THE TRUMP NATIONAL PORTRAIT
On Friday morning, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery did what it’s always done before the inauguration of a new president and revealed a portrait of the man in question. So the public did what it’s always done, and came to see it.
“Why is he tossing an apple?” asked a woman strolling through with two friends.
“Because it’s the Big Apple,” one friend replied.
The first woman said that she liked the inclusion of the apple. “I’m a dietitian, so that’s good.”
This artwork in question: not, alas, a surprise reappearance of the six-foot-tall painting that Donald Trump bought with his charity’s money and which then went AWOL (Have you seen it? Send tips!), but rather a 1989 studio photograph by the photographer Michael O’Brien. Trump, in a suit and tie, stands against a blue sky backdrop, an apple tossed from his hand hanging in midair.
The portrait is temporary. It will hang in its spot on the first floor until the end of February. It’s not an official presidential depiction — those aren’t commissioned until the end of a presidential term, and they join the official gallery upstairs only after the pol has left the White House.
“It’s very witty, and we think a good representation,” said David Ward, the museum’s chief historian who was on hand to answer questions about the artwork. “It’s simultaneously a respectful portrait, but it also references Rene Magritte.” (You have seen the Belgian surrealist’s most famous painting: man in suit and tie, blue-sky backdrop, apple covering his face). The portrait was already a part of the gallery’s collection before the election. “We know Trump liked it, because he used it as the cover of his second book.”
“Well, there he is,” a young woman said, pausing in front of the portrait and considering it with the discernment one gives to portraits of future leaders of the free world hanging in world-class art museums. “There he is,” she said again. “The future A-hole-in-chief.”
