and left, which highlights its distorted shape. The lateral boards at the top of the photo give us the sense that Newman's camera is held level, but all of the lines one would expect to be vertical in the picture--the shutters, the right and left panels of the door frame, the porch's central support and the two cut-away walls--are slanted, making the structure appear unstable and droopy. Our eyes search the bowed and jagged siding for ninety degree angles to no avail. As much as they purport to be squares, the spaces within the porch frame are more like rhombuses that lean faintly to the left. Yet the tilted aspect of the porch doesn't overwhelm or unsettle the photo, because the two chairs in the lower right corner "lean" in the opposite direction. These backward-bending chairs may have no effect on structural soundness of the rickety building but they do provide the balance needed within the composition.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Vallauris, France, 1954.

The crop planned here, which resulted in the famous Picasso portrait below, accomplishes something a little different from the "Porch and Chairs" framing. Newman begins with an image of a leaning subject, reorients it, and restores balance and energy to the painter's mien. Even after these modifications, there are still signs that he was leaning over in the original pose. The rightward pressure of Picasso's hand visible in the creases on his forehead offsets the positioning of the subject toward the left side of the frame. The hand, in other words, acts as a frame-within-a-frame that repositions and counterbalances the visual weight of the leaning subject.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Ernest Trova, Sculptor, Pace Gallery, 1971

Several other Newman portraits at the Harry Ransom Center feature leaning subjects and frames-within-frames. In this photograph of the sculptor Ernest Trova, for instance, the white jutting walls of the gallery (instead of Newman's red crayon) crop nearly half of his body from view, and what's left of Trova's trunk is pictured leaning against this "environmental" frame. We get the sense that the thrust of his lean is the only thing keeping him from being squeezed out of the picture.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

In this shot, Ansel Adams appears comfortably wedged between a beam and the frame of a sliding glass door. Behind him and inside his house a group of frames hang on the wall. The placement of the photographer in front of a pane of glass that, in turn, superimposes reflections of the trees outside on the framed artworks within the house suggests a communicability between each of these layers that may refer to Adams' work. Indeed, capturing the photographer, his beloved trees, and the art on his walls within the same bounding line suggests the inseparability of all of these things.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Joel Meyerowitz, photographer in his studio, New York, 1993

This final photograph of Joel Meyerowitz leaning against what must be the entry to his darkroom emboldens me to talk more directly about the importance of leaning and internal frames for Newman's work. From a compositional standpoint it seems to me that, like the tilted porch frame and the crooked-backed chairs of our first image, the lean and the frame of Newman's later pieces give them a crucial sense of counterpoise. In Newman's portraits of artists, these frame-like structures inevitably take on a more definite significance because of the inescapable relationship between artists and frames. Deliberately positioning these art makers within at least two sets of frames--the borders of Newman's photograph and what I've been calling its internal frame--emphasizes the fact that they have momentarily relinquished artistic control and have become art. Perhaps leaning or pushing back against the frame is the only way they can reassert a modicum of control.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Staging the Past: Irina Werning's "Back to the Future"

Megan Eatman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Nico in 1990 and 2010, France; Irina Werning

This week, I want to draw attention to Irene Werning's Back to the Future project (website probably not safe for work; there is a small amount of nudity), in which the artist meticulously reconstructs images from her subjects' pasts. The results are always impressive, often funny, and sometimes touching in their illustration of how much and how little changes with the passage of time.

Lali in 1978 and 2010, Buenos Aires

In most cases, the images are recreated more or less exactly. Subjects wear identical clothing and mimic their earlier facial expressions. The small differences in the images then become especialy interesting. In the image above, Lali's outfit is noticeably different (a solid dress, heeled shoes) and the building she poses in has been updated. While the building's changes were outside of the photographer's control, I wonder about the wardrobe differences. While the shoes show the shift to adulthood, I am not sure what to make of the brown dress. There are smaller wardrobe differences in other images; perhaps they draw attention to the image as performance, creating a deliberate gap in the illusion that reminds viewers of the gap between the past and present.

Marita and Coty in 1977 and 2010, Buenos Aires

The images are often hilarious. The playfulness of performing your childhood self shows in the images, particularly those like the image above in which the subject has to replicate his/her expression as a baby. The incongruity of an adult with a baby-faced wonder seems silly, even though it seems like it would be depressing because the loss of innocence is at the core of what makes the disjuncture amusing. While these images can be poignant for a variety of reasons, they also seem to deal in a light-hearted manner with the departure of the past. The replication of the past (and the often uncanny resemblance between child and adult subjects) indicates that it isn't really gone, but things are different, and sometimes in an amusing way.

Damian in 1989 and 2010, London

If you go to Werning's website to see more of these images, I would also recommend her other projects. Her website shows interesting variety, including a series of photos featuring a Chinese crested dog named Chini in different costumes and a collection of photos called "After Army" that features images from a beach frequented by young people who have just completed their tour of duty with the Israeli army.

Cosplay and the Visual Rhetoric of Loneliness

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:19:05 +0000

The Anime Within, Elena Dorfman

The image above is from a photo essay on the Mother Jones website. The essay, entitled "The Anime Within," was disappointing to me, and while I don't want to malign Dorfman's project, especially since I am glad to see cosplay getting attention in a publication that might not normally address it, I do want to critique some of the messages that these images send.

In the picture above, the subject looks uncomfortably stranded between reality and fantasy. While in costume, she wears minimal if any makeup (thereby disrupting the illusion) and is noticeably withdrawn in posture and expression. The dark background suggests that she is nowhere; not in reality, not in fantasy, and certainly not in a community. She looks both alone and lonely.

Not all of Dorfman's subjects look as depressed. The man above's expression looks faintly playful; he has an attitude that seems appropriate to his costume. He is, however, still alone.

I know that photographing the subject alone is a convention of portraiture, but this essay made me more conscious of its effects in particular contexts. Few of the subjects have truly impressive costumes, which would not in itself be problematic if it weren't also for the fact that none really appear to be having fun. The combination of these two elements, combined with the isolation imposed by the dark background, makes the subjects seem less like artists engaged in a vibrant fan culture and more like sad loners half-heartedly trying to escape reality.

In this particular context, it seemed as if the composition choices helped enforce rather than dispel existing beliefs about people in certain fan cultures. While I would not suggest that a photo essay on cosplay ignore bad costumes or sad people, a practice that already has such circumscribed representation in many contexts deserves a photo essay that complicates stereotypes and emphasizes the complex issues of play, belonging, and performance that permeate this culture.