President Bush's Muse; George W. Bush Unveils His Latest Portrait
TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. In national news, not to sound like a Fidelity commercial here, but what have you planned for retirement? Take former President George W. Bush, for example. There are only so many boat trips, so many rounds of golf, only so much brush a man can clear before he starts looking inward. And while it may strike some as incongruous that the tough-talking cowboy-hat-wearing decider has become a late-in-life painter, our John Berman contends that maybe we should let history be the ultimate judge.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso, Bush.</s>GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT: I do take painting seriously. It's changed my life.</s>BERMAN (voice-over): The 43rd president of the United States presenting his latest canvas to Jay Leno.</s>JAY LENO, COMEDIAN: Did you paint that? Look at that! I can't make fun of him now.</s>BERMAN: A marked difference from early period W., which trended towards, bathroom self-portraits, which the world learned about through hacked e-mails to the president's sister, Dorothy. The critics raved that the paintings --</s>JERRY SALTZ, ART CRITIC: Border on the visionary, the absurd, the perverse, the frat boy.</s>BERMAN: OK, maybe rave wasn't exactly the right word, but everyone's a critic, including a fellow former occupant of the White House.</s>WILLIAM J. CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT: I seriously considered calling you and asking you to do a portrait of me, until I saw the results of your sister's hacked e-mails. Those bathroom sketches are wonderful, but at my age, I think I should keep my suit.</s>BERMAN: Let it never be said that this man doesn't have a sense of humor. We weren't the only one surprised to find out about the former president's predilection for painting happy little trees.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now we just add some very, soft, quiet trees.</s>BERMAN: So was his brother, former Florida Governor Jed Bush, when our Jake Tapper asked him about it in March.</s>JED BUSH (R), FORMER FLORIDA GOVERNOR: He's actually become a pretty good painter.</s>TAPPER: He is good.</s>BUSH: Yes, I'll just admit that this was a surprise to me when I found this out about a year ago and he's doing it with a vengeance.</s>BERMAN: But why painting, why this late-in-life get in touch with his artistic side? He discussed it with our own John King in April.</s>G.W. BUSH: This is a rough interview.</s>JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: What do you get from it?</s>G.W. BUSH: A lot of things, John. I get to relax. I see colors differently. I am, I guess, tapping a part of the brain that, you know, certainly I never used when I was a teenager. And I get the satisfaction out of completing a project. And I paint people's pets.</s>BERMAN: Former first daughter Barbara Bush can attest to that. Her swanky New York town house, as seen in a recent "Vogue" spread, doubles as something of a gallery for her dad's cat period, not to be confused with his dog period.</s>LENO: Look at that, wow, look at that.</s>BERMAN: OK, so you may or may not be eager to hang an original W. over your mantel, but if you're not a fan, perhaps you're just too short sighted to see the genius in his oeuvre right now.</s>G.W. BUSH: It's going to take a while for history to judge whether the decisions I made are consequential or not.</s>LENO: Right.</s>G.W. BUSH: And therefore, I'm not too worried about it. No, as I've read some biographies of Washington, my attitude is if they're still writing biographies of the first guy, the 43rd guy doesn't need to worry about it.</s>TAPPER: The former president has moved on to a new period, according to "The New York Times." He wants to paint 19 world leaders with whom he worked during his time in the White House, personally looking forward to the one of Merkel. While the president's portraits have made him an instant punch line, it turns out that old W. might get the last laugh. Joining me now live from New York is Gary Saltz. He's an art critic from "New York" magazine. Jerry, we heard you in John Berman's piece. I want to read part of review you wrote earlier this year about the former president's paintings. You referred to ones of him in the shower as, quote, "simple and awkward, but in wonderful unselfconscious intense ways, they show someone doing the best he can with almost no natural gifts, except a desire to do this." So you are something of a fan of the effort, if not the execution.</s>SALTZ: I love the way of an ex-president making paintings. I mean, imagine if we had seen Abe Lincoln paint himself naked in the bathtub. This is really unusual stuff. And I loved the kind of oddity of it, the eccentricity, the feeling that this guy was just trying to paint this very private world. He painted in the weight room, he paints in the shower. It was kind of weird. And I always thought of him as a gremlin on the wing of America, and then I went into shock, because I actually like some of these paintings.</s>TAPPER: And now -- and now, we have the ability to compare his growth, the works he did earlier, with the works he's doing now. How do you, when you look at some of the early ones, the shower period, which we'll call it, how do you compare that, for instance, with the portrait he did of Jay Leno, which really was not bad? What's the value of these paintings, even if just from a historical standpoint?</s>SALTZ: Well, first, about the value, I would buy one for a few hundred dollars and donate it to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Celebrity art sometimes costs in the realm of tens of thousands of dollars. Silver Stallone, Frank Sinatra, a lot of others. I actually think, however, that the ex-president took a step backwards, honestly, in this work, where before he was painting things that the camera could not see the way a camera can't take a picture of heaven or hell. Now, he's just giving us a much more conventional photographic realism and there's kind of no insight. It's a very typical, generic, skill set. And I really wish I could talk to him and say, look, we're not going to see eye to eye on anything, but I can help you. You're no Rembrandt, but now you're just becoming a hack, and I don't want any painter to be a hack, even George W. Bush.</s>TAPPER: You said you would pay a few hundred dollars, but certainly, he couldn't command much more than a few hundred dollars for one of his paintings?</s>SALTZ: Oh, I'm sure. I mean, as I said, celebrity art can cost a lot. Sylvester Stallone, as I said, has an exhibition up, a big one, in Russia right now. So I don't think -- what the real issue is, honestly, is that any American museum would be well-served to have a paintings by an ex- president. Imagine that. Seeing into the mind of Thomas Jefferson or Martin Van Buren, for that matter.</s>TAPPER: But you can't anticipate that he would -- he would be welcomed warmly into the arms of the art world in New York City?</s>SALTZ: I would. If he continues making the better early work, I'd love to write about his work, if he would just keep making it. He said the thing that everybody in the art world agrees with. Art changed my life. I take painting seriously. Again, I sort of went into shock when I heard him say it, but I agree with George W. Bush on those two things.</s>TAPPER: All right, Jerry Saltz, thank you so much for your perspective. We appreciate it.</s>SALTZ: Thank you.