Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ Gives a Revered Painting of George Washington a Cameo—as Hotel Room Art

A famed painting of George
Washington makes an uncredited cameo appearance in
The
Irishman, filmmaker
Martin Scorsese’s newly released, epic saga about the mafia’s
entanglement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. A
version of the iconic Emanuel Leutze canvas, Washington Crossing the Delaware
(1851), hovers on a hotel room wall
behind Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino) in a scene where he rages
that he’s not getting enough support from the mob.

“Standing by
me—what the fuck does that mean?” Hoffa yells,
resolutely on his feet in the manner of Continental Army leader
George Washington. “Standing by me ain’t the same as doing
something.”

Hoffa’s expletive-laced tirade
expresses his own desire for troops as devoted as the ones Leutze
painted circling their leader, preparing to do something about the
enemy Hessian army. Washington’s loyal troops are also portrayed in
transit—an apt image for Hoffa, the leader of a group
whose power lies in its control over transportation (“If you got
it, a truck brought it,” he says earlier in the film).

Hoffa, just released from
prison, wants his old Teamster union leader job back but fails to
get a much-needed reelection endorsement from New York City capo,
Tony Pro (Stephen Graham). Mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De
Niro) is dispatched to calm Hoffa down at his hotel. A few scenes
later, as the mafia’s feelings have shifted, Sheeran is sent back
to Hoffa’s hotel to convince the ex-leader to retire.

The set for these scenes was
built from scratch for The Irishman, and designed to look like a standard 1970s
hotel suite in Washington, D.C. “We kept it very traditional,
classic, and presidential,” set decorator Regina Graves told Architectural Digest, “with a George Washington painting hanging
over the bed.”

Washington Crossing the
Delaware is one of
multiple versions that Leutze painted of Washington’s dicey attack
on the German mercenary army in Trenton on December 25, 1776. It
became a viral image almost immediately, with many studies and
copies made after it. Contemporary artists have also found it a
fruitful painting to sample and remix; consider
George Washington Carver
Crossing the Delaware: Page From An American History
Textbook (1975) by
Robert Colescott, currently on view at the Colescott retrospective
at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

This is also not the first time
Leutze’s masterpiece has made it to Hollywood.
Washington Crossing the
Delaware appeared last
year in Ocean’s
8, the all-women reboot
of the popular heist film trilogy starring George Clooney and Brad
Pitt.
In a scene where Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) cases the security
system at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she installs a parody
version of the wall-sized canvas alongside the original in the
American Wing. Ocean’s version, titled Our Founding Mothers, is a feminist remake of the famously
masculine original.

Leutze’s George Washington has
morphed into a chameleonic everyman, representing a democratic cast
of characters ranging from African-American scientists to feminist
activists and, with The
Irishman, a Teamster
union leader. The artist would likely be surprised, and hopefully
delighted, by how far his subject has sailed. 

The post Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ Gives a Revered
Painting of George Washington a Cameo—as Hotel Room Art
appeared first on artnet News.