Sunday Pages: "The Toilette of Venus"

A painting by François Boucher

Dear Reader,

Today is Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year in the Christian faith. A not insignificant number of Americans will spend the holiday fomenting a fervent and unironic belief that Donald Trump is a man of God, a devout Christian, and, quite possibly, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—a wackadoodle notion dutifully cultivated by the man himself (Donald, not Jesus), who leans heavily into the “King of Kings and Lord of Lords and He Shall Reign Forever and Ever” aspect of the Prince of Peace. It makes me wonder: Are these worshipful MAGA morons high? Well, it is 4/20.

It’s also Hitler’s birthday, which would feel like some sort of chef’s-kiss cosmic joke on the Donald-as-Jesus narrative, except for the fact that Trump is illegally rounding people up off the street and shipping them to concentration camps in other countries without due process. Because, you know, he’s such an exemplary Christian. Put it this way: “Round people up off the street and ship them to concentration camps in other countries without due process” has never been, and never will be, a viable answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?”

Is Donald a man of faith? A devout Christian? Please. But he does believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and he does fancy himself a monarch, and he does strut around like His Majesty. I came upon an article yesterday, which of course I now cannot find, detailing how his inner circle has become irritated by Trump comporting himself like Louis XVI from Mel Brooks’s A History of the World: Part One. (“It’s good to be the king!”) But I did manage to locate a piece by Peter Baker of the Times, filed two days after the Inauguration, titled “The Return of the King’: Trump Embraces Trappings of the Throne,” that opened thus:

At a late-night inaugural ball on Monday, President Trump, flush with his restoration to power, began waving a ceremonial sword he had been given almost as if it were a scepter and he were a king.

Perhaps it is a fitting metaphor as Mr. Trump takes control in Washington again this week with royal flourishes and monarchical claims to religious legitimacy. His return to the White House has been as much a coronation as an inauguration, a reflection of his own view of power and the fear it has instilled in his adversaries.

His inaugural events have been suffused with regal themes. In his Inaugural Address, he claimed that when a gunman opened fire on him last summer, he “was saved by God to make America great again,” an echo of the divine right of kings. He invoked the imperialist phrase “manifest destiny,” declared that he would unilaterally rename mountains and seas as he sees fit and even claimed the right to take over territory belonging to other nations.

Three months later, Trump has set about transforming the Oval Office into a tacky, mafioso Versailles. He brought in his “gold guy,” a humble South Florida cabinetmaker—a carpenter, we might call him, to continue the Jesus motif—to spruce up the White House. There was a whole piece about this in the Wall Street Journal this week, with this subhead: “The president is making the world’s most famous residence more like Mar-a-Lago, his gilded Florida club.” The Economic Times explained that

Trump reportedly oversaw every detail of the revamp, guiding [his gold guy] on how to incorporate gold elements to bring a new, vibrant look to the Oval Office. The mission? Turn the traditional West Wing space into what Trump calls a “Golden Office for the Golden Age,” as quoted by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in her email to WSJ.

Golden Office? Golden Age? More like Golden Ass.

Ah, but as the old adage tells us, all that glitters is not gold. The tacky gilt appliqués haphazardly glued to the Oval Office wall like panels on a recalled Cybertruck are, apparently, 1) made of polyurethane, and 2) available at Home Depot for 58 bucks a pop (gold spray paint not included). At least the taxpayers aren’t ponying up for actual gold; the tariff fiasco has made the gold price soar.

But give the dude some props. Trump really has cultivated a distinctive MAGA aesthetic. The bright colors—yellow hair, orange skin, white shirt, red tie, blue suit—that may as well come from some lost Andy Warhol silkscreen. His male followers all cop the same look, like the courtiers would ape the fashion of the reigning king. Other than Donald himself, the men have neatly trimmed beads, à la Nayib Bukele, to cover up their weak chins. The woman have sacrificed their natural beauty at the altar of their MAGA god, artless plastic surgeons transforming pretty faces into garish Cubist grotesqueries: puffy lips, broken smiles, flattened cheekbones, to complement the ubiquitous Fox News Anchor bottle-blonde hair.

And the aesthetic of the décor is. . . pick an adjective: tacky, ostentatious, gaudy, garish. Given its origin, I think we go for something French: gauche. There are the aforementioned “gold” appliqués, the gilded tchotchkes and whim-whams adorning the mantelpiece (are these trophies from Trump’s golf tournament victories?), the chubby-cheeked cherubs (“Angels bring good luck,” he explained), the yellow and cream color palette, the preponderance of oil paintings.

On Friday’s Five 8 show, we talked about Trump’s pretenses of royalty. “He’s not a British king,” LB said. “He’s not a Vi-king. What is it?” Something French, she decided, with pouffy hairpiece and high heels. I submit Louis XV:

Trump’s style, LB determined, was “rococo.” And no one did rococo better, and more prolifically, than François Boucher, the most celebrated artist of his day: painter, draftsman, etcher, and friend to the illustrious Madame de Pompadour, the king’s mistress and confidante. He became the Premier peintre du Roi, painting pastoral scenes to hang in Louis’s Versailles bedchamber. One imagines Donald thrilling to such a thing.

In Great Paintings of All Time (1969), Paul Waldo Schwartz explains how Boucher’s work “exemplifies the tone of court aesthetics during the reign of Louis XV. The ideals of the age were formally designed in deliberate, artificial patterns, as were the endless corridors and gardens of the palace at Versailles….Boucher limned the dreams of the court with a supple hand.”

I turned to my trusty copy of A Treasury of Art Masterpieces (1939), edited by the wonderfully grouchy Thomas Craven, for his take on Boucher, and found, to my surprise, that, while the rococo master is mentioned in passing on the page about his protégé Jean Honoré Fragonard—“the incautious pornography of Boucher”—he does not merit his own entry. But we can safely assume that Craven disapproved of Boucher even more intensely than Fragonard, who, he laments, “contribut[ed] his inventive genius to the celebration of frivolity;” the critic seems to delight in relating that Fragonard “was incapable of adapting his hedonistic skill to the Age of Reason; and though the young lovers in his pictures, after dallying in barns, now settled down to domestic fertility, with swarms of children, no one cared, and he died in poverty.” (Craven never disappoints.)

“The Toilette of Venus” is a representative Boucher: the nude woman, the chubby angels, the scrunchy fabrics, the gilded crap strewn around. His enduring popularity is not difficult to understand. Whether Trump is aware of it or not, his own personal artistic taste, such as it is, owes much to the rococo exemplar.

Not everyone in Louis XV’s France dug Boucher. The art critic Denis Diderot detested him. In the Salon of 1765, he wrote:

I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. What can we expect this artist to throw onto the canvas? What he has in his imagination. And what can be in the imagination of a man who spends his life with prostitutes of the basest kind? ... He can show me all the clouds he likes; I’ll always see in them the rouge, the beauty spots, the powder puffs, and all the little vials of the make-up table."

Diderot also announced, “I have seen enough of bosoms and buttocks,” and, as Boucher infamously made a habit of using Madame Boucher as a model for some of his more debauched paintings, accused him of “prostituting his wife.” And if the voluptuous figure in Boucher’s Brunette Odalesque is indeed his missus, Diderot has a point—and we also understand what Craven means about “incautious pornography.” That painting is the 18th century French equivalent of Trump eagerly showing to his visitors the blown-up nude photo of Melania he had hanging on the back of the door in his office.

Louis XV was way cooler than Donald, and there is no one in the MAGA universe akin to Madame de Pompadour. But I think if we were somehow to go back in time and transport François Boucher from Versailles to Mar-a-Lago, he’d fit right in. Obviously, he would approve of the aesthetic. But, more importantly, the artist suffered from the same perverse erotic defect as all the MAGA men. As Schwartz explains—and he is a much less harsh critic than Craven or Diderot—Boucher “delight[s] in the female body, and many of his paintings are highly erotic variations upon this theme. At the age of thirty-three he married a seventeen-year-old girl who served as the model for many of his expatiations upon the image of Venus or Diana.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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ICYMI

Great show on Friday. Our guest on The Five 8 was Steven Beschloss: