Portraits of courage: Caught in the sovereign’s gaze

Abstract

Reversing the normal vector of sovereign representation, former US President George W. Bush is engaged in an ongoing project of painting his former subjects, hundreds of portraits of wounded US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article explores what it means to have a sovereign observe and render in oil the very subjects he sent to war. It will track the politically vexed communicative exchanges of deference, recognition, power, and identity in such portrait making. Furthermore, assessing the meaning of the invitation to wounded veterans to be painted by one’s former Commander in Chief, the article raises complex issues of victimhood and responsibility. Asking the questions, ‘Who gets to look at whom?’ and ‘Who gets to render whom?’, the article takes as its model Foucault’s analysis of the troubled ‘reciprocal visibility’ in Velazquez’s painting, Las Meninas.