George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were earnest and well-intentioned, they were clearly the work of an amateur who, if he hadn’t been president, would not have received or deserved much attention.
But the works included in this new book are another matter. Mr. Bush has learned an astonishing amount in the intervening years—during which he has studied under three distinguished teachers—and the latest results require no special pleading. The transformation is subtle: Bush works in the same Neo-Expressionist idiom as before, but he now does so with vastly greater skill. That, in itself, is a striking development in a 70-year-old man who, into his sixties, exhibited an indifference to art that verged on hostility.
