Nikas Safronov, a Russian artist recognized for superstar portraits and self-promotion, revealed final week the portray of Donald Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin commissioned from him as a present for the US president.
He confirmed CNN a picture of the portrait, which depicts Trump after July 2024 assassination try towards him, with blood on his face, fist raised defiantly, towards the background of a US flag and the Statue of Liberty. “It was essential to me to indicate the blood, the scar and his bravery through the try on his life,” Safronov advised CNN.
Safronov stated that whereas he suspected from the outset that Putin had ordered the portrait, he didn’t know for positive till the Russian president contacted him on to convey the significance of the order.
Additional confirming the origins of the portray, the Telegram channel of the Kremlin pool journalists for the state information company RIA Novosti posted Safronov’s portrait with the phrases: “The very portrait that Putin gave to Trump.”
Steven Witkoff, one in every of Trump’s envoys in a White Home marketing campaign to dealer a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, advised conservative commentator Tucker Carlson: “President Putin had commissioned a wonderful portrait of President Trump from the main Russian artist and truly gave it to me and requested me to take it dwelling to President Trump.” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Putin, confirmed to reporters on the time that the Russian president had given “a completely private present” to “his American colleague”.
The US peace proposal is on Russia’s phrases, with Ukraine ceding Crimea and different Russian-occupied territories. On Thursday of final week, Russia launched one in every of its deadliest strikes on Kyiv since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in 2022.
Putin, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and the late Pope Francis are among the many world leaders whom Safronov has immortalised in portraits. Putin bestowed the title of “Individuals’s Artist of Russia” on Safronov in 2021 for “nice advantage within the discipline of tremendous artwork”.
A related portray, with some completely different particulars and by an unknown artist, displaced an official portrait of former President Barack Obama within the Grand Lobby of the White Home earlier this month.
In March, Trump denounced a portrait of him in Colorado’s state Capitol constructing by the artist Sarah Boardman’s as “actually the worst”, resulting in its elimination. Safronov, in feedback to the Russian tabloid Life.ru printed on 24 March, in contrast the Trump picture by Boardman to provincial Soviet portraits of collective farm chairmen, stated he might do a greater job and supplied the assistance of Russian artists in coaching their American counterparts.
“The portrait of President Trump has no character or soul,” he advised Life.ru. “It seems to be unnatural, one way or the other swollen. In Soviet occasions, such portraits of collective farm chairmen have been painted for village golf equipment, and within the cities such artwork was not acceptable.”
Safronov has lived in Italy and painted quite a few scenes of the nation. Russian media reported on the artist’s February viewers with Pope Francis. Within the Nineties and 2000s, Safronov labored for the Russian version of Penthouse journal. He has appeared nude in broadly circulated photographs, brags about his sexual exploits and boasts of his 17-room, 7bn Ruble ($84.7m) penthouse close to the Kremlin, which he says he’s prepared to the state.
Olga Galaktionova, the director of the Pushkin State Museum of Effective Arts, confirmed to reporters final month that the museum had acquired a Safronov work for its analysis assortment (moderately than foremost assortment) below her predecessor, Elizaveta Likhacheva, who was ousted in January.
