Willliam Morgan: Tacky corporate picture at Bowdoin

Jon Friedman, an artist known for portraits of  such celebrities as Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Ted Turner, donated this painting of Leon Gorman to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Gorman, the grandson of Maine sporting-goods store pioneer L.L. Bean, was a graduate of Bowdoin, in Brunswick, Maine, and served the college as a trustee. Gorman died in 2015.         

This seemingly generous gesture is really a slap in the face of one of the great college art museums in the county. Housed in a neoclassical gem designed by McKim, Mead & White, the Bowdoin museum is home to an exemplary collection of American art by such luminaries as Winslow Homer, John Singleton Copley, Edward Hopper, Gilbert Stuart and Abbott Thayer.

Based in New York and  on Cape Cod, Jon Friedman cranks out trite, officialese portraits of the rich and famous – CEOs, physicians and congressmen. All follow the same bland photo-realist formula. Leon Gorman's is one of Friedman's worst, looking like a knock-off of one of the L.L. Bean catalog covers, complete with the ubiquitous Maine hunting shoe, barn coat and a couple of incompetently rendered bird dogs.

            To be fair, the Bowdoin visage is a preliminary study for a portrait at L.L. Bean, which is based in Freeport. Museums often try to collect artists' sketches, believing them to be fresher, more immediate, and less fussed over than the finished canvas. Alas, the Leon Gorman study is neither appealing nor revealing..

William Morgan, based in Providence, taught the history of American art at Princeton. He was also a visiting lecturer at Åbo Akademi, the Swedish-language university in Finland.