Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Obamas Unveil Official Paintings at National Portrait Gallery
Barack and Michelle Obama were on hand at the National Portrait Gallery Monday morning to unveil their official portraits. And, um, here they are:
No, this is not The Onion, but the actual portraits. Barack Obama, apparently being consumed by a hedge, was painted by Kehinde Wiley. Michelle Obama, in the style of a 10th grader in 1984, was painted by Amy Sherald.
What do you think of this … art?
Published in Culture
Look at the guns on Michelle!
Bukak Obama.
Re: 122
I remember seeing one or two photographs of Obama and noticing how prominent the veins in his head are. The artist is probably just painting those veins the way they look.
The more I look at the picture the more intrigued I am by the way the artist painted him looking self important, very posed, and looking like he’s being gradually subsumed by growing greenery and is too stuck on himself to notice what’s happening.
I don’t think this painting is suitable as an official portrait of one of our Presidents, but I think it’s a good work of art. To me, it seems much more effectively damning then any intentionally insulting picture would be.
I really think I’d be more comfortable with a less perceptive, less haunting official portrait of Barack Obama. It’s like I have this new and sudden appreciation for pleasant/phony paintings.
Has anyone noticed his hands where wrong?
I cannot like this.
I don’t get the joke. Either of them.
Don’t we need brash and tasteless reminders of paths once taken, never to be trod again?
Good point.
Oh, now I understand.
Its spelled Bukkake. DO NOT search that word at work!!
I think its a Japanese thing – its a fetish for semen, particularly from multiple men.
O. K., now I know why this portrait of Obama so intrigues me. It reminds me of Douglas Preston’s descriptions of finding the buildings and artifacts of a vast city, concealed for centuries under the dense growth of the rainforest in Honduras, in his 2017 book The Lost City of the Monkey God.
I wish I had a job that paid me to……take closer looks at how people perform their identities?
What is wrong with you people? GET A JOB. DO SOMETHING.
Sick pipes!
Re : 134
In reality, Michelle Obama has beautiful, graceful looking arms. However much we might want to believe it, she isn’t physically ugly. She’s actually a very handsome older woman who often looks haughty, contemptuous, aggrieved or disagreeable.
Re: 133
You know how Andrew Klavan is often pointing out that art gets past people’s conscious defenses ? Obviously, art doesn’t just work that way for the viewer. The artist, if he or she is any good, often ends up painting or writing past his or her conscious defenses.
I think that’s what happened here. However much this artist might have wanted to paint Michelle Obama in the most flattering light possible, I think her picture ends up implying that Michelle Obama didn’t grow much past the age of nineteen. This is a picture of a young and disdainful looking, beautiful, sheltered—spoiled but innocent—woman. (And I think the face in the portrait has to be exactly the face Michelle Obama had between ages of 19 and 25.)
So, yeah, even when she doesn’t exactly intend to, “through her work, she (this artist) takes a closer look at the way people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social and cultural expectations.”
Simply because of what it says about us that we put…..that we put these two unexceptionally gifted, petted and manipulated, children in the White House, I’d love it if these paintings disappeared into a collection somewhere and two typical official portraits were made.
These are just TMI.
Oh no!! How inauthentic! These are the paintings by people they chose to represent them to the world. They need to stay just as they are.
50 years from now a child visiting the presidential portrait gallery will look at them and ask, quite innocently, “How did the paintings of these two people come to be so different? Were they hated by everyone else?”
And the guide will say, “no, these paintings were painted by people chosen by President Obama and the First Lady. Unfortunately, the people they commissioned hated them and wanted to show them in a way that highlighted their petty differences and innate childish nature, instead of demonstrating the appropriate gravitas.”
Re:137
Yes. I think, in the future, it will be hard for people to believe the artist who painted Barack Obama’s portrait wasn’t deliberately mocking him, didn’t deliberately do those hands that way and make it look like a forest was creeping up and would soon cover him; or that the one who painted Michelle Obama wasn’t deliberately representing her as detached, immature, cold and self absorbed.
Oh well, gotta look on the bright side. At least Michelle Obama’s portrait is also a beautiful painting.
But, even though I never liked them, I swear I’d find 50 dollars to donate to the cause of new, more conventional portraits that left them less naked.
“Thanks for noticing they’re different, racist child of the future!“
You are a better person than I. I cannot think of a better way to represent their tenure in the White House.
That looks nothing like Michelle Obama. The woman is beautiful, sure, but she lacks Michelle’s underbite, Michelle’s eyes are closer together, her forehead is lower, her face more round, etc. Here, take a look.
The underbite only shows when she has her teeth clenched because she is so ashamed of her country.
Re: 140 and 141
Instugator, are you kidding ? If the face in the painting and the face in the photograph were at the same angle, you’d see it couldn’t be anyone but Michelle Obama. The artist nailed it. (Well, O.K., she didn’t get the hairline quite right.)
Do you know when that photograph was taken?
I’ve decided that, even though it’s very revealing, the painting of Michelle Obama is just too beautiful for me not to be happy it’s hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
If only her idiot husband could be persuaded to sit for another portrait, one with anatomically correct hands and a more dignified, presidential background. I’d love to see what this Amy Sherald would do painting Barack Obama’s portrait.
I never would have guessed that was Michelle Obama if somebody had not told me.
I think Amy Sherald would feminize him and it would come much closer to catching his inner persona.
Re#145
Funny you should write that, Steven Seward. A little while ago, I was looking online at some of Sherald’s paintings and having second thoughts thinking there is a danger she’d feminize him. That, I think, would miss what he radiates. To catch it, I think the artist would have to get that skeletal look his face sometimes has.
Wiley should, at least, be shamed into fixing the fingers and thumb on the hand that’s on the elbow. If he can’t, then he should redo the whole thing.
He just has to send it back to China with instructions.
Huh, we don’t seem to be looking at the same painting. What do you like about it?
I find the colors displeasing, especially Michelle’s (inaccurately) ashen skin tone against the plain blue background. The backgrounds in both paintings are juvenile and just wrong. One too minimalist and the other too busy. They each detract in their own way.
Michelle’s head and face are disproportionately small and her dress disproportionately dominates the canvas, while being clunky in its execution (the folds and fabric are amateurishly rendered).
I agree the likeness is close, but the overall effect is not flattering to a fairly attractive woman.
I’m having trouble finding anything redeeming in the painting.
Re: 148
Western Chauvinist, what do I like about it ? Different people are different. Everything you don’t like about it. I love that it catches how cold and defensive this lady seemed while she was in the White House. The colors have a lot to do with that. I love that while it doesn’t flatter a beautiful woman it does acknowledge that she is one. And the dress is so right for her. I love that.
For some reason, I hear George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue when I look at that picture.
Oh, I think it’s fitting, I just don’t care for it aesthetically.