The Forgotten Man
Excerpt from "A Snake Whistles" by Travis Diehl
Travis Diehl is a writer based in New York.
The world is a beautiful and interesting place for an artist!
– Jon McNaughton
In February of 2018, Mormon painter Jon McNaughton released a new portrait: a dour Donald Trump standing in a crowded football stadium, clutching the American flag to his chest. In one hand he grasps a small blue rag, with which he would wipe the mud from Old Glory. Hannity posted an image of the painting on Twitter and dared liberals to offer their critiques. The author of this bad-faith prompt should have been enough to warn off serious critics. Never mind that rags don’t wipe away grass stains any more than jet fuel melts steel beams. What Hannity identifies, perhaps instinctively or perhaps with reflexes honed to irritate his enemies, is that a conservative interpretation of this or any image intrudes on what is supposedly the purview of liberal culture. No—whatever you say, you’re wrong. In this painting, things are how they appear, which is how they should be. The grass is green, the mud brown. The flag is red, white, and blue.
Yet critics in the mainstream press, from the New Yorker to the Los Angeles Times, took the bait. Their styles vary, but the pattern of their accusations is that, while McNaughton’s technique is passable insofar as people and things resemble themselves, he ultimately fails to take advantage of art’s capacity for nuance. This is what Jerry Saltz means when he faults McNaughton for “bad academic derivative realism . . . typical propaganda art, drop-dead obvious in message. . . . It panders and preaches to the converted and tells them what they already believe.”1 As early as 2012, Christopher Knight of the LA Times declares One Nation Under Socialism “junk”: “The painting is junk (yes, junk) not because its style is realist or anti-Modern or the image is pandering or inflammatory (you should pardon the expression). The primary reason McNaughton’s painting is a flop is simply that conflicting interpretations can be credibly applied to an image whose only function is to illustrate one idea.” In other words, McNaughton fails not because his painting supports warring readings—why, for instance, is the constitution burning in the first place? Perhaps Obama is impugning the legacy of George W. Bush?—but because he tries explicitly to narrow its meaning to a single propagandist message. “The artist has been quoted as saying that he ‘wanted to get the message across as clearly as I could.’ He failed.”2 “It’s a dismal-looking picture,” Peter Schjeldahl writes of The Forgotten Man, before pointing out that McNaughton cribbed his theme and his title from a WPA-era painting by Maynard Dixon.3
It took an amateur, however, to confront McNaughton on his own terms. Writing in Sunstone, a Mormon blog, Robert A. Rees cuts to the heart of McNaughton’s work and finds it lacking:
I believe that what Robert Frost says of poetry is true of all the arts: that they cannot be thought out, plotted, and rationalized ahead of time. “The logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, a series of revelations, as much for the poet [and artist] as for the reader [and viewer].” In his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost says that poetry should begin in delight and end in wisdom. It is that combination that draws us continually back to the arts in all their forms.
What McNaughton’s didacticism and penchant for literalism do is to commandeer our imaginations, to shackle our interpretive faculties, and to put our cognitive process on the Procrustean bed of his own private interpretation, leaving us no room to come to his art on our own. In other words, he does not trust us to make up our own minds or to know our own hearts.4
Rees states plainly, and builds his critique on, what sophisticates dance around: a belief that good art, when it ushers in truth, does so uncertainly. “No surprise for the writer,” writes Frost, “no surprise for the reader.”5
There’s the truth, and the lie; there’s us, and there’s them. The conservative wing of American politics believes—or at least finds it expedient to act as if—all issues have exactly two sides: right and wrong. Liberals, meanwhile, equivocate. Republicans value loyalty and unity, even to the point of allowing their most extremist, ideological, indecent members pull the whole party rightward. Democrats and socialists discuss. They prize diversity of membership, of discourse, and of views. Simply put, the right is decisive, the left indecisive. Only a liberal like Leon Russell could sing, in “Magic Mirror”: “The left ones think I’m right / the right ones think I’m wrong.”6
As one user writes on r/The_Donald: “Jon McNaughton is today’s Normal Rockwell. Leftists scoff at this art while celebrating the ugly, deviant, and depraved and calling it art. ART IS CONCRETE, NOT ABSTRACT / ART IS LONG-LASTING, NOT FADDISH / ART IS SOOTHING, NOT SHOCKING / ART IS UPLIFTING, NOT DEGRADING.” This Redditor breaks McNaughton down to a formula that nearly describes modernist art from before the World Wars—without the modernist project. The post sums up in a few words exactly the ab-ex and postmodern pomposities that Tom Wolfe sassily skewers in The Painted Word (1975), and that the nun Margaret Stucki rails against in her lesser-known, contemporaneous polemic against abstract art, CRUD (1973). It follows that right wing conservative art is figurative, realistic, of and for traditional daily life; and is symbolic in only the shallowest way. McNaughton’s realism isn’t meant to convey the literal, documentary existence of its subjects—which would admit some level of complexity—but to unambiguously allegorize political ideas. You needn’t think in order to solve McNaughton’s paintings. To suss out their truer truths, you only need a key.
And so, as if the painting were a locked gate, a key is given. President Trump holds it in his hand, just over the white picket fence, pressed upon by weeds on the near side, American Beauty roses on the other. McNaughton describes this painting, which he calls Make America Safe, in indelicately nationalist terms worthy of Trump himself:
Weeds crawl the fence and seek to overrun the garden of our beautiful land. This metaphor is the perfect word [sic] for those who steal from the American people and choke out the prosperity and safety of the garden of our homeland. A weed cannot be tolerated long before it grows out of control and chokes out the true plant that bears fruit. The only plants that should be allowed in the garden are those which are selected, planted, nurtured, and are properly placed. Otherwise, the garden will fail.7
Such failsafe analysis is habit forming. Therefore, faced with a painting like Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of President Obama, conservative critics simply hunt for the hidden symbols. The conservative framework within which these pundits make their living won’t accommodate an analysis more sophisticated than pointing out the figure’s sanctimonious, superior air; his weak posture and gray hair; or joking that the verdant backdrop is made of the pot Obama smoked in college, or finding the secret yet prominent sperm cell on the president’s left temple (to everyone else, it is a vein). Such pundits would rather call the painting ugly, tacky, inappropriate—the art equivalent of Obama’s infamous beige suit—than discuss the radical fact that the painting, a portrait of a Black president painted by a young, Black, gay artist, exists at all—and how, for these reasons and more, there is nothing like it among the forty-three previous portraits.
McNaughton claims his paintings are as subtle as they are absolute. “I included over sixty symbols,” he writes of one anti-Obama tour-de-force, “that represent his failures as president.” It is a cluttered wasteland. A Muslim in white robes holds a flame to a Bible. A police captain cries. McNaughton dares his fans and enemies to “take the challenge” and unearth all threescore meanings. On his website, an “interactive” image of the painting links to news stories that back up each and every symbolic dereliction. McNaughton acknowledges that this painting may be controversial, but “it’s worth it if it’ll wake up even a single American. Because this painting is a representation of Obama’s presidency.”8 Emphasis his. It is a representation. And what do representations represent, if not the truth?
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