It’s Time to Dump the Official Governor’s Portrait–Architecture Critic Will Morgan
Saturday, May 22, 2021
The State of Rhode Island is going to spend fifty thousand dollars on an official portrait of former governor Gina Raimondo. Really?
There is nothing wrong with honoring our past chief executives with an image in the State House. It is honorable, too, to actually pay a too often underappreciated and undervalued artist for their work.
The current Secretary of Commerce deserves her place in the pantheon of Governors of Rhode Island. The problem is the word "official." Given the nature of such paintings, plus the dreadful lack of quality of the existing gubernatorial portraits, the Raimondo version is likely to be a visual disaster.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe Lincoln Chafee painting by Julie Gearan is an exception. The Providence artist pretentiously claims that her work is built of "metaphoric narratives … bolstered by stories that swim in the soup of our collective cultural conscience." At least, Gearan left out all the trappings of power and office that usually clutter up the compositions.
Typically, official portraiture has not changed much since the 19th Century: An often-corpulent white man sitting in a throne-like chair and holding some document or symbol of office.
But sometimes the personality of the governor shines through. John Pastore's dignity and fierceness recalls paintings of Renaissance popes.
More recently, the typical gubernatorial visage is a studio photo done in paint, cluttered with all sorts of references, and too little of the spirit of the subject. The most egregious of these is that of recent leader Donald Carcieri.
Carcieri portrait is a jumble of flags, a statuette of an Italian general, a ship's wheel, and family photos–signs of a life, but the subject himself is lifeless. GoLocal
RI Governor Don Carcieri and MA Governor Mitt Romney, official state portrait. Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Such visual failings are not just limited to Rhode Island. The portrait of Mitt Romney of Massachusetts looks as though it came from the same production line of predictably awful official governor hagiography. The Utah Senator looks even more wooden and unreal than Carcieri, looking less like a statesman than an insurance salesman.
These portraits are defined and mired in a sort of state-sponsored realism that is always popular but typically associated with totalitarian regimes, whether politically left or right. That genre should have been killed by photography.
Artistically considered, an idealized depiction of Stalin, Lenin, or Hitler is really not so different from our gubernatorial offerings.
Unless the Rhode Island Council of the Arts is going to get really radical and hire someone like Kehinde Wiley, who painted the official portrait of Barack Obama, it is time to accept that the tradition of idealized likeness of our leaders has long passed its sell-by date. The wooden facsimiles of our governors will never capture to the spirit of someone caught millions of times over on camera. There are formal oil paintings of FDR and Churchill, for example, but their iconic images were caught on film.
Why spend fifty grand for something that will be both unflattering to the subject and embarrassing to the State. Let's dump the painted portrait project and ask Rhode Islanders to submit their own photos of Governor Raimondo, from which the arts council's committee can choose the image that best represents our first woman governor.
GoLocal architecture critic Morgan has a doctorate in American art and was a visiting fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.
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