Art
Henry Kissinger, symbol of American global power and subject of artistic satire, has died, aged 100
Henry Kissinger, one of the most consequential and controversial international political figures of his generation, and the subject of artistic protest and satire from artists including Philip Guston and Alfredo Jaar, has died, aged 100.As US secretary of state to President Richard Nixon and then his successor President Gerald Ford—and an adviser in some capacity to every US president since—Kissinger was an agent of American realpolitik and peace-making in the 1970s, and of the US rapprochement with Communist China that led to Nixon’s celebrated visit to China in 1972 to meet Mao Tse-Tung. As the architect of US diplomacy in southeast Asia, and of the country’s engagement in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, involving carpet-bombing, destructive regime change—as well as of US support of right-wing regimes in Argentina and Chile—Kissinger found himself the target of human rights protests for the past half-century, and a most controversial winner of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.In the 1970s—an era noted for standout eyewear sported by the likes of the artist Andy Warhol, the rockstar Elton John and the singer Nana Mouskouri—Kissinger’s broad-framed spectacles (then at their broadest and blackest) could hold their own as an instantly recognisable graphic device. In his 1971 “Richard Nixon“ drawings, Guston, disgusted at US engagement in southeast Asia, represented Nixon as either a Ku Klux Klan figure or a scrotum and penis—three years before he resigned in disgrace after the Watergate affair—while Kissinger was depicted as a disembodied pair of thick-rimmed spectacles.The biting Nixon and Kissinger drawings were inspired by Guston reading some early chapters of his friend Philip Roth’s Our Gang, his satirical tale of Trick E Dixon. They were the subject of an exhibition, Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings From 1971 & 1975, at Hauser & Wirth, West 22nd Street, New York, in 2016-17.In Searching for K (1986), the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar appropriated pages from Kissinger’s 1979 and 1982 memoirs to track Kissinger’s role in the overthrow of democracy in Chile in 1973, and the rise to dictatorial power of General Augusto Pinochet.In the early 2000s, the artist Jan Frank produced a series of large canvases featuring Philip Guston-style renderings of the former secretary of state’s thick-frame glasses, collectively entitled The Nixon Suite. In 2009, The Art Newspaper reported that “when Frank heard that Mr Kissinger was in New York, in order to be photographed by his old friend Steve Pyke, the New Yorker staff portraitist, Frank wasted no time in transporting his gigantic diptych of Henry’s specs up to the sitting. Security was understandably very tight yet Frank managed to wheedle his outsize canvas up to the photography studio and thus, finally, the politician was photographed by Pyke right in front of the glasses painting, an intriguing image currently on view at Pyke’s show of new portraits at Flowers
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