{"id":9949,"date":"2018-07-02T14:09:59","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T14:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=9949"},"modified":"2020-07-27T20:04:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T20:04:37","slug":"warriors-and-volunteers-a-review-of-george-w-bush-portraits-of-courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=9949","title":{"rendered":"Warriors and Volunteers: A Review of George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors,<\/em> March 2\u2013October 17, 2017, George W. Bush Presidential Center, Dallas, Texas. http:\/\/www.bushcenter.org\/exhibits-and-events\/exhibits\/2017\/portraits-of-courage-exhibit.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors<\/em>. Exh. cat. New York: Crown Publishers, 2017. 191 pp, 72 color ills. Hardcover $35.00.<\/p>\n

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Like many other art historians, I have looked upon President George W. Bush\u2019s retirement pastime of painting with interest. I was drawn to the strangeness of his early self-portraits and the awkwardness of his depictions of world leaders. But perhaps unlike other art historians, I have a personal attraction to his images of wounded military veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. My partner is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran of the US Marine Corps, and I teach art history at a university where, every semester, around 20 percent of my students are either active military or veterans, most of whom served in Iraq with the US Army. I think twice when I teach bloody war images by Goya or Gardner or Dix. Some of my students have seen much worse.<\/p>\n

Bush started painting in 2012 after reading Winston Churchill\u2019s essay \u201cPainting as a Pastime\u201d (20). In the exhibition\u2019s wall text, Bush states, \u201cI was antsy. I figured that if painting had sated Churchill\u2019s appetite for learning, I might benefit from it as well.\u201d Bush primarily paints portraits. The exhibition Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief\u2019s Tribute to America\u2019s Warriors<\/em> featured painted portraits of ninety-eight men and women in the Armed Forces who sustained injuries in the war in the Middle East. Bush painted this particular series at the suggestion of his painting mentor Sedrick Huckaby, himself a portraitist, who \u201cwas aware of my world leaders series, and he suggested I paint people whom I knew but others didn\u2019t\u201d (14). This last point sticks; one learns in the catalogue that Bush met all of his portrait subjects after they sustained their injuries.<\/p>\n

The exhibition included sixty-six individual portraits, along with a large four-panel mural that depicts bust-length portraits of thirty-five veterans, though some subjects in the mural are repeated from the individual portraits. Bush painted the entire body of work in under a year. The work was presented in the special exhibitions galleries of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, where the walls were all painted olive drab, reminding viewers of the military context of the exhibition; overhead track lights spotlit the paintings. This design, augmented with two looping musical soundtracks\u2014one from an introductory video internal to the exhibition and another from a CGI wall and video blaring from the atrium\u2014created a dramatic effect. The rooms also contained central vitrines with objects unrelated to painting, which underscored that this was not an art exhibition, but rather a highly politicized space. As Bush writes in the catalogue introduction, \u201cI\u2019m not sure how the art \u2026 will hold to critical eyes. After all, I\u2019m a novice\u201d (15). Few novice painters will ever have an exhibition, complete with full-color catalogue, at this scale.<\/p>\n

Entering the exhibition, one first encounters a video of Bush speaking about this series. He refers to the subjects of his video as \u201cwarriors\u201d and \u201cvolunteers,\u201d recalls his various painting teachers, and highlights the skills one learns in the military. He notes the bravery of facing post-traumatic syndrome (PTS), emphasizing that members of the Armed Forces suffer both visible and invisible wounds. The video has a lively instrumental soundtrack that can be heard throughout the exhibition, though it fights for ear space with the equally soaring music of the digital installation in the center\u2019s atrium. This introductory space also exhibits three portraits of Bush by his painting teachers Gail Norfleet, Jim Woodson, and Huckaby.<\/p>\n