George W. Bush: Great Painter? Or Greatest Painter?

[jimmy olsen]

I think they might be over thinking things just a tad. 

As always, there are a bunch of embedded links in the actual article.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/02/08/george_w_bush_s_paintings_and_self_portrait_critics_weigh_in.html

George W. Bush: Great Painter? Or Greatest Painter?

By Forrest Wickman
Posted Friday, Feb. 8, 2013, at 5:12 PM ET

Email accounts close to George W. Bush have apparently been hacked, exposing several private photos of the former president, according to a post from the Smoking Gun. The most interesting of the photos show what appear to be three paintings by W. himself.

Are they any good? Are they great? Several art critics have weighed in already, and we consulted a few more for their expert opinion on the 43rd president's budding oeuvre.


Slate art critic Christopher Benfey offered insight into Dubya's influences from the world of high art:

    Has W added looking at art books to his hobbies of cutting brush and falling off mountain bikes? Is he a fan of Bonnard's paintings of his naked wife in a bathtub, or Mantegna's supine dead Christ? Hockney's swimming pools, maybe? An interesting riff, in the shower scene, on the self-portrait painted with the aid of a mirror, since we have to imagine the painter holding a brush—but, hey, easy to rinse it in the shower.

Benfey also detected a theme of surveillance and accompanying guilt:

    I see one face peering out of the mirror, but is there another head emerging from between those two pigeon-toed feet? Privacy! Why can't a president get any privacy? Eyes are watching everything you do. It's like Psycho. Even poor Barney, in that portrait based, of course, on a photograph, is looking at 43 a little accusingly. "For here," as Rilke wrote in his poem about a statue of naked Apollo, "there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

It wasn't just Benfey who picked up on a sense of heavy remorse. Contacted via email, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight compared the painting to Shakespearean tragedy:

    Is George W. finally coming clean? Out, damned spot! Out, I say!

Bush_bath

In a review for Vulture, New York critic Jerry Saltz raved about the paintings, taking exception with Gawker's proclamation that they were "awkward and simple." Instead, the bathing paintings "border on the visionary, the absurd, the perverse, the frat boy":

    These are pictures of someone dissembling without knowing it, unprotected and on display, but split between the promptings of his own inner drives and limited by his abilities. They reflect the pleasures of disinterestedness. A floater. Inert. The images of a man who saw the entire world from the inside but who finds the smallest most private place in a private home to imagine his universe. Of almost nothingness. Sweet sublime oblique oblivion. The visibility of invisibleness.

After Saltz declined to psychoanalyze "why the water is running in both pictures," the New Republic gamely piped up with a Freudian reading. "Man in Shower," Michael Shaffer says, reflects latent turmoil over Hurricane Katrina:

    Consider the composition. The subject of the painting is not actually under the water. Physically, he stands back, reticent, his body still dry. In the shaving mirror, he watches from above, as if surveying the scene from an aircraft, a vaguely confused look on his face.

"Man in Bathtub," on the other hand, is quite obviously a rumination on enhanced interrogation:

    Why put up with the discomfort of lying down in a half-empty tub waiting for the water to pour down? The answer is clear—subconscious remorse about waterboarding. Consider the white item above the faucet. Perhaps it is a bunched-up curtain, or a towel hanging from a rack. But there is no window on that wall, and it is doubtful that the Bush family's bathrooms are so cramped as to require that towels be hung within the tub itself. No, that item is likely a representation of the interrogator himself, preparing to give the helpless captive a dunk in the water even as the prisoner tries to distance himself.

The painting of the stone building, though we can readily identify it as St. Ann's Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, Maine, remains the most opaque. Saltz suggests that it might represent "the purity of the lone American farmer," while the New Republic sees "the inner divide that dominated Bush's public life: The New England traditionalism of his actual father versus the mountainous Wyoming ruggedness of his presidential tutor, Dick Cheney." So which is it? That may be for later generations of art historians to decide.

[Razgovory]

I do hope the Secret Service finds the guy who hacked Bush's computer.  Then stake him out to die.

[Admiral Yi]

Classy move by Slate. 

[grumbler]

Classy move by Slate.   

The line between satirical and merely mean-spirited is a thin one, and this piece crosses it.  Slate needs some new editors.

[Scipio]

Slate: a bag of dicks, or a collection of douchebags?  Indeed, whither Slate?

[jimmy olsen]

This portrait of his dog is pretty good.

RIP Barney.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/02/01/rip-barney-bush-age-12/

[Sheilbh]

Classy move by Slate. 

What's wrong with it?

[Neil]

Classy move by Slate. 

What's wrong with it?

They were in on the hack.  It's like the News Corp thing, only hopefully the secret service will execute some hipsters and pseudo-intellectuals.

[Sheilbh]

They were in on the hack.  It's like the News Corp thing, only hopefully the secret service will execute some hipsters and pseudo-intellectuals.

How so? I thought Smoking Gun posted all of this. They got some art critics to comment.

They're bloggers, not nuns.

[Syt]

I'm confused why he would paint Clinton in the shower.

[grumbler]

How so? I thought Smoking Gun posted all of this. They got some art critics to comment.

They're bloggers, not nuns.

Actual art critics don't comment on private amateur art.  Slate just got some snarky faux critics to write some snarky faux critiques.  It isn't amusing, or even adult.  It's just Slate:  the Online Magazine for the Timmays of the World.

The Smoking Gun stuff was news.  SG didn't feel the need to go all juvenile like Slate does; they know their audience doesn't go for that shit.

[alfred russel]

How so? I thought Smoking Gun posted all of this. They got some art critics to comment.

They're bloggers, not nuns.

Actual art critics don't comment on private amateur art.  Slate just got some snarky faux critics to write some snarky faux critiques.  It isn't amusing, or even adult.  It's just Slate:  the Online Magazine for the Timmays of the World.

The Smoking Gun stuff was news.  SG didn't feel the need to go all juvenile like Slate does; they know their audience doesn't go for that shit.

I don't see the point in criticizing the paintings: they are better than I can do. What I think is more interesting is that it seems Bush 43 has an interest in art. It is one more piece of evidence that his Texas cowboy persona was complete bullshit. He came from a new england family, went to a new england prep school, got a degree from yale and another from harvard. And as soon as he leaves politics he moves to a big city rather than staying on his ranch. Culturally he is probably close to a carbon copy of Mitt Romney, but a better politician because he was able to cover that up.

[mongers]

I think we need to know which of the last dozen presidents had the best fashion sense.

[Admiral Yi]

What's wrong with it?

It's exploitation of illegally obtained images.  They're incredibly snarky comments about a guy's personal hobby.

[Razgovory]

I don't see how having a ranch is mutually exclusive with painting.  And I agree with Yi, this is a personal thing.  He's no longer President.  If he wants some privacy he should have it.