The Washington Post
Painting Ted Turner’s Legacy
December 5, 2014
If the portrait of Ted Turner unveiled this week at the National Portrait Gallery is any indication, the businessman doesn’t want to be remembered foremost as the founder of CNN and the crafter of a cable news empire. He is painted on horseback amid the bison and foothill grasslands of his ranch in southwest Montana. The electric-colored backdrop gives no nod to the industry he upended on the East Coast that made his name and his riches. It’s instead an homage to his later move Westward, sweeping up huge swaths of American range.
Commemorative portraiture like this is an odd thing: The artwork stands in the nation’s gallery as a giant image of yourself, hardened in brightly saturated oils, on display to a crowd of colleagues and cameras. The rugged backdrop for the portrait was Turner’s directive, and its commissioning was a deliberate effort to shape what, for posterity, the American public most remembers about him.
