Trump Asked Museum to Borrow a Van Gogh for the White House — Was Offered a Gold Toilet Instead
January 26, 2018Donald Trump‘s Van Gogh dreams were reportedly very creatively flushed down the drain last year.
The president asked the Guggenheim Museum in New York City if he and Melania Trump could borrow Vincent Van Gogh’s “Landscape With the Snow” to decorate the private living quarters of the White House.
Chief curator Nancy Spector, who has often criticized the president on social media, denied the Trumps of taking the 1888 painting of a man and his dog in Arles, France, according to her statement to the Washington Post on Thursday.
Instead, Spector offered them a counter-offer nothing like the oil and watercolor painting.
Vincent Van Gogh's "Landscape With the Snow"
In September, she responded to the White House Office of the Curator via email to offer the first family a “long-term loan” of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold toilet installation, titled “America,” that was used by over 100,000 visitors of the museum’s gender-neutral public restroom until that month.
The golden throne has an estimated value of over $1 million.
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“Should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Spector wrote about the fully-functioning gilded loo, according to the Post. “[Cattelan] would like to offer it to the White House for a long-term loan. It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care.”
A post shared by Nancy Spector (@nespector) on
Spector’s choice of alternative has an underlying Trump reference.
Cattelan’s 2016 creation was first proposed when Trump announced his bid for the presidency, according to a Guggenheim Museum blog post written by Spector.
“When the sculpture came off view on Sept. 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril,” she said.
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Many of Trump’s predecessors have chosen art pieces from museums and galleries from across the country.
The Kennedys were loaned the Eugène Delacroix painting, “The Smoker” from The Smithsonian while Barack and Michelle Obama chose abstract artwork by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns.