Earlier this year, a controversy erupted over a portrait of US President Donald Trump in the Colorado Capitol building. This incident is a recent example of the president’s interest in the arts. Despite his notoriously garish taste, he was correct to point out that Sarah A. Boardman’s portrait of him was flat and lifeless. In President Trump’s opinion, she “lost her talents,” inspiring the president to ask for the portrait to be taken down and replaced.
Boardman’s portrait of President Trump, as well as her paintings of other public figures, showcase the aesthetic challenges that so-called “conservative art” faces as the Trump administration influences the direction of the arts in America today.
To understand the challenges faced by art in contemporary America, we need to define “conservative art.” This type of art is not formally associated with President Trump or the Republican Party. Instead, it is a sentimental imitation of past art movements that lacks the substance of those movements while appealing to grievances about contemporary art. There is some overlap with kitsch art or academic art, but it is more superficial and politically adjacent.
While I am skeptical of political prerogatives in the arts, political conservatives are finally taking the mantle of leadership in the visual arena. The Trump administration recently reviewed works of art and exhibitions at the Smithsonian that it found politically “objectionable.” It also instituted enormous funding cuts against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) that target art embodying progressive values. It is clear that the “woke” or progressive vision, as it manifests in the arts, is a target for elimination by the Trump administration.
What is less clear is what will replace that vision. There have been attempts by the Trump White House to promote a patriotic vision in the arts. The administration launched the America250 Initiative, encouraging states to create cultural projects and develop grants that support patriotic themes in celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary. States such as New Jersey, Nevada and Mississippi are awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants for projects that are fairly politically neutral, such as murals and other public displays focused on the American Revolution.
The conservative media organization PragerU launched a rather banal Founder’s Museum as part of the initiative in the Eisenhower Building in Washington, DC, featuring reproductions of historical paintings of the founders. In typical conservative fashion, the exhibition is not very original. It features no new paintings of the Founding Fathers. However, it does have visual AI displays that bring the founders to life to tell their stories — hardly the innovative spirit that has defined American creativity for generations.
“Conservative” art still misses the mark
Despite political conservatives’ distaste for progressive visual art that brings racial themes into stories about the colonial period and America’s founding, such works tend to display a level of imagination and complexity that “conservative art” almost never matches.
In 2022, African American artist Simone Leigh’s sculptures of colonial slave women, cowrie shells and black female sphinxes adorned the interior of the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The colonial building that houses the US’ contribution to the biannual “art olympics” was decorated with a thatched roof to resemble a 1930s West African palace. In contrast, “conservative artists” would hardly ever create works of art this conceptually sophisticated.
The Trump administration has unfortunately fallen into the “conservative art” trap of rejecting newness in its arts policy. In January, President Trump signed an executive order promoting traditional architecture while vehemently rejecting contemporary styles. This was accompanied by the allocation of millions in funding for a National Garden of American Heroes, which will feature lifelike statues of great Americans in traditional sculpture materials (including marble, bronze, copper, granite and brass).
Aside from this narrow exception and the adjacent architecture policy, political conservatives have failed to provide a conceptual vision for any visual arts policy beyond purging “improper ideology” from cultural institutions. This leaves a gaping vacuum for a coherent aesthetic sensibility to define the federal government’s vision for the visual arts, in other words, a “conservative” vision.
One organization that is almost perfectly designed to fill that vacuum is the Art Renewal Center (ARC). The ARC is an ultra-conservative arts organization known for promoting “classical realism” in the fine arts as a rejection of modern and contemporary art. Founded by Fred Ross in 1999, the ARC positions itself as the guardian of the Western artistic tradition, championing a return to 19th-century French academic painting and valorizing its epitome, painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, over what Ross famously called the “Great 20th Century Art Scam.”
However, much of the art that the ARC promotes through its competitions and featured galleries demonstrates the fundamental flaws of “conservative art”. The ARC prizes an idealized and whimsical imitation of neoclassicism that is sterile and unimaginative, reminiscent of yearbook photos and cheesy “fan art.”
While most of their featured artists have superb technical skills — though a handful do not — the ARC takes something meant for a very specific context (art created during formulaic academic training) and insists that a formula meant for teaching should be applied to all art outside the academic setting. Instead of utilizing and building upon the tools of classical training, the ARC’s focus is stuck in this structure. Thus, it results in the promotion of forcefully constructed, highly centralized compositions that are difficult to relate to because they do not reflect the deep spaces and dynamic figures we interact with every day.
These defects, and the ARC’s smug sense of superiority about them, are precisely why the ARC was called the “xenophobes” of the art world and why former partners of the ARC, like the Laguna College of Art & Design, now reject them.
Jonathan Keeperman, founder of far-right publishing house Passage Press, identifies “conservative art’s” flaws as being overly moralistic, self-consciously sentimental and grievance-oriented. These shortcomings define the ARC’s preferences and precisely position the organization, as well as people who share its reactionary views, to take a significant place in the Trump administration as the government carves a path for a “conservative” revitalization of the arts.
The current direction is the wrong direction
President Trump has demonstrated some aesthetic discernment, such as in the Boardman portrait controversy. However, his tastes are still brash and unrefined. After the death of the notoriously sentimental painter Thomas Kinkade in 2012, he tweeted, “I happen to love his beautiful paintings”. Trump has also shown approval for the conservative propaganda artist Jon McNaughton, who creates flawlessly executed yet tacky paintings of conservative politicians and pundits that resemble political cartoons more than high art. This is not to mention the ornamental details across the White House that Trump had painted gold, and the decorative appliques that observers compared to polyurethane Home Depot decorations.
Among my friends and peers in the art world, there is skepticism about my concern that “Classical Realism” or a similar kitsch vision will overtake the visual arts through federal intervention — an intervention that thus far has been mostly punitive and lacking in creativity. However, my peers have a point. Progressives dominate the art world, and that is not going to change anytime soon just because President Trump is in the White House.
Instead, the impact of whatever style is promoted by the administration will be about establishing a kind of political legitimacy to the public. Conservative art will not only be legitimized, but the administration will also use this art to justify its policies through idealized imagery. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security posted a picture of Thomas Kinkade’s painting Morning Pledge in early July, associating the Trump administration’s controversial immigration policies with an idealized and nostalgic Americana aesthetic.
The saccharine scene features misty morning rain, 1950s cars, a church steeple and an American flag to match. This is not to mention Kinkade’s characteristically high-chroma palette and crudely painted foliage. This exact aesthetic, which supposedly promotes the time-honored tradition of technical excellence while neglecting the very techniques that create subtlety and depth in the depiction of objects, is reflected in some of the less technically proficient art the ARC promotes.
Classically trained artist and head of The Society of Figurative Arts in Texas, Michael Mentler, is a long-time critic of the ARC. We spoke on the phone about “conservative art” and the current direction of the representational arts. Mentler and I shared our mutual surprise that the ARC has not been more involved with the administration’s arts policy despite its perfect fit for the moment, especially given its peripheral connections with the administration.
For example, SpaceX will be launching copies of the ARC’s recent Salon winners’ paintings to the Moon. In addition, PragerU made multiple videos featuring an ARC member. Mentler thinks that the reason the ARC has not taken up this initiative is that the organization may be concerned about alienating the many liberals who associate with the ARC.
Regardless of the subject of conversation, Mentler always veered back toward discussing craft, composition and his encyclopedic knowledge of art history. His most insightful critique of the ARC’s sensibility was that they prize the “fine mimicking [of] surface detail” (an apt description of Sarah A. Boardman’s portraits) instead of valuing the structure of the figure and its placement in dynamic space (like Edward Hopper’s famous 1942 painting Nighthawks, which displays this dynamism). The term “surface detail” stuck out to me and is essentially what differentiates great art that celebrates tradition from kitsch art that reproduces a superficial imitation of the brilliance of great artists of the past.
The path forward lies in a substantive — not superficial — appreciation of the past
Impressionism, which the ARC considers to have some merit, is still seen as the beginning of the end of the heyday of classical values in the arts by Ross & Co. However, El Greco and the late work of great masters such as Jacobo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Rembrandt van Rijn, Titian, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix and other titans often display qualities that are proto-impressionistic, suggesting that the modern sensibilities the ARC derides are actually artistically advanced.
Titian is perhaps the best-known Renaissance painter to have loosened up his style as he aged. His late painting, The Flaying of Marsias (1570s), and his final painting, Pietà (1576), show a stylistic development reminiscent of the arc of Western art history. His earlier work was cleaner: skin was smoother, brushstrokes were less visible and the edges of objects were harder. As he felt more comfortable in the stylistic and technical conventions of his time, he became looser in his paint and less conventional in his methods.
Western art had the same evolution when Modernism challenged the conventions of the French Academy by building on previous examples in art history, not by rejecting them, as Fred Ross erroneously claims.
Many political conservatives doubt the continued existence of a figurative tradition that embraces standards of excellence, which Mentler sees as the result of an insufficient study of art history. In my conversation with the notable conservative cultural commentator Heather Mac Donald, she implied that such institutions are almost extinct. She suggested that Larry Kudlow’s wife’s painting atelier is among the only schools still teaching representational art. However, there are many schools, museums, galleries and self-taught artists that support the great artistic tradition of Western civilization — even if they do not make headlines or inflame the culture war.
One such institution is New York City’s Art Students’ League. The League offers courses in representational painting, drawing, sculpture and even abstract painting without denigrating or discouraging the stylistic flexibility that allows the arts to grow and change over time.
The League is not alone, with some art schools and apprenticeships remaining that offer similar skill-based instruction, as well as numerous ateliers that adhere to a more traditional approach. If conservatives are going to have an arts policy, they should replace their punitive war on wokeness with a propping up of the existing figurative tradition hiding right under their noses.
The combination of classical values and contemporary forms is not exclusive to institutions. An underappreciated figurative art movement called “disrupted realism” has adorned gallery walls with fragmented bodies, shifting faces and distorted spaces for decades. Great living figurative artists such as Jenny Saville, Alex Kanevsky, Phil Hale, as well as my close personal friends, paint in this movement. They are well-versed in art history, deeply admire the Renaissance and, like the great masters of the past, build on what their predecessors created instead of stagnating and merely copying styles popular at one specific time in history to “preserve” an art history tradition that, in reality, never stopped evolving.
Change defines the Western tradition
In modern society, we typically associate radical innovations with young start-up founders and inventors. In the pre-modern visual universe, radical innovation often belonged to the old who built on their experience. The imperfect and noncentral compositions that create narrative and movement exemplify the most sophisticated old master paintings.
The ARC demonstrates its own lack of sophistication by valorizing some of the least dynamic William-Adolphe Bouguereau paintings — paintings that Bouguereau himself said were composed under significant market pressure to conform to buyers’ tastes. Bouguereau’s earlier work, rich in saturated colors and dynamic figure poses, ironically shows stagnation over time in contrast with the growth typically associated with a decades-long career.
That same stagnation killed Boardman’s portrait of President Trump in the Colorado state Capitol. It may seem promising that the president was tantalized by the portrait that replaced it. However, while the Vanessa Horabuena painting that replaced Boardman’s may have been more realistic, it still maintained the same kind of superficiality that holds back “conservative art”. Just as kitsch creates a superficial sense of enchantment, “conservative” political art creates a superficial sense of authority defined by the dishonesty of a generic image.
President George Washington’s presidential portrait by Gilbert Stuart is striking because its volumetric rendering creates a believable sense of dimensionality, complemented by soft, subtle brushwork. President Ronald Reagan’s portrait in the White House is warm, with bright colors and thick brushstrokes. President Barack Obama commissioned Kehinde Wiley — who fuses the Western tradition with his own African-American culture — to bring together realistic portraiture with his unique floral backgrounds for his official portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Yet, the newest portrait of President Trump by Vanessa Horabuena, which was merely more technically proficient than the previous one in the Colorado Capitol Building, is still empty. The painting is more of an imitation of the photograph it was copied from than an authentic rendition of a president.
The difference between these past presidential portraits and the more recent ones of President Trump demonstrates what happens when the Western artistic tradition is embraced in its fullness — and when it is not. If political conservatives believe in the value of that tradition, they should accept the fact that the Western artistic tradition is not defined by stillness, but by a cascade of influence, with one period and movement after the other building on the last.
Furthermore, if political conservatives truly believe in their Western heritage, instead of using art as a political tool or disregarding its finer particularities, they should point their efforts toward supporting arts institutions that serve no explicit political purpose. Such a strategy would have a much more constructive impact on our culture, making today’s conservatives patrons of our heritage rather than saboteurs.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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