Old, new and exotic in Obamas’ art choices

You can’t see it, but a quiet cultural revolution is under way at the White House.

The Obamas are decorating their private spaces with more modern and abstract artwork than has ever hung on the White House walls. New pieces by contemporary black and American Indian artists are on display. Bold colors, odd shapes and squiggly lines have arrived. So, too, have some obscure artifacts, such as patent models for a gear cutter and a steamboat paddle wheel that now sit in the Oval Office.

Works by big names from the modern art world — Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko — are rubbing shoulders with lesser-known artists such as Alma Thomas, an black abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ms. Thomas’ “Watusi (Hard Edge)” hangs in the East Wing, where first lady Michelle Obama has her offices. The acrylic on canvas, on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, shows a jumble of geometric shapes in bright reds, blues and greens.

Glenn Ligon’s “Black Like Me No. 2,” a Hirshhorn loan hanging in the first family’s living quarters, is a “text painting” that reproduces words from the 1961 book “Black Like Me,” a nonfiction account by a white man who disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the South.

Mr. Ligon, a black artist from Brooklyn, N.Y., said in an interview that the painting’s theme fits with President Obama’s efforts to promote dialogue between the races.

“It’s a really important part of what he’s about and symbolically what he’s done,” Mr. Ligon said, adding that it was “intensely flattering” for the Obamas to want his painting to hang in their private spaces.

The Obamas got to work selecting new artwork for the White House even before the inauguration and had the first pieces installed on the president’s first day in office. Other pieces have arrived just in recent weeks. And there’s a Rothko piece — “No. 17 (or) No. 15” — in limbo; they haven’t quite decided what to do with it.

Working with California decorator Michael Smith and White House curator William Allman, the Obamas have borrowed dozens of works from various Washington museums and galleries, being sure to use only items that weren’t already on display. Other recent first families hung a few modern pieces in their living quarters, but none approached the scope of the Obamas, Mr. Allman said.

Mr. Smith ferried lists back and forth between the White House and the galleries and museums as the Obamas narrowed their choices.

“The first lady had clear ideas about what they were aiming for,” Mr. Allman said. “They knew their tastes, and Michael Smith knew a lot about their tastes.”

The new artwork is on display only in the first family’s living quarters and office areas. Any changes to the White House’s historic public spaces — such as the Blue Room or the State Dining Room — must be approved by the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, which has yet to meet in the Obama administration.

Could more modern artwork be headed for public spaces at the White House?

“Undoubtedly, this will be a subject that will be raised,” Mr. Allman said. There may be an opening, he said, to “collect something new and different and take a leap.”

As for the private spaces, the first lady’s office provided a list last week of dozens of pieces of artwork on loan to supplement the hundreds of more traditional landscapes, portraits and still lifes that dominate the permanent White House collection.

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