The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

FOUNDER’S FOREWORD
I must admit I had mischief on my mind when I invited Julian Raven to exhibit his massive
portrait of Donald Trump, Unafraid and Unashamed, alongside Tim Atseff’s nasty 7 Deadly
Sins portraits of the President and Jim Boden’s chilling Out of Paradise collages.
hat would have been a two-man show of
Atseff and Boden’s work, titled, The
Grotesque in 21st Century Political Art,
became a three-man show, The Good, The
Bad & The Ugly: Portraits of Our
(Unindicted) Leader— possibly the first
exhibition, anywhere, to present work by
artists who both support and oppose the
most polarizing, divisive President in our
country’s post-Civil War history.
I first became aware of Julian Raven’s
controversial portrait when several people
sent me links to Will Sommer’s interview
with the artist in the March 12 th (2019)
editions of The Daily Beast. What Sommer
reported was the simmering controversy
over the massive 8’ x 16’ portrait of Our
Leader, painted in 2015, which The
Candidate liked so much he had a copy
made for Trump Tower, but which the
august Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
had refused to exhibit.
After nearly two years of rejection by the Portrait Gallery, Raven
did what no other artist is known to have ever done: he sued, arguing
the Gallery had violated his First and Fifth Amendment rights by
refusing to hang his Trump. According to Raven’s legal complaint,
which the artist wrote and argued himself, the reasons Kim Sajet, the
Charles Krause, Founding Director of the Center for
Contemporary Political Art.
National Portrait Gallery’s director, had given
him for not exhibiting Unafraid and
Unashamed were various. At one point, she
said the painting was “too big;” at another,
“too political;” and, finally, “not very good.”
After a recent adverse ruling by U.S.
District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, who
found that “the First Amendment simply does
not apply to government art selection, no
matter how arbitrary,” The Beast quoted
Raven as saying he was prepared to appeal
McFadden’s finding “all the way to the
Supreme Court” if the Portrait Gallery didn’t
come to its senses and exhibit the portrait of
its own accord.
Perfect, I thought. Here was a political
painting that had become a political football
because it was deemed to be “too political.”
Why not stir the pot and stand up for what we
at CCPArt believe, which is that “too political”
is a lame and even cowardly excuse for not
exhibiting a work of art at any time, but especially in times like these.
By showing the Raven painting at CCPArt, fortuitously located just
a block away from the Portrait Gallery, we‘d be tweaking two sitting
ducks with one large canvas: our Established neighbor to the East for
being un-democratic or too Democratic (take your pick) and Our
Leader to the West for not knowing the difference between fine art