George W. Bush: A president’s self-portraits

last updated 8 January 2015

I never thought I’d say this, said art critic Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com, but “I like something about George W. Bush. A lot.” Last week, a hacker released a trove of information stolen from the former president’s emails, and among the discoveries was a pair of self-portraits painted by Bush since leaving office. One depicts Bush in the shower, his naked back toward the viewer, that famous “empty, happy gaze” reflected in a shaving mirror. The other depicts the former president’s splayed legs and feet in a bathtub, as seen from Bush’s own point of view, with the faucet still filling the tub. The paintings are simple, but reveal an unguarded Bush in his own private universe—“a man who saw the entire world from the inside.” People spent eight long years trying to fathom the contents of Bush’s seemingly incurious mind, said Oliver Burkeman in Guardian.co.uk, and here now is a glimpse. There is something affecting about the “lack of grandiosity” in these simple self-portraits that helps us “inch (slightly) toward empathy.”

I find the paintings “strangely heartbreaking,” said Bruce Handy in VanityFair.com. The recurring bathing theme suggests a need for absolution, as if Bush is trying, like Lady Macbeth, to wash the blood of Iraq from his hands and the guilt of 9/11 and Katrina from his conscience. Yet because Bush depicted himself in this “fragmented and oblique” way, his paintings also give us a sense of a man still trying to evade full scrutiny—the viewer’s and perhaps even his own. Yet that “mirror’s reflection is relentless, inescapable,” said Clare Malone in Prospect.org. However Bush tries to hide, or to regain his innocence by baptizing himself clean, these self-portraits suggest he’s a man who knows he “cannot escape his past.”

Good Lord, spare me this liberal psychobabble, said Jill Lawrence in NationalJournal.com. Bush started painting when he left office in 2009, and self-portraits “are not the only types of art he’s been producing.” Bush himself recently released a “shockingly good” portrait of his late dog Barney, and has painted several Texas landscapes, none of which support the themes of “cleansing and redemption.” Whether or not Bush paints in pursuit of post-presidential peace, said Elspeth Reeve in TheAtlantic.com, his art sure does have therapeutic value. Look how it’s helping liberals who once despised him “work out the lingering traumas of the 2000s.”