LOS ANGELES ¨C New York¡¯s Guggenheim Museum offered to lend an 18-karat gold toilet to President Donald Trump after the White House asked to borrow a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The museum¡¯s chief curator offered to loan the toilet, which had been used by tens of thousands of visitors, in a Sept. 15 email to a Trump administration official, the newspaper reported.
A Guggenheim spokeswoman declined immediate comment on the Washington Post report and White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was not clear how the White House responded to the Guggenheim curator¡¯s offer.
The piece, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan¡¯s, is an 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet. It is called ¡°America.¡±
It was put on display in 2016 in a single-stall bathroom at the Guggenheim, where it was used in private luxury by more than 100,000 people, according to a Guggenheim blog post. The museum said the object, which was on display for a year, ¡°skewers social complacencies¡± and the extravagances of the wealthy.
Trump, a real estate developer turned reality television star, campaigned for president as a savvy businessman with the commercial sense to succeed in the White House. His exact personal wealth is unknown.
The offer came in response to a White House request to borrow the painting ¡°Landscape with Snow¡± by 19th century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, for installation at the president and first lady¡¯s private living quarters, the Washington Post reported. The request for the painting was declined.
Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector had previously written about the toilet in a 2017 blog post, in which she took swipes at the president. She wrote that the ¡°Trump reference¡± inherent in the gold toilet resonated with people ¡°during the sculpture¡¯s time at the Guggenheim.¡±
¡°When the sculpture came off view on Sept. 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,¡± Spector wrote.
Trump is known to have a taste for gold and gilded objects. On Christmas Eve, he took calls from children while seated on a gold chair in a tapestried room at his Florida vacation home.
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