All the President's Women

I wanted to feature something relevant for Presidents' Day, and I tried to find this cool painting I saw one time of all the US Presidents together. But, Googling "painting I saw one time of the presidents" didn't really produce accurate results. However, I did run across something cool.


Photographer Sherrie Levine, a prominent artist of the 1970s-80s, did an awesome series of photo collages featuring magazine images cut into silhouettes of US presidents.


Apparently there were some with JFK's silhouette as well, but I couldn't find images of those. (If you have one please send it to me and I'll post it!)

This is an earlier one in the series. It seems like she may have had a shift later on in her choice of magazine images, to more objectifying portrayals of women.


In the later ones (pictured first) with the fashion imagery, the juxtaposition with the idea of the President is greater, and the more awkward cropping reinforces that juxtaposition. It seems to comment on how women are used simply to display whatever is considered sexy and desirable in the fashion-of-the-moment, and the symbolization of more stately, revered, and lasting values is reserved for men. By contrast, the way the Victorian woman and child are framed within Lincoln's silhouette, they almost look like they belong there, as if he's protecting them. In this way, while the suggestion could still be that they are in some way subjugated, it's a much more subtle reference.

A website dedicated to the art of Sherrie Levine and contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger has an analysis of the series.

The images in this post are from (in order) MoMA, the Met, and Carriage Trade gallery.