Rejecting art as propaganda

“Going Home (Suzhou) (oil on canvas), by Chen Yifei, in the show “Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts,’’ at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, through Nov. 10.

The exhibition marks the 125th anniversary of the opening of the museum's Walker Art Building by showcasing the museum's most exceptional contemporary works. Many of the 150 featured objects are being exhibited for the first time, including Chen Yifei's work above. The museum says he painted “Going Home’’ after China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a reaction to his country's use of art as propaganda during that time. “The piece not only represents his rejection of art as propaganda but his hope that the end of the revolution could open up new possibilities for art. The rest of the works in ‘Art Purposes’ are similarly challenging and provocative, offering viewers new insights and perspectives. ‘‘

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.