{"id":68254,"date":"2025-07-16T22:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T22:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/68254\/"},"modified":"2025-07-16T22:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T22:16:10","slug":"rashid-johnson-painting-spotted-in-trump-officials-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/68254\/","title":{"rendered":"Rashid Johnson Painting Spotted in Trump Official’s Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis week, United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed off to social media<\/a> his newest purchase: a top-shelf tequila bottle. But a different object in the picture caught the eye\u2014and ire\u2014of some in the art world: a painting that appears to be by Rashid Johnson<\/a>, an artist whose work is currently being surveyed by the Guggenheim Museum.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohnson, an art star represented by Hauser & Wirth, began the series at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, adapting the frenzied visual vernacular of his loosely figurative, long-running \u201cAnxious Men\u201d paintings for the new global (ab)normal. Using a red oil stick on a cotton rag, Johnson articulated with these abstract agitations the simmering dread that defined our 2020 indoors.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tThe series has performed solidly at auction, with works leaving the block in the $1 million\u2013$2 million range. A spread of institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Morgan Library, own works from the series.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCritics were swift to note the irony of Lutnick, a former businessman appointed by President Donald Trump and current subject of scrutiny over his AI dealings, owning an \u201cAnxious Red\u201d piece, given the administration\u2019s antagonistic relationship to public health services. \u201cThis is sad, don\u2019t sell art to people like this,\u201d wrote one social media user.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Hauser & Wirth representative confirmed that the work is by Johnson. The spokesperson said the painting was not acquired through gallery and was purchased on the secondary market.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2020, works from the series from the \u201cAnxious Red\u201d series were sold in an online charity auction<\/a> by Hauser & Wirth, with 10 percent of the proceeds from each sale donated to the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization\u2014the same organization that Trump officially withdrew the United States from on his first day in office, as he had attempted in his first term. As outlined by a 2025 John Hopkins analysis<\/a>, the withdrawal promised profound consequences for the organization, which monitors and responds to health issues with worldwide implications, and thus necessitate international cooperation. The US was the largest contributor to the WHO (12 percent\u201315 percent in 2022\u201323), funding that has since been halted, as the WHO\u2019s United States personnel is recalled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe withdrawal is a one-year process taking place over 2025, a year that has already seen an uptick in cases of Covid-19 in the US.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe administration has made budget cuts a priority, scaling back arts and cultural initiatives and public health programs: the 2026 presidential budget has proposed a nearly 40 percent cut of the budgets for the CDC and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The CDC has shed nearly one quarter of its workforce since Trump took office, with roughly 3,000 employees leaving either from terminations or voluntarily, even as some officials have been reinstated under unclear circumstances.<\/p>\n

\n\tARTnews has reached out to a representative for Lutnick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed off to social media his newest purchase: a top-shelf…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":68255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,1807,48340,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-68254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-president-trump","13":"tag-rashid-johnson","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114865228070559455","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}