Why Do We Portrait?
The attempted sacking of the National Portrait Gallery.
“The head of our design and production team met with me to discuss installing stanchions to protect the paintings and manage the large crowds in the galleries. Never one to put barriers between people and art, I remember asking, ‘Don’t you think we might be going a little overboard?’”1
—Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery
Sajet was right to be concerned, and right to cave. The National Portrait Gallery is a pretty sleepy institution, but the new Presidential and First Lady portraits brought huge crowds. One suspects that the crowds are what drew the ire of Donald Trump as much as Sajet’s own remarks: Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama became a blockbuster, and if Donald Trump is self-conscious about his portrait, he is even more self-conscious about crowd size.2 Sajet isn’t a particularly interesting personality at the top of an institution that isn’t particularly interesting: the President chooses the artist to render the portrait and the NPG hangs it—Sajet’s role in the Presidential portraiture is cut the occasional ribbon and weigh the merits of velvet ropes. She has phrased that anodyne anti-stanchion position as:
“We owe it to Americans to reflect them because we owe it to accurate history. I’m not interested in only having a museum for some people.”3
Which doesn’t sound like much, until it is mutated, in the brain of Donald Trump, to an Insurrection-Level Threat:
“Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am hereby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery. She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”4
Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama is on view at the Whitney now as part of the jubilant Amy Sherald: American Sublime, and if you can parse the perils of DEI in Michelle’s own remarks about the painting, you’re a more sensitive soul than me:
“The moment I saw it, I couldn’t help but think of my parents, my grandparents, and all the generations that came before me . . . Because it reminded me that if Barack and I could end up as President and First Lady, that means that any kid, anywhere, could go on this journey, too.”5
As a practicing white male, when I hear words like that, that’s when I reach for my tiki torch!
II. Selfies please.
The concern about “Hauser Spring”—the capture of four major museums by artists from a single gallery6—buries the lede: the two blockbusters in New York this summer are portrait shows. If you haven’t braved the teeming mobs to see Sargent and Paris at the Met yet, read our remarks here; Amy Sherald’s retrospective at the Whitney is neither over-hyped nor over-titled. Subject matter aside, Sherald’s paintings are tactile, surprising, and revivifying—sublime in every sense.
It’s notable because the portrait, as a medium, feels so old-fashioned. Consider how dated taking selfies seems in 2025. Unless you happen to care about the sitter or the relative fashionability of stockings at various points in Western Civilization, portraits are the least engaging form of painting.
But there’s a lasting power of portraiture, the penumbra of which we can glimpse now that it has been so fully eclipsed by another figurative form: the mugshot. The identifying photograph was coming into use at exactly the moment that the oil portrait was falling out, and for related reasons. Throughout the nineteenth century, authorities had been grappling with how to institutionalize the masses: the field of anthropometry arose as a means to record and identify workers, convicts, and soldiers. Pioneering work in dehumanization by the Pinkertons and the French police led to the Bertillon System of finger-printing, measuring, and photographing every arrest.7 Photography became the dominant tool of authority, and the success of that system is in your wallet now: we carry our own mugshots around with us on the presupposition of criminality that is life in a modern liberal democracy.
The traditional painted portrait, too, leverages an asymmetry of power. The stanchions are real, but also metaphorical: the teeming masses flocked to Michelle and Barack Obama’s portrait in quest of contact—contact that Michelle, Barack, Amy, and Kehinde need expend no energy to maintain. You get to be with Michelle, but Michelle doesn’t have to be with you. Contact without access: the portrait is a broadcast medium.8
Few understand the leveraging of these asymmetries better than the Donald, and with good reason: no American has ever had both a mugshot and a presidential portrait. Trump’s leveraging of both reached a rococo state this week when he attempted to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery, just as his latest portrait dropped.9 The new portrait fuses the submission-hold of the mugshot to the iron fist of the broadcast.
III. Astride the world.
“As though for reassurance, he looked up at the imperturbable face in the portrait . . . The colossus that bestrode the world!”10
The only hitch is that the National Portrait Gallery is not a part of the executive branch: the Donald “has as much power to fire Sajet as I do,” in the words of The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie. While Trump’s wrong that he has the power to fire Sajet, it’s not clear that Trump is mistaken: he is asserting a power, not citing one. Bouie summarized Trump’s project:
“Of course, there is more to power than what’s on paper. Trump may not have the formal capacity to shape the leadership of any of the Smithsonian’s museums, but if others treat him as if he does, then, well, what’s the difference?”11
“The difference” has occupied the largest share of the discourse among the center since Trump’s re-election, while the “if” part has been nearly silent. Whether in the right-tacking governors of New York and California, the toady contortions of Columbia University and the sycophantic sucklings of Silicon Valley, the world has proven largely compliant to Trump’s reachy authority. What would resistance to that reach look like? Sajet has ignored the “firing,” and the board of directors is reviewing the matter as I write (on Monday, June 9). But a more important meeting is taking place in Los Angeles. If you want a picture of the future, look to those streets, where compliance is being rejected in the face of tear gas, batons, and tanks.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Kim Sajet, forward to The Obama Portraits, Princeton University Press, 2020, p. vi.
Here’s PBS’s coverage of Trump’s anxiety over the size of his crowd compared to his predecessor’s. Joke’s on you, PBS!
Kim Sajet, as quoted in “Defying Trump, National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet is still at work,” Washington Post, June 4, 2025.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime, audio guide resource, full text available here.
Zachary Small and Julia Halperin, “This Spring, One Mega-Dealer Dominates N.Y.C. Museums,” The New York Times, April 27, 2025.
The history of Bertillon and anthropometry is immediately and consistently racist; the new observation that AI is racist is but the most recent call back to the nature of its origins—eg., the use of Bertrillon’s junk science in the Dreyfus Affair, real hot-button issue in the late nineteenth century.
I’m cadging this idea from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World and from Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call, about which you can read more here, should you decline the pleasure of reading the book itself.
Jason Farago, “It’s President Trump’s New Portrait Again, This Time Full Frame,” The New York Times.
George Orwell, 1984, Signet, 1949, pp. 224-225; dig out the memory hole here.
Jamelle Bouie (in his column on this week on the National Portrait Gallery contretemps, “Now the President Is an Art Critic,” The New York Times.