Donald Trump wants van Gogh painting, but is offered a toilet

Donald and Melania Trump asked the Guggenheim if they could borrow this van Gogh landscape. What did they get instead?

Vincent Van Gogh's 'Landscape with Snow.' Picture: Supplied.

When Donald and Melania Trump asked the Guggenheim Museum if they could borrow a van Gogh for their private living quarters, they had every expectation their request would be accommodated. After all, it is common for presidents to borrow major works of art to decorate the Oval Office or their private rooms at the White House.

But the Guggenheim turned them down. Van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow wasn’t available, curator Nancy Spector informed the Trumps.

The gold toilet entitled 'America'. Picture: Reuters.

Instead, she offered them something entirely different ... a second hand toilet. A toilet made of 18kt gold, but a toilet nonetheless, and one that has been used by over 100,000 members of the public.

To pile insult on injury, the loo, an interactive work titled ‘America’ is described by the Guggenheim as a satire aimed at the excess of wealth in the US.

The work by artist Maurizio Cattelan has been exhibited for the last year in a public rest room in the museum, for the use of visitors. When it first opened, The New York Post greeted the installation with the headline: “WE’RE NO. 1! (And No. 2)”

The exhibit has now ended and, according to The Washington Post, the toilet was now available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Ms Spector wrote to the Trumps. “It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care,” she added.

Mr Catalan told The Post the loo had been offered to the Trumps because: “What’s the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.” He would not reveal the cost of the gold in ‘America’ but the Post reports estimates of more than $1m.

In a blog post Mr Cattalan explained “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.”

In a Guggenheim blog post written toward the end of the exhibit, Ms Spector — who has made clear in previous posts that she isn’t a Trump fan — wrote that the toilet was synonymous with Mr Trump.

“When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency,” she wrote. “It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture came off view on September 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.”

Another Guggenheim post points out: “The aesthetics of this ‘throne’ recall nothing so much as the gilded excess of Trump’s real-estate ventures and private residences.”

The Trumps were turned down in their request for van Gogh’s painting because, Ms Spector informed them, the work was on its way to the Guggenheim’s museum in Bilbao, Spain.

During their time in the White House, the Obamas borrowed a number of artworks, including those by abstract artists Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns.