The Curse of the Obama Portraits

From The 'Hope' poster to the recent Unveiling of former President Barrack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama's White House Portraits

Barrack Obama was inseparably tied to portraiture after his historic 2008 presidential campaign became synonymous with the Obama ‘Hope’ poster created by artist Shepherd Fairey. The portrait was the brainchild of Yosi Sergant, a confessed leftist activist who had already commissioned a huge pro-Obama painting the previous year. But it was the ‘Hope’ portrait that became the game-changer. Sergant discovered Shepheard Fairey, who spent his creative time pasting graffiti posters of Andrea The Giant tagged with the words ‘OBEY’ on decaying red brick tunnel walls under the flickering street lamps of abandoned skid-row alleys in Los Angeles. Sergant paid Fairey a small sum to create a political image with Sergant’s word ‘Hope’ as part of the trick. The next day, the photoshopped ‘Hope’ photo-poster, snatched from the internet with its signature red and blue coloring, lay complete on the bed of Fairey’s desktop inkjet printer. Sergant, as a publicist, grabbed the poster and put his brilliant Obama political campaign marketing strategy into play. The man behind the curtain ran with the image he himself had commissioned. Sergant told me firsthand how he dispatched printed copies of the ‘Hope’ poster to universities all over the country. They found immediate reception in the red hot activist bed of university campuses brimming with leftist student ideologues, wannabe revolutionaries, and hungry youth desperate for change.

The rest of that story is now history that most people know. Sergant’s poster campaign was an enormous success. It catapulted artist Shepherd Fairey out of the darkened LA back street alleys strewn with homeless people and alley cats into the focused glare and limelight of the American democrat party’s national political machine. This was uber-amplified by the ever-so-eager activist media, causing even some to get shivers up their legs while live on TV! The attention did not stop there, as Barrack Obama’s ‘hope and change’ message began to resonate among the young even across the Atlantic in Europe. Obama would go on to win the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

Shepherd Fairey’s meteoric rise sputtered when his guerilla-graffiti artistic background caught up with him like stepping on the tail of a spooked alley cat. While he cashed in on the Obama hope poster’s success, he forgot someone. Remember, it was a photo snatched from the Internet by AP photojournalist Manny Garcia? Garcia sued Fairey for copyright violation for using his photo. Garcia won, and Fairey was convicted not only of the violation but of destroying evidence of his violation in a cover-up, ending with a fine, a three-year suspended sentence, and community service (parole).

At the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, there was ecstasy at Obama’s historic win. The gushing and fawning over Obama had already begun, as he was celebrated in the ‘Man of the Hour’ show depicting Obama in a photo. Then came the inauguration with a donated copy of one of the three large collage-screen printed versions of the ‘Hope’ poster image. Washington super-lobbyist at the time, Tony Podesta, brother of then Obama transition Chairman John Podesta, former Hilliary Clinton Campaign manager, said, “He wanted to do something for art and for democrats’. Hence, he donated the large poster for the 2009 Obama Inauguration.

By the time the 2013 inauguration rolled around, even more, Obama photographs were used alongside the Obama Hope poster. This time two giant 6x9 foot jacquard tapestry photo images by artist Chuck Close flanked the photoshopped photo image of Obama in the Hope poster. It was a roof-raising Obama lovefest, as jubilant inauguration festivities were organized within the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Then came Donald Trump. The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Director responded in her tweet to the official Smithsonian Twitter page that ‘it was a dark day,’ as she donned a pussy hat and marched in the post-inauguration anti-Trump protest in Washington D.C. Kim Sajet, from Australia, personally saw to it that no triumphant political Trump campaign art would ever be on display for Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Sajet called me up and engaged me in an eleven-minute argument with me as she objected to my painting, fabricated arbitrary objections, and even lied while attempting to defend her claim that the political Obama hope poster was created from life. Yes, the esteemed National Portrait Gallery director stamped her feet, insisting that then candidate Barrack Obama personally sat with back street graffiti artist Shephard Fairey in his art studio where he created his ‘Hope’ poster! What Sajet did not realize was that I personally knew the back alley story, having heard it from the very source, Yosi Sergeant, hence the fierce argument of truth versus lies. Yosi Sergeant had displayed my 7x15 foot Trump campaign portrait, painted with brushes and on canvas, at the ‘Art of Politics’ show at Politicon in 2016 in Pasadena, California, alongside one of the other large screen printed versions of the same Obama ‘Hope’ poster Podesta had donated to the Smithsonian. You can read the rest of that story and my battle with Sajet and the Smithsonian in my new book ‘Odious and Cerberus: An American Immigrant’s Odyssey and his Free-Speech Legal Wat against Smithsonian Corruption.’

The Obama portrait curse continues. In 2018, while Trump was President, the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, under Sajet’s leadership, had expedited the ‘his and hers’ presidential portraits commissioned to artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. These new presidential portraits were the brainchild of non-other than Kim Sajet, the portrait gallery director.

As paintings, at first glance, they are handsome, colorful, and visually pleasing works of art. To the uninformed observer, they are recognizable images painted of the former President of the United States and the First Lady Michelle Obama. They are attractive, enjoyable, and yet strange. Although Wiley did an excellent job with Obama’s likeness and expression, the rest of the portrait goes downhill. It even unintentionally reflects El Greco’s mannerist style since Obama’s hands are too big for his face. The crossed arms folded over the manspreading legs, sitting on a formal chair in what looks like a hedge row bush, begs all sorts of questions, especially in the context of a permanent gallery of presidents of the United States. Why in the world spend all that time painting hundreds of leaves when the White House is dripping in iconic, relevant contextual background subject matter? If you took the paintings and hung them in a private house, no one would ever know what was going on if they did not know who Barrack and Michelle were. If the paintings were discovered wrapped in a dusty blanket a few hundred years from now in the loft of some barn somewhere in Chicago, you might think that they were paintings of somebody’s parents or maybe a well-to-do couple from the area and nothing more

Now as for Michelle Obama’s portrait by Sherald, again a pleasing composition and an attractive, enjoyable painting at first glance. But as a portrait of the First Lady of the United States of America, the image seems to betray everything that gave Michelle her role as First Lady. Yes, you can tell it is Michelle Obama, but Sherald struggled with the likeness and genuine expression, rendering the image of the face of poor quality. Again the proportions of the body, the arms, and legs, are off, maybe by design to create an unusually large woman. But it fails if it was meant as a literal representation of the body’s proportions. As to the background, which is about half the space on the canvas, you have nothing, just endless blue, which is fine for a villa in the south of Spain. All of that space could have told the American story of Michelle as First Lady, layered with symbolism and imagery that would anchor her in history as the first black female First Lady in American history. Again, if you found the Sherald painting in a barn loft, it would tell you nothing about the subject’s position, prominence, accomplishments, or significance in history. It is just another painting!

The vapid and pointless backgrounds are bizarre and maybe even by design. Director Kim Sajet’s immediate objection to my patriotic Trump painting was expressed in her snooty Australian accent, as she condescendingly objected to the American flag and the bald eagle in the painting, revealing her animosity towards American national imagery and symbolism. This is the price America is paying for having a leftist, non-American citizen from Australia as the chief curator of American historic political portraiture.

Now to the piece-de-resistance, the latest tragic Obama portraits by Burt McCurdy and Sharon Sprung were unveiled today, the 7th of September, 2022, in the White House. The Obamas seem cursed with below-par portraits! Despite being a photo, Shepherd Fairey’s Hope poster was the best for expression and context. The Smithsonian’s portraits, as we have discussed already, are similar, revealing a deliberate similarity in the selection process of the type of artistic style and values sought in the artists that are cause for concern.

Obama looks almost menacing in the photos of the painting, even prickly, lacking his charming and usual handsome demeanor. Hyper-realism with a white background…what’s the point? (The excellent photorealistic painting technique has won the day, reducing the subject to a victim of the technique's inability to convey the life and energy paintings usually can. That is what makes a painting a painting and not a photograph. It might as well have been just another photo that at least would have captured the commonly recognized Obama style.) Its white background says nothing unless it tries to put the black surrounded by the white in some woke, leftist racist code. So much time was wasted on the suit, which is very well painted, it’s a nice suit, but the portrait fails to capture Obama’s charisma; he looks like a stock trader. The forgotten America that gave him the presidency is edited out. No context, no symbolic tribute to America, nothing in the background celebrating the presidency and America’s remarkable journey documented in the first black man president in a nation that once enslaved Africans. The painting from the photo looks just like an unfinished photoshopped photo…Fail!

I like Michelle’s composition and gorgeous colors, but from the photo of the portrait, it looks like a semi-formal portrait for a beach house. (Compare the appropriate formal dress Michelle wore for the actual unveiling of the White House portraits.) Her face looks cartoonish; its perspective is wrong, along with an artificial expression, oversized anime eyes, and a stuck-on mouth. And again, nothing distinguished about either the subject or the background.

What a disgrace to the office of the presidency!

Even embarrassing!

For perspective, the portraits in the U.S. Supreme Court of departed Justices, curated by another art department, put both the Smithsonian and now the Obama White House portraits to shame. They are magnificent, dignified, and honorable. They are painterly, revealing splendid technique and the inner glow that oils on canvas alone can produce. They are consistent in their representation of the esteemed justices and the lofty and immense responsibility they wielded as justices in the land's highest court. And guaranteed, if you found one of those paintings in that old barn, you might not know who they were, but you would know they were a significant person of power, authority, and a jurist. The portraits exude all of the essential qualities and attributes of the individual and the office of a Supreme Court Justice.

The Obama portraits are irregular, disrespectfully out of their institutional context, and not quite right, causing a distraction from the subjects and their lofty entrusted positions of power and influence that he/they held. The casual imagery, divorced from the respect and power of the institution that clothed the president and his wife while in office, is a tacit mockery of the democratic system of government we enjoy. Our system of free government was born out of unimaginable suffering and sacrifice that the casual caricatures offend. Our constitutional republic, where we, the People, entrust other individual citizens with immense power and authority to lead our nation for the betterment of the entire population of over three hundred and sixty million citizens, deserve better. We, the People, deserve portraits set in their American institutional contexts. Our elected representatives and their spouses should serve as reminders, causing our deeply held values and emotions to anchor by our gazing upon the imagery that ought to embody and echo our most precious American ideals of liberty and justice for all. The man inside the White House is nothing without it.

Truth be told, you must be an American to appreciate that, not an Australian!