With primped, blow-dried hair, Donald Trump made his mugshot an art form. His facial expression, aping scorn, likely practiced before a mirror, also makes it hard to take the photograph seriously as a police document.
Then there’s his performance art
Despite four indictments decided by four different juries of his peers in four different jurisdictions, you see him between arrests at rallies, on airport tarmacs, and in on-air interviews with his hands outstretched, parodying innocence.
Trump’s mugshot coming across as an art form tickles the fancy, prompting a slew of images from art history.
You can see Trump’s “who, me?” stance in Botticelli’s “Portrait of a Young Man.” And you find yourself wondering what is wrong with this youth like Trump. It is flatly denying.
On the flip side, you see the hard reality that Frida Kahlo faced up to when she painted “The Wounded Deer.” Clearly, she identifies with the hunted animal pierced by arrows.
Of course, the big difference between Trump and Kahlo is that her wounds were not self-inflicted. She painted “The Wounded Deer” after a failed spinal operation that she hoped would free her of pain that began from polio and escalated after a traffic accident.
“The Wounded Deer” conveys Kahlo’s pinned butterfly feeling – nailed to a future of disability.
At the base of her painting, she wrote “Karma” – her sense of fate that she knew couldn’t be changed.
And here’s the thing. Despite her mixing reality with fantasy by taking on a stag’s body, Kahlo’s feelings don’t look fake. You see sadness, but she’s also calm, accepting the pain that she suffered through no fault of her own.
Looking at Trump’s mugshot, you sense he will grumble until he is no more. And that’s when Jean-Auguste Ingre’s “Marquis de Pastore” painting comes to mind. The marquis’ pose suggests that he had a high opinion of himself.
You see him smirking, with one hand on his hip in apparent self-admiration. His other hand pats his torso with a superior air.
But you can’t hold that comparison between the marquis and Trump for long, given what the New York Times columnist Maggie Haberman wrote about the mugshot. She said the stare is “menacing” because he doesn’t want to look weak.
Behind the mask
Trump’s angry man looks aside, and you can imagine his true state of mind by looking at Van Gogh’s painting “Sorrowing Old Man” - said to be the artist’s portrait of himself in despair.
If not despair that Trump is feeling, then it’s fear of being found out to be the liar he is. I’m thinking of a particular detail in Carlos Crivelli’s “The Annunciation.” You see a child peering around a doorway, not wanting to be seen, looking to see what people are talking about.
You think of the child in Trump trying to see what’s happening without being seen doing it. The child is anxious in a world of people bigger than he is. But wait...
The sorrowful old man you project is Trump in Van Gogh’s painting, is far from despairing. Instead, he is busy turning his disgrace into a ballot box win by merchandizing his mugshot for fundraising. Always out to make a buck, that one.
