Governor’s Portrait Won’t Be in Avant-Garde Mold

In case anybody is wondering about the $20,000 Gov. George Deukmejian is asking the Legislature to authorize for his portrait to be painted, the governor has an explanation.

“Listen,” he quipped to reporters Thursday, “to paint me they’re going to need $20,000.”

If the funding is approved as part of Deukmejian’s $53.7-billion state budget, the artist also is going to have to revert to a more traditional style than was used for the last portrait that went up in the Capitol, according to Deukmejian spokesman Bob Gore.

Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. startled lawmakers when he commissioned a $13,000 abstract Expressionist portrait by Santa Monica artist Don Bachardy. Gore said that for the more conservative Deukmejian, “I think you can count on it (being) a traditional portrait.”

The Brown painting so flabbergasted members of the Senate-Assembly Joint Legislative Rules Committee that they did not know where to put it. Unique among other portraits of California governors, the convention-defying painting of Brown hangs alone in an out-of-the-way hallway on the Capitol’s third floor.