After 36 years, will Kucinich’s City Hall portrait debut in 2015?

This could be the year that Cleveland corrects a historic snub. Thirty-six years after he left the office, Dennis Kucinich is the only modern Cleveland mayor who doesn’t have a portrait hanging at City Hall.

Now, an official portrait of him is finally finished, and Kucinich says he's pleased.

“I’m very happy to learn about its completion,” Kucinich tells me. “I appreciate all people who made the effort to bring it about. I look forward to seeing it. If it’s posted at City Hall, I will be very glad to attend an unveiling.”

Artist Matthew Hunt completed his portrait of Kucinich as mayor last year (see my earlier story here). Kucinich says he doesn’t want to judge the portrait based on the photograph on my blog.

“I can’t comment about portrait unless I see it,” Kucinich says. “I don’t think it’d be fair to assess its value.” He says he doesn’t know if it’s up to him to approve or disapprove.

That’s significant, because some supporters are pausing to be sure Kucinich really wants the honor.

When a Cleveland mayor leaves office, the business community usually pays for a formal portrait to hang at City Hall. But the city fathers were in no mood to honor Kucinich, the fiery young populist, when his two tumultuous years as mayor ended in 1979.

So Kucinich is missing from the mayor’s Red Room -- where, during press conferences, legendary former mayor Tom Johnson looks over Mayor Frank Jackson’s shoulder. Recent mayors — Mike White, Jane Campbell, George Voinovich — gaze down from other walls.

In 2002, after Kucinich revived his career and was elected to Congress, supporters set out to right the wrong. City councilman Joe Cimperman and John Ryan, then president of the local AFL-CIO, got then-mayor Campbell to agree to accept a portrait.

Cimperman, Ryan and others held a pierogi and kielbasa fundraiser in Tremont with tickets at $20 a person. Kucinich attended; so did Campbell. (Here’s my coverage of the event.) Hunt won a competition to paint the portrait in 2003.

Then the project stalled. First, it took Kucinich three years to meet with Hunt. Finally, in 2006, Hunt spent a morning observing Kucinich in his Lakewood office and ten minutes photographing him. Then the portrait took Hunt eight years to finish, due to health problems, business setbacks and a flooded house.

Now, the portrait waits in Hunt’s Akron home. The artist is unsure whose job it is to accept the portrait and pay him.

Ryan, now an aide to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, says he’ll get it done. Cleveland Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit he founded, is holding the money in an account just for the portrait, and will pay the artist, Ryan says.

“My guess is, what they have to do is see if there’s a way to get the former congressman and mayor to participate, even if they have to hold it off for a couple months,” Ryan says.

“If he just refuses, well, we’re going to put this darn thing up,” Ryan adds. “I think it should be some kind of event. Mayor Kucinich’s term of office was not just about him, but about the whole town.”

Officially, City Hall is ready to take in Kucinich's likeness. “We would welcome the opportunity to place his portrait here in City Hall,” a spokesperson for mayor Jackson told me.

But Cimperman says Jackson and Harriet Applegate, Ryan’s successor at the AFL-CIO, want to make sure that Kucinich is OK with the portrait going up.

Though no one says so, Kucinich’s Cleveland friends seem to wonder if he is ambivalent about the honor. Ryan says Kucinich accepted the portrait effort “reluctantly” in 2002, and that he “disappointed” some supporters by taking years to meet with the artist. Perhaps being enshrined in an establishment institution like City Hall feels odd to Kucinich, the proud maverick.

The worst-case scenario, Cimperman says, is that the portrait will end up displayed somewhere other than City Hall. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“I’m feeling the need to get the portrait closer to the city, closer to the Red Room, where it deserves to be,” Cimperman says. (Though Cimperman challenged Kucinich in the 2008 Democratic primary for Congress, the two have reconciled since, most publicly at a 2011 benefit for Cleveland Public Theater.)

“Like or dislike, support or not support, history is history,” Cimperman says. “This was a person who served as mayor during a fundamental time in the history of Cleveland. The absence of his portrait is conspicuous.

“I think if people saw it, they would recognize it for being a great piece of art and a missing piece in that portion of our history.”

After 35 years, Dennis Kucinich’s City Hall portrait is finished at last

Matthew Hunt pauses before the reveal. From an easel, he lifts his painting of a young woman looking over her nude shoulder. Behind it stands a portrait Cleveland has awaited for 35 years.

Dennis Kucinich, his hair still black, looks to one side, his eyes narrowed into a thoughtful squint, serious and enigmatic.

“I was hired to go in and try to find the person behind the name and TV interviews, the stuff that everybody knows,” says Hunt.

When Kucinich was voted out of the mayor’s office in 1979, no one commissioned the traditional City Hall portrait. Moneyed civic leaders, aghast at Kucinich’s confrontational two years as mayor, wanted to forget him.

“I wanted a more quiet side,” says Hunt. “Especially because this was such a wrong that was done. I felt that I had a responsibility to try to make it right.”

In 2002, a new generation tried to correct the snub. Then-mayor Jane Campbell, city councilman Joe Cimperman and labor leaders threw a $20 kielbasa and pierogi fundraiser in a church hall in Tremont. The party raised about $12,000.

Then? Silence, delays, small occasional updates in The Plain Dealer’s “Whatever Happened To” feature.

Now, 12 years later, the portrait is finished.

Hunt, 42, won a contest to paint it in 2003. “They said [Kucinich] saw my work, and he really loved it,” he says.

Self-taught, Hunt began painting in 1998 and debuted with a show that year at the McCormick Place gallery in Hudson. He has a gift for painting realistic, psychologically profound depictions of people that invite the question, what is he or she thinking?

Paid a $7,250 advance to paint Kucinich, Hunt tried for three years to meet his subject. First, the then-congressman’s 2004 campaign for president got in the way. Then his office cancelled a post-election photo shoot in Washington. A year later, Kucinich called Hunt to say he’d make it happen. At last, in September 2006, Hunt spent a morning observing Kucinich at his Lakewood office.

“He would look down when thinking about something,” Hunt recalls. “He would hold his left hand to his head, but he would do this sort of squinting. It was really warm the way he did it, but it was very sincere, and it wasn’t for anyone else.”

Hunt watched Kucinich during a press conference and a meeting with aides and spent ten minutes taking reference photos of him. He headed back to his home studio in Copley, that look on Kucinich’s face still in his mind.

It took Hunt seven years to paint it. “I own the fact that it’s taken as long as it has,” he says.

At first, Hunt’s other work took precedence. Commissions rained down. Parents hired him to paint their children, companies their CEOs, universities their administrators.

Then, three setbacks brought Hunt’s work to a halt. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes; when it was uncontrolled, his painting hand shook. His basement studio flooded, destroying much of his work. The financial crisis hit, and clients cancelled and retreated.

Now, Hunt has recovered. A sharp doctor helps keep his health troubles in check. “I’m able to work now the way I was,” he says. Jobs are flowing to him again. He recently accepted a commission to paint retired Lincoln Electric CEO John Stropki.

He also turned back to Kucinich. He collected ’70s photos to re-create how Kucinich looked in his early 30s. He studied ’70s suits and tie patterns to paint wide lapels and a diagonally-striped tie.

Thinking hard about Kucinich’s two years as mayor, he decided to add no symbolic props -- concerned that a hint of, say, the Muni Light battle might reduce his subject’s work to a single accomplishment.

Instead, Hunt depicted Kucinich in the mayor’s office, sitting on the edge of a bare desk. The viewer looks on from just above him, an unusual perspective meant to evoke Kucinich's populism. “I don’t think he has the need to be above anyone,” Hunt says.

Kucinich’s interlocked hands rest in the foreground, a symbol of him “bringing together people and different sides, and the struggle that he had,” Hunt says. (That’s a generous interpretation of Kucinich’s mayoralty, commonly criticized as divisive.)

Hunt worked hardest at Kucinich’s face, especially his mouth, which is caught between a slight smile and a hint of satisfaction.

“I didn’t want to have a degree of defeat or worry,” Hunt says. “I wanted to convey someone who was in charge, but someone who was taking the issues very seriously. He might be young, but he’s not a boy.”

Hunt painted the final brushstroke about six months ago. He plans to take it to Cleveland’s Bonfoey Gallery for framing.

When will the public see it? That’s unclear. Hunt’s not sure what’s next, because “there’s no client,” he says.

A portrait committee, made up of representatives of two unions and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, owes him a second payment of $7,250 if the portrait is accepted. But whose job is it to accept the painting? The committee? Mayor Frank Jackson? Kucinich himself?

The long wait for Kucinich to join the pantheon of mayors is subtly symbolized in the painting itself. In 2006, Hunt noticed that Kucinich wore his watch upside down -- clasp up, face downward. He painted it that way. The clasp is just barely visible under his sleeve. “Time did sort of get flipped,” Hunt says.