The Recently Revealed, Nude Self

A few observations:

I’m intrigued by how both self-portraits are so fragmented and oblique. In the tub scene we see only the artist’s legs and then, at that, only the lower half of his thighs and his toes, with the rest of the legs mostly submerged in the (nicely rendered) hot, aerated water. In the shower scene, we see only the artist’s back and about two-thirds of his face in a shaving mirror. Why is the artist reluctant—or afraid—to paint himself fully? He flirts with revelation, painting himself nude, but then allows just glimpses of his person. He’s sort of a tease, really. But there’s poignancy, too, in his need to hide even in a self-portrait.

The anatomy of Bush’s back is awkward, his back muscles rendered as if he has a pair of droopy breasts hanging from his shoulders, but I’m guessing this is a lapse in craft, not fitness.

Psychologically, it’s telling that the artist puts his reflected face in the center of the shower painting but then has his actual figure off to the side, with his back to the viewer. One imagines that a president might feel that the public has only seen a small portion of himself, and even then only a facsimile and not the real man. Intriguingly, you can read the figure with his back turned to the viewer as both defiant and, in being almost literally marginalized, melancholy. One can easily imagine Bush—a proud man but also an ex-president widely seen, even within his own party, as a failure—harboring both those emotions. If this is indeed his work, I wonder how conscious he was about choosing these compositions.

It’s telling, too, that this famously incurious former world leader confines his subject matter to himself and his bathroom.

The green stripe around the top of the tub adds a lot to that painting’s composition and color scheme. I wonder if it is true to the environment or an artistic flourish. And the water imagery intrigues. Is the artist in some literal sense trying to “come clean” about his presidential shortcomings in these paintings? The Democrat in me would like to think so, but as Bush is a devout Christian I wonder if the showering and bathing are meant to evoke baptism.

Perhaps Bush knows these famous lines from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”: “But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Or did he tell the guys in his dorm at Yale to “turn that Beatnik shit off” whenever they played Dylan?

I think I can categorically say, and without reservation, that these two paintings are the best things Bush has ever done. And I will confess that, to my appalled surprise, I find them strangely heartbreaking.

One last thought: thank God Nixon didn’t paint.