Here’s the Story Behind That Bizarre Painting of Bill Clinton in a Blue Dress Seen at Jeffrey Epstein’s Home

Given the hurricane-force storm of media attention swirling
around the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the news that he owned a
particularly strange work of art perhaps doesn’t seem like the
biggest of deals. After all, the aggressively unsettling decor of
Epstein’s homes, which includes displays of prosthetic eyeballs, a
female mannequin hanging from a chandelier, and a chessboard whose
pieces featured the likenesses of his staff clad only in underwear,
was already well established.

This particular work of art, however, features an image of
former president Bill Clinton clad in a blue dress and high heels,
gesturing to the viewer. Given that Bill Clinton’s name has been
prominently connected to Epstein, word of the painting
sent the internet conspiracy machine wild.

The original source of the gossip is the not-exactly-reliable
Daily Mail, which quotes an unnamed
source who snapped a photo of the unsettling Clinton painting
through a doorway at Epstein’s $56 million home in 2012. (The
Mail claimed it had seen metadata verifying the location
and date of the photo.) The New York Post, picking up the story,
quoted another anonymous source saying of the painting, “It was
hanging up there prominently—as soon as you walked in—in a room to
the right. Everybody who saw it laughed and smirked.”

The painting has been identified as Parsing
Bill by New York-based Australian artist Petrina
Ryan-Kleid. (A print version is available on Saatchi Art
starting at $40.) The more feverish corners of the internet
immediately began to decode the imagery for clues—but the truth is
that it was part of a body of student work produced quite
independently of Epstein.

The Clinton painting comes from a pair of works
by Ryan-Kleid that lightly satirized political figures. Its
companion, a painting of George W. Bush called War Games,
features the former president sitting on the floor of the White
House playing with paper airplanes, referencing his handling of the
Iraq War, the defining scandal of Bush’s White House tenure. As for
Parsing Bill, the blue dress seems a likely reference to
the blue dress that served as evidence in the former president’s
affair with Monica Lewinsky, the scandal that marked Clinton’s time
in office.

Parsing Bill and War Games were shown at the
2012 Tribeca Ball, a fundraiser for Ryan-Kleid’s alma mater, the
New York Academy of Art. Photos from A Guest of a Guest, a party blog, show the
artist posing in front of the two works at the star-studded
event.

Earlier today, Ryan-Klein said in a statement to artnet News
that she had no idea where the painting had ended up until she saw
it light up the news yestereday:

In 2012, as a grad student at the New York Academy of Art, I
painted pictures of Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush as part of my
Master’s thesis. When the school put on a fundraiser at the Tribeca
Ball that year, they sold my painting to one of the attendees.
I had no idea who the buyer was at the time. As with most of my
paintings, I had completely lost track of this piece when it was
sold seven years ago. So it was a complete surprise to me to learn
yesterday that it wound up in Epstein’s home.

After graduating from the New York Academy of Art, Ryan-Klein
worked as a studio assistant for Jeff Koons in 2015 and 2016 and
now does social media marketing for artists in New York.

Aside from general titillation, it is unclear how, exactly, the
Clinton painting might fit into the many conspiracy theories
swirling around the apparent suicide by the 66-year-old convicted
pedophile, which have included president Donald Trump retweeting a theory
that the Clintons had Epstein killed. Bill Clinton is documented to
have flown on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003, and says that he
visited Epstein’s home in 2002, but issued a statement noting that
he was accompanied by staff and his security detail at all
times.

(Donald Trump, for his part, is also known to have spent time
with Epstein, and infamously remarked to New York magazine that the
financier was “terrific” and “likes beautiful women as much as I
do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)

It is certainly possible to read the painting as a reminder by
Epstein to himself and to guests that he had dirt on powerful
people. But then again, the common denominator of all of
Epstein’s known decor, so far, is simply that he had a taste for
the cartoonishly sadistic.

The post Here’s the Story Behind That Bizarre Painting of
Bill Clinton in a Blue Dress Seen at Jeffrey Epstein’s Home
appeared first on artnet News.