As I waited for Schwarzenegger in the lobby of the governor’s office, I studied the official portraits of former governors, including those of Ronald Reagan, Earl Warren and Jerry Brown (boldly colored and cartoonish and considered so bizarre at the time it was painted that the Legislature initially refused to hang it).
From this New York Times piece on the newest crop of candidates for California governor in 2010, including former governor Jerry Brown.
The “cartoonish” painting referenced was painted by Alice Neel, a portraiturist best known for her loosely rendered, psychologically complex oil paintings of subjects both personal and famous.
Browns’ father, former California governor Edmund Brown, reportedly hated it. I love it, though — it suits the time and place it was created perfectly. Better, in fact, than most similar works. Most official portraiture — bureaucratic realism, one might call it — is hopelessly bullshit-laden, and in recent years, it’s gotten even worse. One only need look at the official portrait of George W. Bush created after his administration to see how badly the genre has been infected by that hey-we’re-all-just-a-bunch-of-bros school of business casual culture. It makes you yearn for the humorless, unsmiling grimness that marked the bureaucratic realism of the first three-quarters of the 20th Century. Brown’s feels about right. These portraits are always created to convey a certain idea to the viewer about the character of the sitter, and Brown’s use of Neel is clearly meant to convey an ideal of swingin’ progressivism and forward-thinking nonconformism, a heroic willingness to break with the past, etc. etc. It may be as much of a lie as the painting of the next guy (that’s serious-minded Republican “Duke” Duekmejian), but it’s a much easier lie to take.
Neel’s portrait of Brown still seems to raise some hackles — do a search for “Jerry Brown portrait” on Flickr sometime and marvel at how many of the results bear captions along the lines of “hey boys, lookee this stupid Democrat and his fancy weirdo picture!”. Hyuck, hyuck.
On a related note, if you’ve never seen this hilarious portrait of our former Gov. Ventura, please do so now. I don’t which detail I like best — the flag tie? The Thinker? The lightning? The light rail in the background?
(Via darkfokus.)
