Reflecting on what it means to be "Presidential"

In the Whitehouse's official photostream at flickr, there are a few quiet shots of President Obama touring the galleries at the Centre Pompidou. [via]

If this strikes you as unusual, I doubt you're alone. Since the advent of television, presidents have increasingly come to spend most of their time being presidential. And these days it seems, there is nothing particularly presidential about looking at art.

In their rare moments of leisure we expect our leaders to jog or ride their bicycles, spend time with their family or pets, or work at their ranch or ride horses. Regan had his acting career, Carter is endlessly writing books and Clinton played the sax, but I don't believe we much think of our leaders as doing anything very creative, or even spending much time thinking along these lines.

So moments like Obama's brief walk through the Pompidou are rare. And not just in the rarity of the quiet moment the president has reflecting on these pictures, but also of the moment we have reflecting on our own picture of him.

Of course, this rarity was not always the case.

Winston Churchill (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940-45 and 1951-55) was an avid, if also amateur painter. He also wrote a number of essays on the subject, and these, along with some reproductions of his works, were ultimately published in book form as Painting as a Pastime. He writes: "To have reached the age of forty without ever handling a brush or fiddling with a pencil, to have regarded with mature eye the painting of pictures of any kind as a mystery, to have stood agape before the chalk of the pavement artist, and then to suddenly to find oneself plunged in the middle of a new and intense form of interest and action with paints and palettes and canvases, and not to be discouraged by the results, is an astonishing and enriching experience." The book is sadly out of print (and the Churchill estate wasn't ready to grant Hol reprint rights, though we asked) but it's worth tracking down a used or library copy.

Theodore Roosevelt (President of the United States from 1901-1909) wasn't a painter, but was a prolific and respected writer. While most of his books dealt with the military, the environment and the American West, as editor of Outlook magazine, he once wrote an article on the 1913 Armory Show. The show was one of the most controversial in history, and a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern art. It was the American public's first view of then-unknown Eurpoean artists like Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp. Roosevelt's article, "A Layman's Views of an Exhibition", is just that -- an honest and forthright account of what he thought of the "new" art being exhibited. Coming out clearly on the side of a more traditional home-grown art, he was never condescending or close-minded to the new. We've posted the complete text at Scribd for viewing or download, or it's available in Hol's book, For & Against: Views on the Infamous 1913 Armory Show.

Does knowing these things about Churchill and Roosevelt change your view of them? It certainly does mine and ultimately, though I don't know what it means to have a political leader who also paints, or one that writes and visits art exhibitions, I do feel better knowing it's possible.