Government Portraits

Big acquisition news! We're thrilled to welcome Robert Arneson's vital "Portrait of George (Moscone)" home to #SF: sfmoma.me/M2gWim

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  (@SFMOMA) May 31, 2012

has anyone seen the official presidential paintings? guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/… ("starving artist" sale anyone?)

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Jörg M. Colberg (@jmcolberg) May 31, 2012

@jmcolberg Yet Don Bachardy's official portrait of Jerry Brown got panned...

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nick (@vossbrink) May 31, 2012

.@vossbrink Did you see Joerg Immendorf's (official) portrait of (former chancellor) Gerhard Schroeder? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schr…

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Jörg M. Colberg (@jmcolberg) May 31, 2012

.@vossbrink or Helmut Schmidt by Bernhard Heisig (co-founder of the Leipzig School [Neo Rauch etc.]) bundeskanzlerin.de/Content/DE/Sta…

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Jörg M. Colberg (@jmcolberg) May 31, 2012

@jmcolberg Not aware of either of those. I'm beginning to think that there should be a fuckyeahgovtportraits tumblr.

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nick (@vossbrink) May 31, 2012

Between SFMoMA’s new acquisition and the prompt from Jörg Colberg, I may soon succumb to the temptations of tumblr. I do not know whether I would include Avedon’s The Family in this though. I kind of like the idea of it being official government-commisioned portrait work which is not the usual non-offensive* official government work.

*Yes, “non-offensive” is a nice way of saying boring and bureaucratic. But it also gets at the fact that the primary purpose of these portraits is to fit in with already-existing portraits and be lowest-common-denominator acceptable to everyone.

The only reason why I haven’t started a tumblr yet is because I fear that I won’t find any more examples after the four here.

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