DALLAS — It’s useful to consider “The Art of Leadership,” former President George W. Bush’s solo painting debut, as a kind of sprawling installation that begins with the metal detector at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and ends with the gift shop, where Dubya Bobbleheads are for sale and an entire shelf is devoted to tomes ostensibly written by George or Laura. In the middle of the center there’s a lobby showcasing gifts from foreign nations to America and an impressive quasi-holographic projection up near the ceiling that shows various multi-hued Americans moving about. You enter the gallery space, where all the walls have been painted blue and are emblazoned with various Bush homilies, and where television screens show a documentary about 43’s artistic journey. There is background music playing that might best be characterized as falling under the genre of “inspirational elevator.” If you’re a New Yorker or a non-Republican, you have to steel yourself a bit and remember that the majority of attendees here are not visiting in any sort of ironic sense. When a security guard says that “history will judge [Dubya] kindly,” you are not allowed to laugh. Another thing that is off-limits, laugh-wise: Mocking the hanging methodology of the paintings themselves, which are positioned about eight feet above the floor, as if awaiting a dream audience of giraffes. It seems OK to take selfies with Bush’s self-portrait, or standing next to a painting of Bush’s father, who is rendered like a waterlogged potato, his cheeks blasted with rosacea, his eyes hound-dog, stoned-looking.
There have been many reactions to these portraits, reactions based both on online gawking and IRL visits to the venue (I’ve also emailed a few prominent artists I admire to pick their brains, and we’ll get to their own judgments in a moment). Of course, it’s hard to judge this art dispassionately, the same way that it would be tough to listen to a Charles Manson folk album dispassionately. The whole concept is borderline ridiculous, and offensive, if you think Bush should be in jail rather than painting his pets, himself in the shower, or headshots of his former international pals. Bush has cited Winston Churchill’s thoughts in “Painting as a Pastime” as being formative. (Sample quote: “Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so — before you die.”) It’s easy and tempting to politicize a critique of Bush’s creative noodlings. And that’s why the fact that some of these paintings are unnervingly, weirdly good is so dismaying, as if the whole exhibition is designed to molest your liberal sensibilities: jumpstarting a discussion about how Hitlerwas also a painter, or why Bush didn’t choose to paint any pictures of dead bodies in Iraq, or how easy it would be to shoplift one of those Bobbleheads from the gift shop, simply to avoid donating any money to this history-effacing ego-temple.
Not all of the portraits are good. Some are exceedingly terrible, as if Bush was dashing them off en route to a more interesting golf game: Rwandan President Paul Kagame looks pissed off and vacant, his head floating forgettably on a field of blue ether; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia appears to be wearing a paste-on costume beard. But there are real gems here, some intentional, others less so — like Israel’s Ehud Olmert, painted with his mouth hanging open in mid-speech, his eyes nearly subsumed by multi-tiered bags. The portrait of Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia’s first female president, is great, and Bush could and should rework this one as an abstract piece focused purely on the green background and the curling red wave of her hair. The best portrait in the show is the one of Czech leader Vaclav Havel, grinning in a grandfatherly way at something off the canvas. The surface is much more worked than in other paintings, and Bush has skipped the monochromatic backgrounds he typically uses in favor of a wall of books. A thin horizontal line of bare canvas is left along the bottom, and somehow that’s an oddly nice touch. Havel’s jowls have an interestingly complex topography. I’d be happy if I made this painting myself.
But Bush, who famously governed from a boldly unforgiving position of unearned self-confidence, probably doesn’t care too much about what elitist art critics have to say about his efforts. He might be more interested in what more accomplished art world practitioners have to say (I’d call them his “artistic peers,” but I’m loathe to lump anyone into company with someone so reviled on a personal and political level). Marilyn Minter, for one, was not so impressed when I reached out for her opinion. “I taught intro to painting for half my life, and these pieces would be pretty much the minimum I would expect from a high-school student with no painting experience,” she said. “The act of painting can be immensely therapeutic. His guilt level must be so intense, and the concentration that painting requires might offer some relief. It’s either that or the bottle, I suspect.”
Marc Dennis— another painter whose photorealist technique is miles away from Dubya’s wonkier portraiture — is more supportive: “It’s cool that GWB is painting; more people ought to try it. At this point in his path as a painter, his works are more about craft and technique rather than skill and talent, but still have merit. When he decides to paint his wife, then we’ll see if he has what it takes.”
Natalie Frank, whose figurative works often take liberties with actual physiognomies, has no patience for Bush’s sideline hobby: “While there have been many criminals who have been great artists — Friedrich Schroder Sonnenstern, Caravaggio, Egon Schiele— George W. Bush is not one. Why waste the time and ink to consider an abysmal president, war criminal, and dilettante painter: is there not art all over the world that would be grateful to be introduced into the dialogue? (Note to self: Find out if Hillary sculpts?)”
Austin Lee, who recently had a celebrated show of eccentric portraits at Postmasters, reminds us of the part of Bush’s oeuvre that is not included in this exhibition: “I think Bush paints dogs better than people. I actually like the painting he made of Barney. He probably loved that dog.”
Betty Tompkins — who occasionally paints faces but more often focuses on more penetrating subjects, in a literal sense — isn’t buying it. “A man who had been a very bad president did some paintings that are not very good,” she said. “He showed them in his own presidential library along with photos of him with the famous men he had painted. None of this is interesting to me. When I taught painting, the thought that popped most often into my head was how very hard it is to do a good painting. When I looked online at the paintings he had done, I thought the same thing. Peter Plagens is saying on Facebook that this is all a ploy to soften up the folks for a Jeb run. He might be right. I hope the idea fails. I’m not interested in another member of that family being in the White House.”
Sanya Kantarovsky, a young painter who has a show coming up at Casey Kaplan in May, takes a nuanced but ultimately dismissive stance. (I’d initially asked him to critique Bush’s very strange portrait of Putin, since Kantarovsky was born in Moscow and spends quite a bit of time in Russia.) “George W. Bush’s most recent painterly effort has been severely over-sensationalized,” he said. “The previous paintings attributed to the former president a few years ago were more interesting, if only for their Kahlo-esque haptic intimacy and introspection. This new batch is pretty boring in comparison. Take for example W’s portrait of Putin: one might expect Bush’s personal experience with his subject to imbue this portrait with some kind of insider’s insight. Instead we are presented with a familiar phenomenon to anyone who has ever seen fan art of any sort: an embattled attempt to capture a likeness from a photograph with pasty earth tones. Yes, this painting has a bit of a yard sale charm to it, but then again, what amateur painting of Putin wouldn’t? The myriad of presidential doodles, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s aliens to Reagan’s American-dreamy cowboys, football players, and horses, are not only more interesting as visual artworks, but also more telling of their authors. I prefer their candid lightness and humor to the staged extravaganza of W’s anemic portraits.”
Canadian painter Brad Phillips went out on a limb in praising Bush’s output more than most. “Many accomplished artists may be horrible people (myself) or may have done awful things, and we aren’t aware of it,” he said. “The derision surrounding the portraits painted by George W. Bush tends to be inextricably tied to his status as war criminal, and even those who like the works can’t be more complementary than call them ‘accomplished amateur’ or well-made kitsch. However, were I to encounter his work in a gallery in New York, besides the relief I’d feel at seeing a painting that wasn’t an easy design-based abstraction, I would feel drawn to them as good works: not great works, but good works. Not great, because in his self-portrait, unknowingly or not, he’s painting like Elizabeth Peyton, who I think is highly overrated. His portraits most resemble the work of Luc Tuymans, who also has been showered with too much acclaim. However, Bush is perhaps more earnest about his politics than Tuyman’s occasional nod to the Congo or pointless portrait of Condoleeza Rice, and his muddy awkward paint handling seems to genuinely indicate a desire to craft his own odd realism, not the lazy ‘deskilled’ greige of Tuyman’s works. Unencumbered by his track record, Bush shows more promise than many painters getting press in 2014.”
