chicagotribune.com OpEd
The image of a president
By Hugh Howard
February 16 2009
George Washington would have been jealous. When painter Gilbert Stuart
painted his portrait, the general spent 15 hours posing, hating every
self-conscious moment. In contrast, Barack Obama gave White House
photographer Pete Souza five minutes to record his easy smile.
Shepard Fairey went Souza one better. Fairey required none of Obama's
time to produce his now ubiquitous red, white and blue illustration.
Fairey Googled The Associated Press photograph taken by Mannie Garcia
and manipulated it to make Obama-as-hope. The resulting image has been
reproduced endlessly, on T-shirts, yard signs and stickers and has even
appeared in various guises on the covers of Time
and Esquire
.
The visual impact of Fairey's graphic was so evident that shortly after
its appearance in 2008, Obama's advisers, without adopting it formally,
welcomed it as a key campaign image. Fairey, whose works were once
described as "non-gang graffiti," has been transformed in the ensuing
months from outsider artist to political insider.
So what would Washington have thought? As our pioneer president,
Washington intuited many principles that we accept as received wisdom.
He understood that the public wanted to see what manner of man served as
chief executive, so he subjected himself repeatedly to more than a dozen
artists. Not that he ever learned to like it. "Washington was a bad
sitter," reported the step-grandson he raised from infancy. "After every
sitting, he was wont to declare this must be the last."
Out of expediency alone, Washington might well have cast an approving
eye on today's technological shortcuts; certainly he would have
preferred Souza's five minutes to hours of Stuart's company.
Washington might have been less comfortable with Fairey's approach. The
general knew very well how to make an entrance; he understood the
importance of stage presence, of silences and poses and postures. As a
man of the 18th Century, he accepted the face-to-face meeting as
essential to human affairs; he probably would have been discomfited by a
shadowy world in which the recorder-artist employs an Internet search
engine and imaging software to produce a likeness of a man he knows only
from other people's images.
The contrast to Stuart's approach is revealing. He was a practitioner of
the "science" of physiognomy. He believed passionately that temperament
and character could be read in facial features and expressions. He
studied the men and women who sat for him, looking to record on canvas
their essential natures.
Psychologists today may scoff at the antiquated notions of the
physiognomists, but Stuart's ability to identify telling details—the set
of the chin, the doubtful glance, the watery eye, the prim mouth—make
his gallery of Federal-era worthies, together with their papers, the
best means we have of acquainting ourselves with Washington, Jefferson,
Adams and their contemporaries.
Fairey draws upon his mastery of computer graphics, collages,
silk-screening and tools of the street artist, including spray paint.
These particular artistic skills, however well he employs them—and
Fairey is highly skilled—quite eclipse the ability to sketch a likeness
or render flesh tones on canvas.
Neither Washington nor Stuart would have understood Fairey's talk of
"branding" and "mainstreaming" Obama. Fairey's goal, he has said, was to
make a "promotional tool." If it worked for Obama, his image-making also
has given Fairey a giant boost. In addition to his various television
appearances, his first museum survey show just went up in Boston, a
burnished "retrospective" book is out and a mixed-media stenciled
collage of Obama-as-hope is an official part of the nation's artistic
canon. It was acquired by and is on exhibit in the Smithsonian's
National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
Obama-as-hope has become an icon, a tour de force of propaganda. But
consider it in relation to Stuart's Washington, possibly the most
reproduced likeness in history. In looking at a dollar bill, you see the
"head shot" Stuart made on commission for Martha Washington. He painted
80 replicas of it (he called them his "hundred dollar bills" because
that was the price he charged). They became so revered that, less than a
generation after the general's death, art critic John Neal observed, "If
Washington should appear on Earth, just as he sat to Stuart, I am sure
that he would be treated as an impostor."
Quite by accident, Neal may have set the standard for judging iconic
images. Certainly there are other impressions from our presidential past
that come easily to mind. One is Mathew Brady's wet plate of the craggy
Abraham Lincoln in 1860 at Cooper Union. When we think of JFK, chances
are a flickering black-and-white television screen surfaces. Those have
proven staying power.
Will Fairey's poster become the analog for Obama? Only the unpredictable
process of cultural selection can decide. But if the paradigm is
Stuart's Washington, then the best-remembered recorder of Obama will
have to convey to us a sense of the man.
Stuart's wizardry was to give the viewer the illusion that his painted
likeness was three-dimensional. Working in pure, unblended colors,
Stuart made a face that conveys Washington's gravity, a sense of repose
and strength, and the man's frustration too (his ill-fitting false
teeth, he confided to a friend, were "uneasy in the mouth").
In contrast, Fairey's stencil-like treatments are empty of character and
human content. They are fun, warm, colorful, accessible and memorable.
Although they undoubtedly played an important role in marketing the
candidate to the electorate, Fairey's Obama posters convey little or
nothing about the man.
Hugh Howard is a historian and the author of "The Painter's Chair:
George Washington and the Making of American Art."
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune