OLD NEWS

ART GREEN (1941–2025)
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Art Green, an original member of a rabblerousing group of artists known as the Hairy Who and a key figure in the Chicago Imagist movement, died on April 14. He was eighty-three. Green in the mid-1960s was a recent art-school graduate when he founded the Hairy Who in Chicago alongside fellow grads James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. United by little more than friendship and a passion for representational painting, the group quickly became known for their bright, bold, and often grotesque works, which were in lively contrast to the slick, more salable work of New York artists of the time such as James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. Heavily influenced by Chicago’s culture and architecture and by the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Green was known for witty, hallucinogenic paintings blending Pop and surrealist elements. His avowed goal, he said, was to create works that “hit you in the eyes.”
Arthur Green was born May 13, 1941, in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a self-taught civil engineer who worked for the railroad; his mother was an avid quilter. Immersed in the Midwestern car culture of the era, Green at first intended to be an industrial designer but on enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago shifted his major to graphic design. Discovering a dearth of classes in that discipline, he shifted to painting, graduating in 1965. Though like many artists of his generation he was originally drawn to Abstract Expressionism, he turned toward surrealism after encountering the work of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, both of which were represented in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. Green was especially intrigued by de Chirico’s metaphysical period, and his interest would inform his work, which frequently centered tropes of postwar and contemporary advertising—such as ice cream cones, women’s painted fingernails or stockinged legs, and zippers—in complex and stratified spaces. “I aspired to make paintings that were awkward and monstrous, boring and familiar,” he would later write.
In 1966, under the moniker the Hairy Who, which was evocative of the names of rock bands at the time, Green, Falconer, Nilsson, Nutt, Rocca, and Wirsum mounted the first of a series of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center on Chicago’s South Side. The group would stage a total of six informal shows by the end of 1969: three in Chicago and one apiece in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC. Though the work of each of the six artists was distinct, the Hairy Who shared a unique sense of humor, tremendous technical skill, a commitment to progressive ideas, and a fascination with the tensions generated by America’s love affair with consumerism and pop culture, its immersion in the Vietnam War, and its reckoning with the civil rights movement.
Among the works that exemplify Green’s early oeuvre are 1968’s Disclosing Enclosure, <https://tinyurl.com/24o3eutn> depicting a human face opened like a flower by bisecting zippers to reveal a flaming soft-serve cone; 1969’s Immoderate Abstention <https://tinyurl.com/24pn2y8x> , featuring a large pair of scissors that appears trapped between a billowing conflagration and a window, whose open drapes reveal a serene moonlit seascape; and Regulatory Body <https://tinyurl.com/27p4o3r5> , also 1969, which presents a waffle cone whose creamy contents are distressingly clamped in a set of electric-blue gears, above which hovers a gaping maw seemingly constructed of peanuts, caramel, and chocolate. <https://tinyurl.com/22h4hlzg>
In the 1970s, Green become increasingly interested in trompe l’oeil. Around this time, he began focusing on close-ups of hands and fingernails <https://tinyurl.com/22h4hlzg> as well as details such as wood grain. The 1980s brought an interest in the Necker cube, an optical illusion in which a two-dimensional drawing of a cube is perceived as having three dimensions and two possible spatial orientations. Green remembered the pattern from his mother’s quilts. “I was intrigued by the possibilities of simultaneously representing all sides of a rotating cube,” he wrote. “I incorporated tiling patterns of unfolded cubes along with the hypercube in my work.”
His later works continued to astound with their carefully devised strata. “Made with a meticulous touch in luminous, confectionary colors, his new paintings assert a kaleidoscopic complexity whose order takes considerable time to figure out,” wrote Ken Johnson reviewing a 2009 exhibition of Green’s work. “On star-, diamond-, circle- and otherwise eccentrically shaped panels—as well as on rectangular ones—representations of ceramic tiles, panes of glass, pieces of masking tape, interwoven colored ovals and wood-grained inner frames are intricately layered. . . . Green’s paintings conflate contradictory illusions to visually gripping, mind-stretching effect.”
“I have been trying to make layered paintings that take a long time to ‘see,’” Green explained in 2005. “I want to encourage the viewer to be conscious of the (usually unconscious) process of the interpretation and construction of images in the mind.”
Flowing alongside Green’s artistic practice was his career as a teacher, which he launched fresh out of college, teaching seventh grade in Chicago public schools. Stints as a professor at Chicago City College, Kendall College of Art and Design, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design followed. In 1977, he began teaching at the University of Waterloo in Stratford, Ontario, where he twice chaired the fine arts department and from which he retired as professor emeritus in 2006; in 2005,
Despite continuing his artistic practice to critical acclaim in recent years, Green, like many artists whose careers endure, was often asked to reckon with the distance from his earliest glory days. Responding to a 2015 query from curator Lanny Silverman on this topic for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, <https://tinyurl.com/2azhod49> he offered a modest and delightful reply. “If I was a package of doughnuts, I’d never be sold,” he said. “But the doughnuts are still good.” _Artforum

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FLYING
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THE NEW SUN KING Carolina A. Miranda
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When President Donald Trump gave Fox News host Laura Ingraham a tour of the Oval Office last month, he showed off a copy of the Declaration of Independence stashed behind a pair of navy blue curtains, as well as prominently placed portraits of George Washington and Ronald Reagan. The camera panned the room to also reveal a row of gilded vases and baskets on the mantel, golden floral moldings adhered to the fireplace and walls, and golden angels tucked into neoclassical pediments above the doors. Ingraham noted the golden accents, along with the fact that another media organization had said the president wanted to “Trumpify” the Oval Office. Trump responded: “It needed a little life.”
Every U.S. president has adapted the Oval Office to suit his taste. Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed an animal hide rug on the floor. John F. Kennedy, a World War II naval officer, hung seascapes on the walls. And Barack Obama featured indigenous ceramics on the shelves. But Trump has gone golden <https://tinyurl.com/25k5fffk> , taking the office into baroque and rococo realms typical of 17th- and 18th-century French monarchs. An analysis in the Cut called the decoration “An Interior Designer’s Nightmare.” But the sparkle conveys something more insidious about how Trump views himself. Behold the new Sun King, a wannabe emperor who views his powers as absolute — who governs by executive order, and has been recorded giggling in his gilded chamber with Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele as his administration defies a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that he facilitate the return of a Salvadoran immigrant who was wrongly deported. God save us from the king.
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The White House decor might seem inconsequential, but its aesthetics were important to the Founding Fathers, who were conscientious about what the decor might telegraph about the nascent republic. George Washington, who presently surveys the Oval Office from his position above the mantel in an 18th-century portrait by Charles Willson Peale <https://tinyurl.com/24hsauoe> , was wary of designs that smacked of royal ostentation — the country, after all, had just extracted itself from a monarchy via a bloody revolution. Before the construction of the White House, Washington inhabited a taxpayer-funded home in Philadelphia where he demanded that any additions and alterations be done in “a plain and neat manner, not by any means in an extravagant style.” As historian Betty C. Monkman writes in “The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families,” Washington “rejected the use of tapestries or rich and costly papers.” I can only imagine what the republic’s first leader would make of the golden paperweight that now sits on the Oval Office coffee table, embossed with Trump’s name in screaming ALL CAPS.
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When it came time to choose a design for a presidential residence in the late 18th century, Washington likewise picked one of the more restrained concepts. Conceived by Irish-born architect James Hoban, the White House, as it originally stood, combined the tidy symmetries and boxy practicality of Georgian architecture, a neoclassical style that had been popular in the British Isles during the 18th century. The White House was inspired, in part, by Leinster House < <https://tinyurl.com/2y9oq63q>> in Dublin, which dates to the 1740s and now houses the Irish Parliament — a Georgian structure that is grand in scale but subdued in its surface decoration.
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In keeping with the modest tone, the White House’s earliest inhabitants avoided referring to the building as a “presidential palace,” describing it instead as the “executive mansion” or the “President’s House,” the latter of which appears engraved on silver serving objects from the 19th century. It was Theodore Roosevelt who made the informal expression “the White House” the building’s official designation. The U.S. republic’s representative democracy, however imperfect and incomplete, has historically been symbolized by a “house” — not a palace.
This doesn’t mean the White House hasn’t experienced moments of exuberant ornamentation. Chester A. Arthur added a Gilded Age vibe by installing in the entrance hall a glass screen <https://tinyurl.com/28kt2mlp> by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Andrew Jackson adorned the East Room with an exploding aureole of gold stars <https://tinyurl.com/2ao5jej4> above a doorway. (Neither of these flourishes survived subsequent renovations.) And there was James Monroe, who had an abiding fondness for French decorative objects, and acquired a surtout de table <https://tinyurl.com/2do7e4s5> for the White House — a gilded ornamental centerpiece intended for elegant dinners.
The surtout remains in the White House’s collection to this day. In fact, elements of the centerpiece, namely the gilded bronze baskets <https://tinyurl.com/2asuosep> held aloft by the Three Graces that were crafted by the 19th-century French firm of Deniére et Matelin, now appear on a table behind Trump’s desk and on the mantel of the Oval Office. Some of the other golden objects on the mantel, were gifts to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. Where exactly the gilded floral wall trim comes from, along with the golden angels that are stuffed into the Oval Office’s pediments, is uncertain. The White House did not respond to my query regarding their origin or fabrication, nor did the president respond to Ingraham’s question about the source of the angels during her tour (though he did state they “bring good luck”). Enterprising tech reporter however, may have tracked down the source of the trim <https://tinyurl.com/2y9yu6jt> , which bears an uncanny resemblance to decorative pieces sold on Alibaba for $1 to $5 apiece — made in China.
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Whatever the design evolution of the White House, the president’s office has generally been a more low-key affair — principally because an office isn’t the place to bust out the glitzy state dinnerware. In 1909, when President William Howard Taft built the first Oval Office, it was designed in the Federal style, which is the form of Georgian neoclassicism favored by the Founding Fathers. An early photograph <https://tinyurl.com/29rrq3zh> upon its completion shows a room with almost no decoration — just a wooden desk, green burlap walls and a green carpet. The most prominent adornments are the Grecian-style pediments over the doors. It conveyed authority with no unnecessary flash.
For the most part, U.S. presidents have adhered to the broad contours of the Federal style when decorating the office (though FDR was partial to clutter). But Trump is the only one who seems intent on transforming it into one of those rococo period rooms <https://tinyurl.com/2bcfxmap> at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Where previous leaders have featured a small selection of paintings, Trump has stuffed the room with a salon-style hang of canvases that includes an array of U.S. presidents, along with Benjamin Franklin. In between, he has added military flags and ornate, baroque-style mirrors in gilded frames. Modern bronze busts of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Winston Churchill sit incongruously on console tables supported by gilded eagles. On the central coffee table rests a stack of bright golden coasters. With each passing news conference, the Oval Office increasingly resembles the highly ornamented Hall of Mirrors <https://tinyurl.com/2bd9sqy7> at the Palace of Versailles — a space that will make you dizzy with decoration.
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Trump likes to refer to his presidency as “a golden age” — a phrase that kicked off his inauguration speech in January and that, he has since repeated ad nauseam. Among the various merchandise in the Trump online store is a collection called “Golden Age of America” <https://tinyurl.com/2864gzud> that includes a giant chocolate bar wrapped in golden foil, a golden serving tray, golden playing cards and a “gold” headband that looks suspiciously beige <https://tinyurl.com/2xhule85> . What exactly makes our era golden Trump never explicitly says. (It’s certainly not the value of your 401(k).) But the golden age he hearkens to in his office decor is “Le Grand Siècle” (The Great Century) of the French monarchy under King Louis XIV, a.k.a. the guy who built Versailles.
For this so-called Sun King, life was golden. For his subjects, not so much. Monarchical power was absolute, with no checks or balances. Dissidents could be dispatched to prison with an order signed by the king, known as a lettre de cachet. These had to be obeyed. If the king sent you off to the Bastille, off you went; there was no due process, no appeal, no explanation. Punishments such as banishment — being deported to another territory — for a limited period or for life, were also a part of French criminal practice.
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At Versailles, Louis XIV built for himself an opulent home, but he also created an important symbol. The baroque and the rococo are forms that dwell in spectacle: gilded and mirrored surfaces, ornate floral designs, sumptuous fabrics, and paintings and sculptures imbued with intense drama. Baroque buildings like Versailles were constructed in the service of displaying the glory and the authority of the state. (Versailles, incidentally, was also a bit of a prison: located at a remove from Paris, it isolated Louis XIV’s courtiers from the rest of the aristocracy, so they wouldn’t get in the way of the king’s political plans — which largely consisted of starting wars.)
The world of King Louis XIV is the world that Trump is building for himself both aesthetically and politically. The White House media apparatus has actively promoted the idea of Trump as a king — even releasing an illustration<https://tinyurl.com/29sk5lko> m that shows him wearing a crown. In his Oval Office surroundings, Trump offers aesthetic spectacle. In the way his administration has carried out its deportations, he provides political spectacle: masked ICE agents smashing immigrants out of their cars , a university student cuffed at a citizenship interview, the deportation of hundreds to an inhumane megaprison in El Salvador — no due process, no appeal, no explanation. Trump’s gilded gewgaws and our growing authoritarian state are intimately connected. In the United States in 2025, l’etat c’est Trump.
In the presidential memorandum on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” the Trump administration describes the need to honor the “traditional” architectural heritage of the United States. But in his taste for the gloss of French kings, Trump does no such thing — instead, he rejects the traditions of the Founding Fathers in favor an aesthetic that connotes absolute rule. If history is a lesson, Trump shouldn’t get too comfortable with his royal trappings. After the French Revolution, overwrought styles such as rococo went out of fashion, as the country’s monarchs quite literally lost their heads at the hands of the peasantry. And the Hall of Mirrors? It’s now a tourist attraction.
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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
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NOAH DAVIS’S MYTHICAL SOCIAL REALISM by J.J. Charlesworth
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A note the late Noah Davis scribbled to himself – ‘best fucking painter alive’ – encapsulates the ambition of an artist who only had a short time to prove it. As it turned out, Davis died of cancer in 2015, aged 32. This retrospective consequently makes you project the what-could-have been, even as we watch, over eight years, a painter figure out what he’s about, what he wants to say and – toughest of all – to work out the painterly language he needs to turn this into images that endure.
What stands out in Davis’s approach is his commitment to painting as an artistic legacy, to be claimed by anyone who might want to pursue it. Harnessed to this is his project of representing Black subjects, and the social experience of Black people in America. Davis’s painting is social realism that reaches for something mythical – a kind of magical realism where present, past and fable combine. The early work 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007) offers us a young man, maybe a boy, diffident and watchful, who has arrived from out of the ink-black background astride a greyish white unicorn. The pair are wobbly and unstable, shaped by the flowing and disintegrating contours of Davis’s flat and unshowy rendering, in danger of being swallowed by the darkness that surrounds them. Hinting at the dashed expectations of post-civil war era America (freed slaves had been promised ‘40 acres and a mule’), it’s an allegorical work that already points to Davis’s empathy for vulnerability, while positioning ordinary people and ordinary life as a thing to be cherished.
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From there, Davis weaved a path between realism and the surrealistic, trying out all manner of art historical precedents while circling around the millennial politics of race. In Bad Boy For Life <https://tinyurl.com/25bpmw4s> (2007) a peculiarly old-fashioned scene finds a mother, her mouth absent, as if erased, spanking her son across her lap; behind her is candy-striped wallpaper and a black sideboard that might as well be bits of hard-edged abstraction. If its title hints at social and racial stereotypes, so does Single Mother with Father out of the Picture (2007–08), which by contrast negates such allusions with its poised scene of a woman in a floral-patterned armchair, her infant child standing before her, both looking out, with cautious attention, towards some point or person beyond the frame.
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There’s a tightness and awkwardness in these works, both of line and application, that Davis would quickly move on from, as he brewed his own blend of skewed figuration; trying out the bleak pessimism of Marlene Dumas in 1984 (2009), a child wearing striped pyjamas sits on the corner of a bed, their face concealed by the sinister blankness of a white mask; or the collapsed painterly space and cut-and-paste artificiality of the Leipzig School painters, in works such as the lone hatted man striding across the almost Mondrian-like planes of the empty street in The Missing Link 3 (2013). But Davis pushes out the weirder excesses to settle on a more realist view that nevertheless is fringed with the fantastical. Isis (2009) depicts his wife Karon, dressed in a golden-yellow leotard, who stands under a tree in the yard of a house, holding two huge semicircular fans. They’re reminiscent of wings, or a radiant sun. If it gestures Egyptian mythos, which has long been an alternative origin story in African American counterculture, Isis is also a moment of superbly poised, gentle intimacy.
That care for everyday life courses through the series 1975 (2013), which foregrounds subjects found in photographs taken by his mother when she was a student in Chicago. Here there’s no abrasive edge, just the celebration of minor moments – people bathing and diving into a blank blue pool; a woman’s head of braided hair, in the background anonymous storefronts; a lecturer in a classroom reading from a sheet. Davis’s insistent reduction of detail – faces are blurred, hazed by memory and time – makes for an atmosphere privileging place and community.
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The community that Davis looked for hovered between nostalgia and the making of alternative presents; in the mesmerising, purple-skied twilight scene of Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque <https://tinyurl.com/26dofotg> (2014), six women in white ballgowns or tutus dance on the lawns between modernist terraced houses. To know that Pueblo Del Rio was a postwar Los Angeles housing project designed in part by the African American architect Paul Revere Williams (elsewhere the subject of Davis’s The Architect,<https://tinyurl.com/2af8cjfg> 2009), and that it quickly fell to white flight and job loss, turns Arabesque into a what-could-have-been had race, politics and economics not intervened. But it’s also a hymn to art and culture; Davis’s demand that everyone should expect such things as a birthright. It’s a sentiment reasserted in the reconstructed presentation of Davis’s ‘knock-off’ contemporary art masterpieces – Dan Flavin-like neons, a remade Duchamp bottle rack, a Jeff Koons Hoover – which Davis and his wife exhibited in the show Imitation of Wealth (2013) at the Underground Museum, their gallery founded in Arlington Heights in 2012.
In the end, though, there is death, before which we are alone. Among Davis’s visions of conviviality are portraits of solitude. There’s his deceased father standing on a rocky cusp, looking into the void, carrying only a lantern to find his way (Painting for My Dad, <https://tinyurl.com/277dedre> 2011); the distant funeral group of Untitled (2015), around a white coffin almost disappeared from the painting’s lower edge, beneath a huge wash of vacant blue sky; and the hunched, elderly man of Untitled (2015), little more than a silhouette, a container of smokelike veils of paint, as he shuffles past Barnett Newman-like columns of mauve and grey, fading towards his exit. It’s an astonishing painting, an image that endures. _ArtReview