Sunday, April 6, 2014

George Bush's paintings: this is the art of Forrest Gump

George W Bush
 
A detail of a portrait of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Ehud Olmert
'Bush's portrait of Putin looks like something you would find in one of America's trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at.
The Guardian
"His portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America's trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It's got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has attempted to render shadow and shape in stylish blocks of fawn and woodchip and cookies 'n cream, but they don't sit right and the whole head looks mildly crazed. Perhaps this mad look is what is meant by revealing Putin's "soul", but it seems inept rather than insightful.

It looks as if Bush's art coach has showed him paintings by no less a model that the great pop portraitist Alex Katz, whose semi-abstract, wide-eyed style and flat backgrounds his hamfisted daubs vainly echo. But the results lack coherence or vitality. This is the art of Forrest Gump.

Idiocy in art has its charms. In the man who ran the free world into bloodstained buffers, those charms quickly sour. These empty headed daubs look the work of someone you wouldn't trust to mow a lawn without cutting someone's foot off."

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