It must be nice to be the president. In addition to having helicopters, jumbo jets, and motorcades, you get to rifle through the cellars of the National Gallery and the Hirschhorn for artistic masterpieces to adorn your home for the next four to eight years.
As with all of our recent presidents, the artistic choices made by Barack Obama and his wife (since first ladies traditionally play a big role in decorating the White House) say a lot about the first couple and what they want to say about themselves. It is evident, for example, that the Obamas (with their selection of Degas sculptures and Morandi still-lifes) are far more Europhile than either the Clintons or the Bushes (father or son), and one is struck by their willingness to live with art that is not only avant-garde, but also on occasion downright radical.
Selecting these works is somewhat more complicated than you might suppose. The first couple can borrow almost anything for their private quarters, but as regards their selections for the public parts of the White House, a complex vetting process takes place. Among other considerations, because a presidential acquisition invariably sends prices soaring, an artist must be dead at least 25 years before being admitted into the permanent collection of the White House.
So what do the Obamas' choices say about them? They may well be the first couple in the White House to prefer abstraction to representational art. And while it is always possible that they simply liked the works in question, one is well-advised to interpret each selection as a message sent. Click through the slideshow to find out what those are.
The choice of Glenn Ligon (born in 1960) is significant. He is black and gay--and it's hard to imagine that the Obamas weren't fully conscious of his "identity" when they chose him. Said identity is the essence of Ligon's art, which often consists of nothing more than bold black words stenciled onto primed canvas. In the present piece, Ligon is mercifully well-behaved: no manifest anger, no outward reference to race (other than the title) or, heaven forbid, to sexual orientation, only the bizarre repetition of the words, "All traces of the griffin I had been were wiped from existence," darkening as they descend into an illegible black mass.
Of all the Obamas' choices, this work by Nicolas de Stael may be the most inscrutable. Beside the fact that it is fairly good and that they may well have genuinely liked it, one is hard put to see what message, if any, is communicated by its selection. This Russian-born French painter (1914-1955) is France's answer to Abstract Expressionism, their one source of consolation when the art world abandoned Paris for New York after 1945. A fairly typical example of post-war European abstraction, this piece is so non-American that it is almost--I said almost--un-American.
This Ed Ruscha may be the most purely and explicitly postmodern painting chosen by the Obamas. The Reagans had a certain taste for that part of postmodernism that, back in the early '80s, was energetically classical. The Obamas, by contrast, seem to be drawn to its ethereal ironies. Also from the '80s, this is an older example of the word art that we saw in Glenn Ligon's piece. The words, "Maybe yes, Maybe no, Wait a minute," set against a blissed out field of pure vermilion, suggest an anti-heroic, almost Beckettian indecisiveness. It's probably Rahm Emanuel's least favorite work in the collection.
This is more like it. We elect our presidents to hang Winslow Homers on the walls of the White House! This 19th century painter is thought to embody the rugged, outdoorsy nature of the American character, the ethos of the frontier. Though reared in the art of Europe, Homer's style and content are essentially American. The present work is surely one of his better paintings, very daring indeed in its flirtations with abstraction. It could almost be a Franz Kline. The Obamas have chosen well.
Like the Homer, this painting is the sort that any president would be expected to select. An inveterate chronicler of the lives and legends of the 19th century American Indian, Catlin could be a skilled and precise draughtsman. In the present work, however, he uses a much more feathery touch that has its charms, though no one could claim that the results are of any great consequence. That doesn't matter, of course. Choosing this work is, for the Obamas, the equivalent of wearing an American flag in one's lapel.
Because I have never quite seen the appeal of Susan Rothenberg--with her unending cavalcade of neo-expressionist horses--I’m inclined to think that this early work, from 1976, was chosen for other reasons than artistic vision. Here, the Obamas certainly score points with the art world by selecting one of their less obvious blue chip artists, but, to my eye, it seems as if they're exhibiting a greater reverence for hype than for quality.
It turns out that Ms. Rothenberg is not the only woman to adorn the White House walls. Alma Thomas, an African American, is not as well-known, perhaps, but she is a far more substantial artist. "Sky Light", seen here, from 1973, not only appears in reproduction to be a very accomplished painting, but is also all the more remarkable for being by an artist then in her eighties. Her selection bespeaks considerable sophistication on the part of the first couple.
That sophistication is borne out as well in this excellent choice, from 1961, by Leon Polk Smith, a leading Abstract Expressionist. It is hard to see what message is being communicated by this selection of a dead white male of manifestly European tastes from half a century back. For that very reason, perhaps, no other selection indicates as strongly the nature of the Obamas taste in visual art.
Intellectual rigor. Honest reporting. Influential analysis. Don't miss another issue of the magazine considered "required reading" by the world's top decision-makers. Subscribe today.
