IT'S UNLIKELY THAT Donald Trump is fretting over his presidential portrait. With further legal troubles and several industries turned against him, the man has bigger fish to fry. But as we’ve learned time and time again through the ravages of the coronavirus and police violence, just because Trump isn’t worried about something doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. The unconfirmed, though expected, portrait offers a chance for him to shape a legacy that is in dire need of salvaging. Trump’s painting could serve to underscore—or attempt to elide—the unconventional nature of his time in office, potentially adding a glossy filter to a difficult period in American history. Of course, filtering is more than part and parcel of portraiture. It’s the very nature of the job.
Throughout the centuries, portraiture has been the province of the wealthy and, despite its biographical nature, is a genre that conceals nearly as much as it reveals. Louis XIV, another larger-than-life leader, exhibits this multiplicity of meaning all too well in his portraits. Painter Charles Poerson clothes Louis XIV in the garb of Jupiter—complete with lightning bolts in hand—to signify his victory over a series of nobility uprisings known as the Fronde. By shrouding the king’s humanity, Poerson makes Louis into someone divine, armed with greater might than mere mortals. Who needs the imago dei when you can simply be God? A different portrait replaces the gouty king’s legs with the calves of a younger man. In short, the sovereign portrait is synonymous with a kind of psychological trompe l’oeil, created to preserve power and project glory. American presidential portraits differ in their ends, though they are invested in other kinds of self-delusion: equality and equanimity.
The tradition of presidents’ portraits, often in oil paint, traces back to George Washington’s time in office and grew to accommodate first spouses. There are some exceptions to the stoic faces and banal backgrounds of the portraits, such as the meme-worthy painting of Eleanor Roosevelt that features several iterations of her face, and Bill Clinton’s unofficial portrait by Chuck Close, showing him in vivid detail while simultaneously abstracting his genial expression, his face appearing as if hidden behind shower glass—fitting for a president whose charm obscured more sinister aspects of his personality. But perhaps bland paintings (ignoring Kehinde Wiley’s Obama jungle) are the birthright of our political system.
Lest we be fooled by the all-too-prevalent McMansion, I would like to suggest that America is not a country that values glamour or ostentation. The utility of our aesthetic taste is part of the trade-off we make for a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer famous for his analysis of America’s nascent democratic system, noted “if there be less splendor than in the halls of an aristocracy, the contrast of misery will be less frequent also.” Not having a monarchy means less pomp in portraiture, but it also means that our leaders are tasked with appearing as though they are one of us. The charisma of the Kennedys certainly superseded this responsibility, as did Lincoln’s gravitas, but in their stories we see fragments of America, and by that light, fragments of who we could be. There’s beauty in this steadiness and humility. Unfortunately, this beauty is about to be shattered by a former president who believed himself above common decency and the law. This begs the question: Should he get a portrait?
Our presidents were not perfect. Many of the men elected to the “highest office in the land” committed some of the lowest acts. Owning slaves. Displaying brutality against Indigenous people. Instigating immoral wars. And so on. To paraphrase a decontextualized Sen. Lindsey Graham, if we were to deny Trump a portrait, we might have very few left. I don’t know if that would be a bad thing. Considering the image of God each person bears, however, there is something that feels right about the presidential portrait as an acknowledgement of an awful, exhilarating position held with duty and honor.
Objects with Trump’s face on them are nothing new. From the baby blimp to squeeze toys to caricatures galore, he’s got a face people love to hate—and distribute. Will his portrait be a chance for him to reclaim the dignity he forsook by way of his mafioso-esque dealings (and stripped from others)? Or will it orange-wash a disastrous presidency? We’ll simply have to wait until the writing—or rather, the painting—is on the wall.
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
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