February 13, 2018
What's wrong with Obama's hand in that official portrait?
By Monica Showalter
I'm gonna go out on a limb here: I generally like the Obama official portrait. It's an odd style, but it expresses him, and what's more, it reflects the art of his era. It has a background that appears computer-generated as a flowey pattern, with a quite flattering visage of the first black president in a realistic rendition in the foreground. It's a composition that creates the appearance of vector art mixed with a photograph, very modern in the era of cell phones and quite similar to the mixed-media animation being produced by Hollywood. I can feel the vibe of Playa del Rey and South Central and Melrose Avenue through this piece. And Obama, of course, spent massive time during his presidency hobnobbing with the likes of Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood bigs at fundraisers around Los Angeles, so it's very him.
It's good just as Peter Hurd's official portrait of Lyndon Baines Johnson was good. (That was a more-flattering-than-he-deserved portrait, done in the most modern representational style of the era, which was done in the characteristic renditions of this Western artist, who also did this beautiful piece.) Johnson, inexplicably, hated it and got a poem about it by Richard Wilbur for his idiocy. Obama, on the other hand, loved his image, which says something about him as well, in more ways than one.
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