Nelson Shanks, the artist who painted the Bill Clinton portrait hanging in the National Gallery in Washington D.C., recently slammed the president as “the most famous liar” in history and said that he incorporated the famed “blue dress” into the portrait to criticize Clinton.
Shanks insisted that the Clintons have tried to get the gallery to remove his Bill Clinton painting unveiled in 2006. “The Clintons hate the portrait,” he said.
He also noted that he put an allusion to Monica Lewinski’s famous, seamen-stained blue dress.
Q: Who did you find was the hardest to capture?
Nelson Shanks: Clinton was hard. I’ll tell you why. The reality is he’s probably the most famous liar of all time. He and his administration did some very good things, of course, but I could never get this Monica thing completely out of my mind and it is subtly incorporated in the painting.
If you look at the left-hand side of it there’s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him.
And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait Gallery. They’re putting a lot of pressure on them. [Reached by phone Thursday, a spokeswoman from the National Portrait Gallery denied that.]
No wonder the Clintons hate it. It has the spark of truth in it. Truth is like a crucifix to a vampire for the Clintons.
