Trump moves Obama’s White House portrait across the hall to make room for painting of his own assassination attempt
Visitors to the White House on Friday were greeted with a new addition to the executive mansion’s art collection — a painting depicting the now-iconic photograph of President Donald Trump raising his fist just moments after a bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania last June.
White House staff installed the painting just outside the East Room, in the main foyer of the White House, at a location traditionally reserved for a painting depicting the most recent president to have his official portrait unveiled.
Because neither Trump nor his predecessor-turned-successor Joe Biden have commissioned official portraits much less had them completed and unveiled for public view, that spot had until today been filled by a painting of the 44th president, Barack Obama by artist Robert McCurdy.
Though McCurdy completed the artwork in 2018, it was not unveiled until September 2022, when both former president Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama returned to the White House to see both of their official portraits added to the White House collection.
A post on X (formerly Twitter) from the White House’s official account announced the change, leading some users on the platform to suggest that the Trump administration was doing away with the portrait of Obama. One prominent pro-Biden activist on the platform, Chris Jackson, accused the Trump White House of exhibiting what he described as “straight-up tin pot dictator energy” and having “taken down” Obama’s portrait.
But The Independent has learned that such accusations are completely unfounded.
A White House official explained that the portrait of the 46th president had been relocated across the foyer to the spot where the painting of Obama’s predecessor, George W Bush, had hung since it was unveiled in 2012. The official said the portrait of the 43rd president, a 2011 work by artist John Howard Sanden, was being relocated to a spot on the State Floor of the White House next to the 1994 portrait of Bush’s father, 41st president George HW Bush.
According to the official, the reproduction of Vucci’s iconic photograph of a bloodied Trump raising his fist against a backdrop of a hanging American flag was painted by Marc Lipp, a Florida-based artist who is also known for producing painted bronze sculptures of dogs. The official also stated that the painting was gifted to Trump by Andrew Pollack, a GOP activist from the Sunshine State whose daughter was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
The choice to display a painting based on the Associated Press photo by Vucci — the wire service’s chief photographer — comes at a time when the White House is engaging in a court battle for the right to ban him and his colleagues from the Oval Office and Air Force One in retaliation for the service refusing to refer to the body of water between Mexico and Florida as the “Gulf of America.”
Neither the White House nor Mr. Lipp’s gallery representatives immediately responded to a query on whether Mr. Lipp had properly licensed the copyrighted photograph from the AP.
If he did not receive permission to reproduce the photograph, the artist could potentially be liable for copyright infringement.
The AP has taken artists to court to enforce copyrights before. In 2011, the wire service and street artist Shepard Fairey settled a long-running dispute over Fairey’s iconic “Hope” campaign poster image of Obama. The poster was based on an image of Obama taken by an AP photographer in 2008.
According to the New York Times, the settlement included an agreement for Fairey and the AP to share the rights to the iconic poster and to financial terms that remain confidential.
