Here’s a tug of the LeBlanc beret for Jennifer A. Greenhill for “Trump’s Court Artist” in The Atlantic.
Being described as a court anything to President Donald Trump qualifies as apostasy among his snarkiest critics. Consider, for example, historian John Fea’s frequent designation of “court evangelical” on his weblog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
Greenhill, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, concentrates her remarks largely on painter Jon McNaughton’s full-barreled support of Donald Trump and his pointed depictions of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, even Woodrow Wilson.
I have lived through the past several years without realizing that McNaughton does so much to provoke the cultural left, including art critic Jerry Saltz of New York magazine. Saltz, as Greenhill mentions, called one McNaughton painting (of a glowering President Obama holding a burning Constitution) “bad academic derivative realism,” “typical propaganda art, drop-dead obvious in message” and “visually dead as a doornail.” (Props to the TV affiliate CBS DC for seeking his thoughts.)
Greenhill too quickly moves on from McNaughton being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (his attending Brigham Young University is one clue). This is the one church that teaches the most exalted perspective on the nation’s founding.
Consider Article of Faith #10 on the church’s website, Come unto Christ: “We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.”
Such patriotism mixed with piety saturates McNaughton’s website, especially in the religious gallery and in the patriotic section, which includes Angel of Liberty — The Vision of George Washington.
People who have watched the strange interplay of modern art, kitsch, and religion will recognize traces of Adverntist painter Harry Anderson (who imagined Jesus knocking at the United Nations), Jack Chick, Thomas Kincaid — perhaps even Samuel J. Butcher, whose Precious Moments Chapel also favors all-star images.
What I most enjoy on McNaungton’s website are the five interactive pieces: The Forgotten Man,” “Justice for All,” “Peace is Coming,” “One Nation Under God,” “Via Dolorosa,” and “Wild Wild West.”
Each painting is a time-defying group portrait of both animate and inanimate figures, including:
President Obama (again, stepping on the Constitution this time) and all his predecessors;
Moses
Antonin Scalia
Frederick Douglass
Dorothy Day
Sally Ride
Sister Katharine Drexel
Police officer James Leahy, who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center
Condoleezza Rice
Sgt. Alvin York
The Bill of Rights
Haym Saloman
Joan of Arc
An Arab
A Knight
A Conquistador
A Spartan
A generic, ashamed Supreme Court justice
A Greedy Lawyer
A college student holding The Five Thousand Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen
A smirking Mr. Entertainment
Issac Newton
Karl Marx
Mother Teresa
A besuited Modern Christian
A Politically Correct Preacher
Vladimir Lenin
Greenhill quotes a fine comic actor thus: “‘The most consistently funny artist working today,’ tweeted the actor Michael McKean, deadpanning.”
Who would know better than McKean, who depicted both the lead singer of Spın̈al Tap and the showy harp player on Primetime Glick? Then she adds:
The artist insists he’s not joking, however. Making work for posterity is McNaughton’s stated goal; he often says he wants nothing more than for his art to endure so that it might tell future viewers “what it was like to be alive at this time in our country’s history.” Americans should take him at his word. People considered Trump a joke, too, and look where he ended up.
But wanting to tell people “what is was like to be alive at this time in our country’s history” hardly precludes humor.
As with the president, the easiest way to misunderstand McNaughton is to take him literally but never seriously — or humorously.