Trump Asks For Van Gogh, Museum Offers Solid Gold Toilet Instead

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When Donald Trump asked New York’s Guggenheim Museum if he could borrow a Van Gogh to place in the private living quarters of the White House, museum officials said no.

However, they did offer a fitting alternative: A solid gold toilet.

The Washington Post reported that the bizarre offer came up because White House decorators had hoped to cheer up the private living areas by displaying “Landscape With Snow,” an 1888 oil painting by Van Gogh.

This isn’t unusual. Other presidents have decorated their private spaces with classic works of art borrowed from great museum collections.

What is unusual is how museum curator Nancy Spector responded to the request.

First, she told the decorators that the painting is “prohibited from travel except for the rarest of occasions,” but was on its way to be exhibited at the Guggenheim’s museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Then after being exhibited, there, the plan was to return it to New York “for the foreseeable future.”

But Spector did offer an alternative she considered suitable: An interactive work titled “America” that is basically an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet.

Of course, some might argue the Trump White House is a step down from the previous place where it was exhibited: a public restroom on the museum’s fifth floor.

A person would have to be pretty flush to privately own the toilet art work: The gold alone is reportedly worth more than $1 million.

However, it would definitely fit in with Trump’s aesthetic, since he has decorated his private residences with the shiny metal.

Spector, who has been critical of Trump, made the offer in an email obtained by the Post, explaining that the gold toilet is “extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care.”

WILLIAM EDWARDS via Getty Images

The generous offer was made in September, but the Trump White House has yet to respond to it or to media inquiries about it.

The work is the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan, and satirizes America’s love of excess wealth.

However, Cattelan is dodging direct comment about whether he wants the president to use his solid gold commode while tweeting at 3 a.m.

“It’s a very delicate subject,” he told the Post, when reporters asked him why he offered the artwork to the Trumps.

He added: “What’s the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.”

Meanwhile, Twitter users offered their thoughts on the matter.



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Confessions of a Paintaholic: Rust Never Sleeps

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Rust Never Sleeps      SOLD  

watercolor   © Cynthia Allman

A local landmark in the first light of early spring.

"We both know what memories can bring...

They bring diamonds and rust."

Joan Baez


Awarded "Best in Show"
Brunswick Art Works "ArtWorks '12" Exhibition

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A Painting Today: “Portrait Sitting”

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6 x 8"

oil on panel

sold

I saw this painting on Instagram by Diego Velazquez, Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria in Hunting Dress and fell in love with the dog. Not Cardinal Ferdinand, but his dog. He obediently sat for the portrait. What a good boy.

From the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.

 

~ Stay safe, stay healthy and wear a mask.

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The Obamas Wrest Presidential Portraiture From Its Traditional (White) Trappings

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WASHINGTON ― When people first filed into the courtyard of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery on Monday morning, the stage before them was empty, save for two massive, rectangular objects draped in plain brown fabric.

An hour later, Michelle Obama and Amy Sherald, the artist the former first lady carefully selected to paint her official portrait, took the stage. Together, they tugged on one of the fabric coverings until it fell to the ground. The crowd gasped audibly when the larger-than-life painting appeared before them and then broke into enthusiastic applause.

Former first lady Michelle Obama stands next to her portrait.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Of course, they’d all seen Michelle Obama’s face countless times before in photographs, on television, in fantasies of her future presidential run. But never like this. Sherald’s painting is a dreamlike vision of the former president’s wife that depicts her as more than a first lady ― she’s an archetype of grace and elegance. Her edges are muted, her gaze distant, her skin a charcoal gray.

Sherald described her painting practice as a conceptual one, founded not upon accuracy but imagination. “Once my paintings are complete, the models no longer live in the paintings as themselves,” she told the crowd. “I see something bigger in them, something more symbolic, an archetype. I paint things I want to see. I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.”

Moments after Sherald’s painting was revealed, Twitter was teeming with reactions from newly anointed art critics, who praised and condemned the work at lightning speed. First came the takes, then the memes, then the takes on takes. Real art critic Lee Rosenbaum said the portrait lacked vibrancy. Not an art critic Chris Cillizza said the piece looked “very little like Michelle Obama.”

This routine isn’t at all surprising in our digital age, when images and opinions emerge at a rate faster than any human can consume them. But it is somewhat amazing that the echo chamber of Obama-related commentary is revolving around something so quietly traditional as a painted portrait. Every four to eight years, a couple of new presidential portraits appear at the National Portrait Gallery, memorializing the likes of George W. and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, and so forth.

Of course, Michelle and Barack Obama’s portraits are different for multiple reasons.

Artist Kehinde Wiley and former President Barack Obama unveil his presidential portrait.
Artist Kehinde Wiley and former President Barack Obama unveil his presidential portrait.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

After the unveiling, Michelle Obama reflected on the otherworldly experience of seeing herself in paint. “As a young girl, even in my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined this moment,” she wrote on Instagram. “Nobody in my family has ever had a portrait ― there are no portraits of the Robinsons or the Shields from the South Side of Chicago.”

Former President Obama expressed similar excitement. He’d posed for a high school picture, he joked to the crowd, but this was different. Even after achieving the impossible so many times over, Obama was visibly bowled over by seeing his likeness in a frame, where it would remain, in a prominent American cultural institution for all time.

When he and his artist of choice, Kehinde Wiley, unveiled his presidential portrait, the crowd managed another round of sharp inhalations. Wiley painted a stern-faced Obama sans tie, seated amidst a backdrop teeming with fecund greenery. The flowers ― blue lilies, jasmine and chrysanthemums that pay homage to Kenya, Hawaii and Chicago ― here and there eclipse the former president’s form. As with many of Wiley’s paintings, the background seems to be battling the subject for the viewer’s attention.

“There’s a fight going on between him and the plants in the foreground that are trying to announce themselves,” Wiley said of the work. “Who gets to be the star of the show? The story or the man who inhabits the story?” In other words, who will history remember, the man or the myth? The subject or the painting?

Although Wiley’s aesthetic style is hyperrealistic, he, like Sherald, doesn’t depict his subjects as they are in real life. He’s best-known for scouting young, black men on the street and painting them with all the accoutrements of Old World mastery ― horses, scepters, robes and the like. With Obama’s portrait, instead of invoking classic nobility, Wiley paints him dressed down and casually seated among flowers, uprooting traditional notions of power, masculinity and privilege altogether.

It’s the radical nature of Barack and Michelle Obama’s portraits that has stirred up conversations online and off. The unorthodox, fantastical details of each painting speak to the mythic proportions of their subjects. They’re what set Wiley’s and Sherald’s works apart from the other presidential portraits, many of which are naturalistic, straight-forward, a little buttoned-up and rendered in browns and grays.

Perhaps the most unconventional portrait before the Obamas’ was Bill Clinton’s pixelated painting, crafted by artist Chuck Close. Yet Clinton’s face, no matter how unusually depicted, still fades into the long hallway of heretofore entirely white bodies. (Moreover, a closer examination of the people behind the pairing reveals two men both accused of abusing their positions of power.)

Even before they were painted, the Obama portraits were revolutionary. They are, after all, the only paintings at the National Portrait Gallery that immortalize a black presidency. The individual aesthetics of each painting flesh out this fact with precision and imagination. Just as Barack Obama eschewed the traditional imagery of power, so he avoided the typical template of what a presidential portrait should be. Instead, he embraced an artist’s ability to go beyond immortalizing a likeness and begin to shape a legacy.

After the Obamas and the artists left the stage, the portraits were thronged by visitors eager to get a closer look. People took photos, of course, but they also stood and stared in reverie. Not yet installed on museum walls, the paintings felt especially sacrosanct. Generations from now, people will encounter them; perhaps then they won’t be seen as a revolutionary divergence but the beginning of a sea change.

Monday’s portrait unveiling involved a mix of tradition and innovation that evoked drama, pride and a glimpse at our future. It demonstrated how history is not an abstract concept but something that is carefully deliberated over and physically made. In a time when images are so readily available, adaptable, mutable and meme-able, it’s all the more mesmerizing to encounter a painting that will, assuredly, live on forever.

And on the same day President Donald Trump announced his plans to slash arts funding and close the National Endowment for the Arts, the experience felt especially profound.

The crowd takes their own pictures of Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Amy Sherald and the two portraits.
The crowd takes their own pictures of Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Amy Sherald and the two portraits.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images



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Gateway

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Gateway
oil    © Cynthia Allman

"Let your curiosity be greater than your fear."
                                    Pema Chodron

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"Facing the Music"

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9 x 12"
oil on panel
sold
When I reproduce masters' works of art, I learn more about color, mixing paints, edging, brush strokes and composition than any class or book could possibly teach me.  My mom swore by it, which is why I spent a large chunk of my early years in museums.
Picasso's work is a whole other thing.  Three Musicians is defined as a Synthetic Cubist style - meaning the compositions are made up of jigsaw-puzzle-like shapes, flat planes and solid colors.  You don't look at it and think 'look at those brush strokes'.  But I look at every shape and try to figure out where it fits, which I probably shouldn't obsess about but that's the jigsaw-puzzle solver in me.
The recurring characters - the masked Pierrot playing the clarinet, the Harlequin strumming a guitar and the singing monk holding sheet music represents the then-popular Italian comic theater that Picasso and his friends were involved in.  
From the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Please click here for a larger view.

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Jim Carrey Starts Controversy With Painting That Looks Like Sarah Huckabee Sanders

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Comedian Jim Carrey ruffled feathers Saturday when he tweeted a photo of a painting he made that looks a whole lot like White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The actor and comedian shared the image with the caption: “This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous!”

Many Twitter users shared their extremely varied responses to the piece. Some celebrated the image, while others criticized Carrey’s use of the word “Christian” in his caption.

Carrey has been drawing and painting since he was a child, talking passionately about the hobby in a 2017 documentary short called “I Needed Color.” He talks about what his paintings mean, noting that people can “tell my inner life by the darkness in some of them” and “tell what I want from the brightness in some of them.” The 56-year-old also said that he has used painting as a way to heal a broken heart.

Carrey hasn’t said anything else on social media about the portrait that looks like Sanders, but he did share the following image on Monday:

As for who this one is supposed to be, we’ll let you figure that out on your own.



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