Portrait Capital

As Brougher points out, the kinds of artists he's likely to acquire for the Hirshhorn make a point of pushing back against inherited cliches of portraiture. Starting in 1964, Andy Warhol did a series of portraits he called "Screen Tests" in which he simply sat his subjects down in front of a movie camera and asked them not to move. Since then, says Brougher, many important artists have tended to resist the idea of revealing the sitter's personality or social status. The physical appearance is intended as "a wall that you can't get through," he says, rather than a window onto who someone really is.

Even more recently some artists, like Cindy Sherman and Nikki Lee, both in the Hirshhorn collection, have staged the photographs they take. The portraits that result-- usually using themselves as models -- can't possibly be seen as telling truths about the figures that they show. Sherman can appear in any role from tramp to librarian to decomposing corpse. Lee has had herself portrayed as both trailer trash and yuppie princess. As Brougher points out, most of the portraiture that goes on in contemporary art is "the kind of thing that's in opposition to what federal officials want to say about themselves." It is, he says, an attempt to undermine, or at least question, the traditions of portraiture that most politicians are counting on when they have their pictures painted.

And generally speaking, he said, leading contemporary artists aren't interested in cozying up to the political establishment or in making a "history stamp" meant to disseminate a leader's face. (Even traditional portraitists can balk at commemorating certain politicians: Vice President Spiro Agnew was disgraced more than 30 years ago, but the Senate only recently found an artist to sculpt his bust.)

Even medium is an issue. It's pretty clear that a lot of the most significant portraiture of the past 50 years or more has been made by photographers. Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn all produced portraits of important people that are noteworthy works of art, as well as the iconic evocations of their sitters. Dozens of today's most influential contemporary artists -- Nan Goldin, Thomas Struth, Rineke Dijkstra -- specialize in photographic people-pictures of one kind or another. A relatively straight photograph of John Kerry by Taryn Simon even made it into a comprehensive survey of New York's youngest cutting-edge artists, now in Queens.

But it's almost impossible to imagine Goldin or any of her colleagues being asked to represent a government official. Even as tame a figure as Yousuf Karsh, who shot the classic portraits of Winston Churchill and many other leaders, never made it onto the walls of the Capitol, where to this day only paintings are welcome as official portraiture.

When former House budget committee chairman Martin Sabo commissioned a portrait from painter Robert McCurdy in 2002, the artist did a decent job of using oils to approximate the look of one of Avedon's life-size, white-background photographs. But even then, it seems that Sabo's colleagues were not pleased with this departure from tradition, according to House curator Farar Elliott.

It's not that an official portrait painting can't recall a photograph. Almost all the recent ones do. Knox, who painted both Clintons from photos, says he doesn't know a single colleague who rejects the camera's help. But an official portrait can only look like photographs that even the most conservative viewers would recognize as absolutely inartistic work, if they saw them propped on someone's desk. Somehow, though, once those workmanlike photos have been translated into paint, what comes out counts as suitable for framing in gold.

The Capitol's official portrait of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, shown with the Mall stretching behind him, looks like it must have been painted from a photograph, or maybe from several photographs combined. But even if painter Thomas Nash didn't follow photographic sources slavishly, it still looks like he might have done so. That is, any tweaking done by Nash hasn't made the painting notably better than something a hack's camera could have snapped -- and that we wouldn't ever think of as a work of art.

On June 1, the National Portrait Gallery is launching its first nationwide portrait competition, borrowing an idea from its British counterpart. Photography isn't being allowed in. But even if some truly interesting painting or sculpture emerges when the winners are announced next year, it's hard to see how it could touch the hermetic world of official portraiture. Unless a picture looks a fair bit like the portraiture that's come before, it doesn't fill the peculiar social and political roles its patrons have in mind for it.

Contemporary art strives to be of its time, whereas politicians are likely to want "timeless" good taste that will ensure their immortality, even if they lose the next election.

Elliott, curator for the House, points out that most politicians don't want to commission works of art that might go on to be more famous or recognizable than they are. They might have a problem with "the kind of ars that's going to be longa " she said -- with art, that is, likely to be long-lived for its own sake, rather than because of who it represents. She also suggested a more positive take: Maybe politicians who commission portraits are not thinking of pleasing themselves or even their art-loving contemporaries, but of future citizens and legislators who will expect a certain kind of record of their nation's past.

"What they want and where contemporary art is right now may be two different places," says Brougher. And he thinks it could be a very long time before they come much closer together.

Chuck Close, a 64-year-old artist who paints huge portraits broken into a kind of mosaic grid, counts as a grand old man of American figurative painting. There are examples of his work in any art museum that can get one, and he has a large popular following. But even his work would pose a challenge as official portraiture, according to a recent talk by Betty Monkman, a former White House curator. In official Washington, she said, "there is a question of what fits into the decor," and that will make embracing more contemporary art a vexing issue for future presidents or leaders.

If money is being spent on public art of little lasting value, not all of it comes from taxpayers' wallets. Most of the official portraits intended for the Capitol cost in the middle of the $8,000 to $80,000 range often cited as the ballpark for custom portraiture, while the White House pictures can sit at the top of that scale. But they're often paid for by private sponsors, then "donated" to the nation subject to approval of the relevant art committee. (No one knows of any that have been turned down.)

In the Capitol, only portraits of the vice presidents, Senate leaders and speakers of the House depend on the public purse, and the White House commissions are all privately funded.

If there's any kind of scandal here, it's an aesthetic one. (If "aesthetic scandal" is not an oxymoron in our times.) We don't fill our most hallowed civic spaces with important art that rivals works already there by Gilbert Stuart or John Singer Sargent. We fill them with status symbols that happen to consist of gilt-framed canvases and that happen to have faces painted onto them.

The Capitol is "not an art museum," says curator Barbara Wolanin, who cares for many congressional portraits. Her colleagues in the nation's leading art museums would say that she is right -- because the recent paintings in it barely count as art.