In a painting most would shrug off as kitsch, Jon McNaughton’s Speak the Truth: Unleashing the Untamed Spirit of Freedom has Donald Trump sitting as a centerpiece between notable Republicans on his left and the Founding Fathers on his right. His form is clearly the core of the painting, centered compositionally and given far more definition than anything else. His figure seems to almost levitate off the surface of the canvas while everything else recedes into painterly impressions. Drapery gravitates around him, from a tablecloth caressing his leg to a jacket which seems to fall out of his ass. 

While immediately drawing to to mind Junius Brutus Stearns’ Washington as Statesman at the Constitutional Convention and John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, as well as the anonymous paintings of assembled presidents one might find in a Goodwill, closer inspection reveals this painting is a visual allusion to Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life. Courbet is swapped for Trump, the painter’s studio becoming the real allegorical realm of politics. While, for Courbet, what lurks behind his canvas are the characters of an accumulated bourgeois art, McNaughton has the Founding Fathers congregated behind a Trump who stares off in consideration.

Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria. But Lehrer advances this while not giving McNaughton’s work the benefit of any aesthetic curiosity at all, lackadaisically stowing his work away in the realm of kitsch, its past value accredited merely from its punk-rock sensibility of sticking it to the establishment. Why address it at all then?

For art critic Clement Greenberg, kitsch is predigested aesthetic experience: art that does the work of experiencing itself for the viewer. But this is not something endowed in the art object itself; rather, this happens within the sympathetic resonance between the subject experiencing the art and and the art object; kitsch is the cancellation of this resonance. Kitsch is a function of atrophied subjectivity, sentiment so buffeted by experience that even the most advanced artistic productions can be seemingly understood at a glance. Thus even the masterpieces of the past become kitsch for eyes which think they have seen it all. A painting becomes just a painting, and the possibility of seeing what is not there via the play of the imagination dissipates. This raises the question: might we have an aesthetic encounter with what has been written off as kitsch?

Lehrer’s derision of McNaughton’s work as kitsch propaganda denigrates its aesthetic value. But McNaughton’s work is not merely propaganda (nor is anything merely propaganda to those who can see more than mere messaging) but a real objectification of the imagination. From the perspective of those who had been allowed to fall through the cracks throughout the turmoil of the 21st century, Trump represents a political break and a restored continuity with the deeper history of America: a renewal of the optimism of the past and a trouncing of wrong-doers in the present. McNaughton’s work expresses this.

A few years ago, liking McNaughton’s art used to yield a frisson of subversive pleasure for those frustrated with the art world’s stifling orthodoxies. But today, we need artists willing to tell the truth, and more than that, we need them to make work that people take seriously. This means, like the great painters of the Renaissance, articulating criticisms of the prevailing political order in one’s work through symbol, metaphor, or subtle aesthetic gesture — the practice that I call “crypto-transgression” — than it is to make one-dimensional propaganda on behalf of the opposition party. Great art has the capacity to change us. Hollow political messaging doesn’t.

Lehrer calls for a return to the Renaissance, which for him ultimately does mean maintaining “political messaging” in art, but burying it beneath “symbol, metaphor, or subtle aesthetic gesture” in the way that, as Lehrer says, Caravaggio, “managed to encrypt observations about human sexuality, primal violence, and unfettered desire into otherwise doctrinaire Christian paintings.” Ars est artem celare. 

Lehrer purportedly takes McNaughton as his essay’s object, while really he is addressing the art world at large, which from 2016 to 2020 was completely dominated by anti-Trump art. Lehrer’s real discontent is not directed at McNaughton but at the artistic affinity milieu which, through discontent with the art world, might ironically uphold McNaughton without themselves engaging with his work aesthetically. Lehrer attempts to critique this milieu while falling into the same trap, really demanding a more sophisticated iteration of what he perceives McNaughton’s work to be doing, i.e., “articulating criticisms of the prevailing political order.” Lehrer wants to call trash trash, but doesn’t grasp that all art might be received as trash today. 

Lehrer’s calls for transgression can ultimately be conformed to the post-1960s consensus that art is tasked with protest. Comparatively, McNaughton is much more interesting than this. While Lehrer concedes to the politics of art, McNaughton’s work seems to be interested in the art of politics. Returning to Speak the Truth, the seat of the artist is taken by the politician. An accumulated history of bourgeois art is replaced with a revolutionary history, and expressed just as ambivalently. Is the murky crowd behind Courbet’s canvas being expressed through his work, or is his work blocking their shadowed outlines from view? Are the figures of the revolution speaking through Trump’s acts, or are they but one voice arguing in a crowded room? 

Most of the figures in McNaughton’s painting have an expression of anticipation, as if they’re waiting for Trump to do something. Trump, like Courbet in his own painting, is locked in contemplation. Unlike many other McNaughton paintings, Trump is not a dynamic figure here; he’s a passive fulcrum in the history of the present, possessed by history, rather than vice versa. The subjectivity of the artist and politician alike is reduced to a contemplative stance within their own respective spheres as they try to mediate history and the present. 

Despite this, McNaughton’s view of history is certainly more optimistic than Lehrer’s. By arranging contemporary figures alongside historical ones, there’s hope within his work that we are still participating in history. But there is ambivalence to this optimism. This painting is not a far cry from Diego Rivera’s murals, such as the one in the Hotel del Prado, which portrays a procession of Mexican historical and contemporary figures alongside each other in a park. In its own time, this work expressed a growing difficulty in differentiating kitsch from the avant-garde by formally enacting the tension between modernism and socialist realism. There’s a mania present in both McNaughton and Rivera, the cumulative impulse to put everyone on the canvas is motivated by the desire to transform history into one long triumphal parade — the flipside of the fear that all of these figures will amount to nothing. This is the same impulse which informed the writing of ancient histories and gave them their vigor. 

The memory of Courbet seems to flash up in McNaughton’s painting in a way that goes beyond mere aping (though there is that as well; McNaughton’s overcommitment to doubling aspects of Courbet’s painting within his own surely has this defect — even the mesmerizing painted “windows” on the wall of the artist’s studio become literal windows, and incidental shadows are artlessly repeated). The productive tension within Courbet’s painting is not absent from McNaughton’s, though the ironic once-over most would grant his work would not be able to recognize this, and, for this reason, it’s also suspect whether they would still be able to recognize it in Courbet’s.

The avant-garde art that Courbet represented and Greenberg said was characterized by a “superior consciousness of history” has disappeared today along with the criticism which could recognize it. However, it is worth asking: why is it that our supposed kitsch shows a far greater effort to explode the past into the present than Lehrer's remarkably forgetful calls for transgression, calls which would have us mindlessly repeating the back half of the 20th century ad infinitum? 

Mystifying as well is Lehrer’s demand to return to the Renaissance. We are not an aspirant class within medieval society who must secretly slide in critiques of the social order and give glimpses of rediscovered truths from antiquity. We are still bourgeois, we have no need of mystification and self-censorship. Lehrer’s imagined Catholic clerics of his new Renaissance are nothing but the Democratic Party apparatchiks which make up the art world over which he wrings his hands. Fearing a return to a repulsive anti-Trump art in the wake of a likely Trump presidency in 2024, Lehrer’s solution for the discontent in the art world is not to detach from the Democrats and their hollow protest art, but for discontents to be buried: the embellishment of vulgarity through his symbols, metaphors and subtle aesthetic gestures. Lehrer recognizes that the anti-Trump art’s attempts at protest actually gave it a closed character, but what he calls for instead — “crypto-transgression” — is ultimately advanced kitsch. 

McNaughton’s work is not worth considering on the basis of its transgressive character or its anti-establishment-ism. McNaughton’s work objectifies a want to return to a historical continuity after being thrown off course — continuity with American History, and art history, an object whose recent turns are silently protested by the untimely formalism in all of McNaughton’s paintings. There is an undeniable romantic element in McNaughton’s work, the sense that history has gone wrong. But his total commitment to presenting a positive image of a righted world is actually nothing but a negative image of a wronged world. This is the real productive core of McNaughton’s body of work. Can we still see this necessity in work like McNaughton’s, or are we forever punished to smugly nod at his political messaging?