Brian Mackey, host of Illinois Public Media’s The 21st, interviewed me and Carla Smith, registrar at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, yesterday. The show, which airs on five NPR stations in central and northern Illinois, focused on art at the White House.
Smith discussed a portrait of Lincoln, which the library and museum lent to the White House and which recently returned to Illinois.
I talked about the White House collection more broadly and about its political symbolism. I suggested art has to sing for its supper in the Oval Office, much as it has for centuries—whether in Louis XIV’s Versailles or Philip the Good’s Burgundian court—and a lot of what is reported about Oval Office decoration is inside baseball.
You can hear the 16-and-a-half-minute segment here (or here).