Many good artists do bad things. Cellini and Caravaggio were both murderers; Schiele and Balthus had a thing for young girls; and more than one contemporary artist I could name has been tied up with tax evasion troubles. So just because a painter has – for example – the blood of up to 136,012 dead Iraqis on his hands does not, in itself, prove that he lacks talent.



George W Bush, whose nightmare presidency unleashed its latest aftershock this week when his dauphin John Roberts gutted our already minimal campaign finance laws, has been painting these past few years, and at his presidential library in Dallas he is exhibiting two dozen portraits of fellow world leaders. The show opens Saturday, and it has a title: The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy.

“Diplomatic” is actually not a bad word to describe the orientation of these paintings. They are not bad so much as cautious, vacant, even servile – paintings by an artist anxious, or perhaps incapable, of doing anything that might leave a mark.

A responsible art critic, I should say at the start, does not review a show without seeing it, still less solely from stills taken from a hagiographic embarrassment of a Today show interview conducted by the artist’s daughter. (That is some serious media control: interviewed by your own child in your own library on a topic of your own choosing.) But with Bush, who famously made some of the worst decisions of any president since Reconstruction based on his “gut feeling”, an exception is in order. It’s hard to imagine that his portraits, with their notably flat composition and thin brushwork, gain much from being seen in situ.

Bush’s paintings first came to light in the winter of 2013, when a hacker released images from his personal email account that included two self-portraits that were shockingly, disturbingly respectable. One was of the president, nude and from behind, standing to the right of a shower. (He stood outside the stream of water; the blood of 136,012 dead Iraqis will not come off.) The grout of the tiles moseyed jaggedly and unperpendicularly, like in a Latin American geometric abstraction, while Bush doubled himself via a fogless shower mirror, eyes visible but face half-obscured. Like the bathtub portrait that accompanied it, the shower painting showed a once-powerful man reduced to dumb flesh, using off-kilter perspective and bizarre scale to impressive effect. Had he kept it up, with a little dedication he might have approached something like the art of some recent American figurative painters, such as Wayne Thiebaud or Alice Neel.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin, painted by former US president George W Bush. Photograph: Brandon Wade/Reuters

But, sad to say, Bush has never equaled those bathing portraits, and on the evidence of the work that followed it’s clear that their naiveté and experimentation were not intentional, but the accidents of a much more customary artist struggling to gain his bearings. Since then we have been subjected to embarrassing, sometimes downright perverse depictions of dogs, cats, and Jay Leno, all of which would look more at home at a garage sale than an art gallery, which have revealed an utter indifference for anything beyond surfaces. These world leader portraits, too, offer nothing beyond a superficial engagement. What you see is what you see, as Frank Stella once said, though Stella’s minimal anti-illusionism is the last thing on one’s mind here.

Liberian president and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose portrait is perhaps the strongest of the ones that have surfaced so far, looks skyward while wearing a purple headscarf. The former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi (who knows a thing or two about venerating war criminals) smiles mildly with his familiar gray-McDonald’s-arches coiffure. Tony Blair, his Iraq co-conspirator, has been shifted far to the composition’s right – a nice, probably unintentional political metaphor. Vladimir Putin, against a lavender background, gazes straight on, his cheeks depicted with an impasto uncommonly thick in Bush’s work; this one in particular, with its strange use of lights and darks, seems to have been a struggle.

A self-portrait of former president George W Bush and his father George Bush Sr. Photograph: Brandon Wade/Reuters

None of the 24 world leaders have seen their paintings yet, and Bush seems to have worked from photographs, which is no bad thing in itself. But if you were expecting some interrogation of the nature of history through the translation of photography into painting, you should stick with Gerhard Richter. The photographic apparatus is totally suppressed in Bush’s paintings, suppressed in favor of a counterfeit studio banality. Their vacancy, their stubborn refusal to offer anything beyond the most basic signal of a famous person’s identity, is precisely what Bush will have wanted. Like the dog and cat paintings, and unlike the shower portrait, nothing is at stake here. It is futile to gaze at these paintings and discover anything of importance about Bush’s foreign policy, or even much about Bush’s post-retirement life. Or if they do, they say only this: both the painting and the policy reflect a man untroubled by outside judgment, certain beyond any doubt of his rectitude and self-worth.

We know how that turned out. One imagines that the excitement over Bush’s paintings forms part of a desperate national hunger for expiation from the unforgivable crime of his presidency, as if translating Bush into a sweet retiree at his easel will erase the illegal war, the obscene economic policy, the environmental spoliation, the executive power grab, the drowning of New Orleans. It is not to be. Bush’s little paintings will be forgotten, churned like a million other images through an unceasing news cycle and replaced tomorrow by a pop star’s accidental nudity or the 17 cutest animal pictures of all time. The Bush presidency, by contrast, endures all around us – and as we feel our way through the collapsing plutocracy he has bequeathed to us, we will need more than these wan portraits to ease the pain.