Here’s the debate question we need to ask Clinton, Trump, Sanders, and the herd of Republicans running for President:
“What art would you hang in the Oval Office?”
It sounds frivolous, but the answers reveal a lot about our last two presidents.
When George W. Bush moved from the Texas governor’s office to the Oval Office in 2001, he brought his favorite painting, a 28 x 40 oil by Westerns illustrator W.H.D. Koerner which appeared on the back of his campaign biography, A Charge to Keep. The title is from a hymn, and a friend gave him the painting because it illustrated a 1918 short story of the same name. Bush believed the figure in the painting, a cowboy charging up a hill on horseback, was a 19th century Methodist evangelist spreading his faith across the West.
“He’s a determined horseman,” the President told visitors, “a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand.”
“Bush’s personal identification with the painting,” writes David Gergen, “reveals a good deal about his sense of himself . . . . a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley’s hymn, ‘to do my Master’s will.’”
Although the painting did appear beside Ben Ames Williams’ “A Charge to Keep” in Country Gentleman Magazine, Koerner painted it three years earlier for The Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a story by William J. Neidig called “The Slipper Tongue.”
The horseman is a horse-thief fleeing a lynch mob.
But whatever its title, the work has become the best known of Koerner’s over 800 commissioned paintings and drawings, including “Hugo Hercules,” the original comic strip superhero.
Koerner immigrated from Germany at the age of three, and seventeen years later got a job as a staff artist for the Chicago Tribune for $5 a day. His duties included producing a Sunday strip for the Comics Supplement. He came up with an urban cowboy with super-strength. If that’s not enough to call him a superhero, Hugo calls himself “the boy wonder” while aiding a series of Chicago damsels-in-mild-distress.
He has his own catch phrase too, “Just as easy,” tossed off whenever he performs some inhuman feat, like ice skating with a boat on his shoulders or flinging a defensive line of football players across a goal post. Sometimes he adds, “I could do this forever,” as if Koerner hasn’t drawn him in a sufficiently effortless pose. Clark Kent wouldn’t declare, “This is a job for . . . Superman!”for almost four decades, but Hugo knows when “It’s up to me!”
Oval Office visitors commented how Koerner’s Methodist horse-thief looked a bit like George W., but Hugo was the one with the cowboy hat—offset by a sports jacket, stripped pants and bowtie. The hat vacillated between white and black though, and Hugo vacillated too. Overall he was a force for good, but his altruism was random and occasionally the good he did was correcting the harm he’d done—like when he missed a football and accidentally punted a house across a field. But at least he lugged it back, right? And so what if he uses his strength to collect the bowling competition prize money after destroying a wall and passing trolley in the process? After catching a falling safe from crushing an old man as his daughter helplessly watched, he asks: “Am I glad I did it? Wid de doll’s arms around me neck and de old gent coffing a three spot? Am I glad?”
Note that folksy way of talking too. No wonder George W. liked Koerner. And if Hugo can be a bit destructive—did he really have to rip up a porch to carry it umbrella-like over a woman worried about the rain?—he helps far more than he harms, like when he catches that family jumping from a burning house, or when he carries a fire engine to another would-be disaster. He stops that runaway horse before it crashes its owner’s carriage, but more often he only saves damsels from mild inconvenience, halting trolleys and cable cars that refuse to stop, or lifting an elephant standing on a handkerchief. And how did the striking cab-driver’s union feel when he carried that woman and her pile of crates? Dragging a derailed train twenty miles is nice, but is lifting a young Romeo and his car to his Juliet’s balcony for a parting kiss really the best use of one’s superpowers? As far as actual menaces, Hugo does wrestle a bear into submission—though he was only saving himself. Same with those three muggers who corner him at gunpoint. They look ready to abandon the criminal life after he points a canon in their faces.
Would their bullets have bounced off him? Could he have leapt tall buildings if they’d tried to escape? No idea. We’ll never know how Hugo might have matured into his yet-to-be-named genre. The strip only ran from September 1902 to January before Koerner abandoned it for better work. Soon he was studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle, creator of the 1883 classic The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, as well as varied adventures of Arthurian knights, noble pirates, and a modern Aladdin. It was a thorough education in proto-superheroes, but Koerner’s interests turned west when The Saturday Evening Post commissioned his first two frontier scenes instead. He never returned. When he died at the age of 58, he was one of the best known artists of the Old West. That was 1938, the year Action Comics No. 1 rode onto newsstands.
When the Bushes returned to Texas, they took their so-called “A Charge to Keep” with them. The Obamas, fresh from Koerner’s hometown of Chicago, replaced his galloping horse-thief with a more traditional Saturday Evening Post illustration, Norman Rockwell’s “Working on the Statue of Liberty.” At 24 x14, it’s less than half the size of Koerner’s work. It depicts four tiny workmen scaling the torch to clean its amber glass. It’s slow, dangerous work—something Hugo Hercules could have finished in three panels.
The Obama Oval Office, however, is not cowboy-free. Frederic Remington’s sculpture “The Bronco Buster” still sits on its side table, and the President not only kept but expanded his predecessor’s spy programs, herding up emails across the frontier of the World Wide Web. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel found out the NSA was following their Master’s will and bugging her phone, her government threatened the diplomatic equivalent of a lynch mob–counterespionage. “They’re like cowboys,” explained a party member, “who only understand the language of the Wild West.”
What language will our next President understand?
Maybe the next president should put up some Humphrey Bogart stills to complement Angela’s channeling Claude Rains? (“I am shocked, shocked…”)
Also: Does anybody know what was on the wall during the B. Clinton administration?
Pictures of Bill Clinton, right?
It’s an interesting and clever article as always, but I assume you don’t really believe that a President’s taste in art has anything to do with his policies. Obama’s cowboy painting aside, he also likes Jay-Z, The Wire, Bob Dylan (actually, I think Jimmy Carter was big on Dylan), and Louie C.K… He’s kind of hip for a President. But does personal taste or personal anything make a difference when you get to that level? It’s not like The Wire inspired him to call off the drug war.
Sorry, “cowboy sculpture.”
@Jack
You said it yourself. Obama’s taste tells us he’s hip. More precisely, it tells us he likes exactly what a pop culture aware liberal professional is supposed to like. (Just as Hillary Clinton’s choice of “Don’t Stop Believing” as her campaign song 7 years ago told us that she – or somebody working for her – “likes” what people who don’t really know or care anything about pop culture think the plebs like.)
Which is bad. (I remember my heart sinking when he first shared a list of his favorite musicians in 2008 – which was entirely my fault; it’s not like I ever had a reason to expect better.) Honest philistinism and real connoisseurship are both potentially good or neutral qualities. The hip are pandering. (Though maybe pandering and getting it right is better than pandering and failing – at least the former shows a kind of competence.)
You answered Jack’s question better than I can, Graham. In this case, wall art is an intriguing overlap between ad campaign and personal taste–or a carefully selected example of personal taste used as an ad? Either way, it might say something about a President, though usually only indirectly–as you pointed out so nicely with the Journey song.
Argh; deleted a confused reply; that’s what you get for responding while half dazed from insomnia.
I quite like Journey; if that makes me a plebe I can live with that I guess.
Or a wannabe plebe, or whatever.
Sorry, my confusion, and I’ve no insomnia excuse. Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” was Bill Clinton’s campaign song. And Jack says above that Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” was Hilary’s. Which is kinda funny now that I think about it. A Clinton-to-Clinton pop song allusion.
Also…I don’t exactly know that Obama’s pop culture tastes are pandering? Or, you know, all politicians always pander, but yeah, he just seems demographically on the nose for someone with mild pop culture awareness. Being friends with Beyoncé and Jay-Z I think makes you legitimately competently hip (way more hip than me, certainly), as does being able to do a thoroughly competent Al Green impression. And Michelle Obama is a legitimate fashion icon I think at this point. I don’t know…like, I can bash hipsters as well as the next hipster, but I think you can make too much of the artificiality of those particular aesthetic choices. Hipsters like what they like, too, I think.
Obama’s also a comics fan. He cited Spider-Man and Conan as two of his faves.
@Noah
All good people like Journey at least a bit. That’s different from choosing “Don’t Stop Believing” as your theme song at exactly the moment when everybody was already writing think pieces about it (for which thank the White Sox, Family Guy, and The Sopranos).
Maybe the hip do really like what they like, but that leaves the question of how they ended up liking that specific stuff.
By the way, let us note that the Trump Tower tells you everything you need to know about Donald.
And then, there’s this… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Z01US5tyg
(Which, seriously, suggests that he isn’t interested in music at all, but willing to use it if the words have the right message – making him, for better or worse, equivalent to the people who program Christian rock – I won’t say to the people who play it, because who knows what those weirdos are thinking.)
Is there any good Christian rock? A sincere question, no snark intended. After all, there’ve been centuries of wondrous Christian music — Gregorian chants, Haendel’s Messiah, Gospel songs — so why not good Christian rock?
There’s been good rock with Christian subject matter, certainly. (The Velvet Underground’s “Jesus,” Black Sabbath’s “After Forever,” Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready”… The examples can probably keep going for however long you want to take the trouble to think of them.)
I can’t think of any good rock made for liturgical purposes, though, or to convey specific doctrine. But that might just be my ignorance.
Of course, Handel’s Messiah wasn’t made for liturgical purposes either. And insofar as the juxtaposition of Bible excerpts by non-juror Charles Jennens conveys a doctrine – roughly, “the Old Testament predicted the New, so nuts to your Enlightenment skepticism” – it’s perhaps destroyed by Whig-voting opera man Handel setting the whole thing as theater music (as Jennens himself seems to have noticed, to his irritation).
I just don’t know how much personality, whether you’re talking about a president’s interests, willingness to pander, or intelligence level, matters in terms of policy. The same institutional pressures and constraints affect all of them, right? Bush and Obama are pretty different as people, but as Chris said in his article, there’s some overlap between their administrations. If Donald Trump became president, it would certainly be embarrassing to have an insulting, vulgar bully representing the country, but I don’t know whether his administration would be that different from his less loathsome Republican rivals’ administrations. Maybe in terms of immigration? I don’t know.
There are a lot of institutional constraints, but personality can matter a lot too. Bush wasn’t really very engaged or interested in governnance, so he let Cheney and Rumsfeld wander around unchecked, which got us in the Iraq war, killing a lot of people who wouldn’t have been dead otherwise.
Donald Trump could do a lot of damage, just in immigration. THe executive has a good deal of power to unilaterally enforce and not enforce laws. Trump also would probably be less tied to structural constraints because he’s not really indebted to either party. That’s why he won’t get into office. If he did though it would really be a mess.
Regarding the Christian Rock question, I won’t presume to tell a group with more sophisticated musical tastes than I have what is good. However, the following groups are composed of self-professed Christians, and the lyrics of their songs reference Christian themes. They are generally accepted as good by the mainstream of their genres, and they get secular as well as Christian radio play.
Jars of Clay
Skillet
POD
Superchick
I’m sure there are more, but those immediately come to mind. Also, the obscure Irish band U2 has communicated Christian themes in their work, but if I remember correctly, only some of the members profess Christ, and they’ve never labeled themselves a Christian band.
Also, this was an enjoyable post despite the fact that my political views differ from Chris’s, but if the whole thing had been merely a setup for Noah’s Bill Clinton snark, it would have been worth it.
Jars of Clay. I have one of their Christmas albums, good stuff.
Huh; missed this before. Lots of good Christian rock, as defined as music made by Christians about their faith. Black Sabbath, as Graham says; Violent Femmes’ Hallowed Ground; Danielson Family, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder…