Portraits of courage: Caught in the sovereign’s gaze

Portraits of courage

It is difficult to say exactly why I thought of ‘Las Meninas’ when I first saw George W. Bush’s portraits of the American wounded veterans. Surely, it had something to do with the reversing of the normal vectors of sovereign representation. Rather than the court painter or the White House artist painting the sovereign’s portrait, we have the President painting portraits of his political subjects. So, there were echoes of the oscillating possibilities of perspective and gaze reversals so pronounced in the Velazquez masterpiece. As well, representational strategies regarding power and control were involved in both projects.

Foucault’s resonant phrase ‘reciprocal visibility’ can help orient our analysis here too. The obvious vector of visibility goes from painter to subject – the subject must be visible to be rendered. And the painting’s ultimate observers also have visual access to the subject when the painting is displayed, though the painter does not usually appear in the painting. But reciprocal visibility entails gazes meeting each other, with subjects able to look back at painters (or sovereigns, or both when they are combined in one person) who capture them on their canvas. While the process of making visible in the case of Bush’s portraits, as will be discussed, problematized the premise of reciprocal visibility, it was not the only element doing so. Most specifically, as in Las Meninas, questions of power, authority, and historical subject-hood created a ‘complex network of uncertainties’ compromising the mutuality implied by reciprocal visibility. In the case of Bush’s portraits, the issue was how those who wage wars and those who fight wars were to be represented – and by whom?

As I have noted, these wounded veterans in Bush’s paintings became doubly subjects – subjects of the sovereign’s executive war-making powers and subjects of the sovereign’s artistic gaze. Importantly, as in the Velazquez masterpiece, the subjects of the Bush paintings have unstable identities. Are they artistic subjects, political subjects, autonomous agents (co)producing their own representations? And what about the painter who conceived and waged the wars that sent the soldiers into the battles where they received their wounds (and perhaps wounded or killed others) and who then captures them in oil years later? What kind of a subject is he? To bring home this point, Laura Bush, George Bush’s wife and former First Lady, writes in one of the book’s Forwards that: ‘Each of the remarkable men and women featured in this book is someone George knows. George painted them from his perspective, as an artist who was once their Commander in Chief’. ⁵ As if by some alchemical reaction, the sovereign has become the artist, but the echo of his command capacity lingers. The king’s two bodies’ theology immortalized by Ernst Kantorowicz 2016 [1957], recurs as the king’s two gazes.

In his narrative descriptions accompanying each portrait, Bush provides basic biographical details of the veterans, including their motives for volunteering to fight, of the explosions and attacks that wounded them, and of their difficulties in reentering civilian life. He also refers frequently to his role as their Commander in Chief, to his post-presidency life and sometimes to his own efforts to find meaning. Bush writes,

I’ve been plenty busy since leaving the White House. I’ve written two books. Laura and I travel frequently, giving speeches and raising money for the George W. Bush Presidential Center . . . I stay in shape on the mountain bike trails . . . reveled in the joys of grandparenthood. But despite all of these pursuits, my life didn’t seem complete. I wanted a new adventure – within the confines of the post-Presidential bubble. ⁶

In the introductory essays, we hear about Bush’s decision to learn how to paint, with Winston Churchill as an inspiration (Churchill began painting after leaving public office). We follow his attempts to learn painting techniques and his use of color to capture his shifting subjects (including self-portraits in the bathroom and portraits of famous political figures he had met). We also learn how he came to paint individual and group portraits of wounded military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan wars. According to Bush, it was one of his three artist/teachers, Sedrick Huckaby, who suggested he, ‘paint people whom I knew but others didn’t. Instantly, I thought of painting wounded warriors I had gotten to know during the W100K mountain bike rides and Warrior Open golf outings put on by the Bush Institute’. ⁷

As a painter, then, former President Bush represents his subjects pictorially, determining which features to highlight, which perspective to stress, how close up, how far away, how calm or puzzled or sad or satisfied the mien of each veteran. He freezes them in time, in and by his gaze and his brushes. He also appears to defer to them – the paintings are labeled ‘portraits of courage’, the veterans’ courage. They become the subject of his attention and his gaze. It is they, not him, who are being painted and admired. The former president also defines them categorically: he calls them wounded warriors, not wounded veterans or wounded fighters or wounded soldiers. He is echoing, perhaps, the vocabulary of the Wounded Warrior Project, a national US charitable organization that focuses on ‘Veterans and service members who incurred a physical or mental injury, illness, or wound while serving in the military on or after September 11, 2001’. ⁸ A vocabulary of warriors is quite specific and resonant. It hearkens back to heroic legends and archaic, pre-modern modes of fighting wars. The Wounded Warrior Project’s logo is an image of a soldier (‘warrior’) carrying a fellow fighter on his back. Combat is face to face in this imagining, individual and grounded.

It is to such a warrior that the invitation to have a portrait painted is tendered. But coming, as it does, from their former Commander in Chief, it is not clear how his invitation to become a painted portrait is received. Is it a request or an order? Can a veteran demur when his or her sovereign calls? Is there an assumption that having one’s portrait painted, often with wounds on display, is an unalloyed good and always welcomed?

The direction(s) of the invitation to appear and their perlocutionary force are complex and often confusingly rendered in both the paintings and the accompanying narratives. On one hand, Bush seems to desire a reversal of conventional official deference as he, the Commander in Chief, salutes them:

This is a tribute to men and women who volunteered mainly in the years after 9/11 to defend our country. The greatest honor of the Presidency was looking them in the eye and saluting them as their Commander in Chief. And I intend to salute and support them for the rest of my life. ⁹

On the other hand, the call to action, whether it be a sporting event or the inclusion as a model for a portrait, stubbornly follows institutional hierarchies, however, humorous or self-conscious. For example, Sergeant Major Chris Self is described by Bush as being in the difficult moment of having a new leg prosthesis made when, ‘We talked about biking and I suggested Chris come ride with me at the ranch. (Well I sort of challenged him to)’. ‘I’m a good soldier, sir’, he said ‘You say when and where. I’ll be there’. ¹⁰ The differences between an invitation, a challenge and an order are unclear, but the soldier will show up.

And what about all those injuries and wounds, some visible and some invisible that appear in painting after painting, narrative description after description – amputated limbs, pieces of shrapnel still lodged in the body, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, depression, alcoholism and difficulty in sleeping. What does the painter do with these features? How to represent them? What does the painter/sovereign himself have to do with them? Might he even be implicated in them?

As a painter, Bush takes no responsibility for the wounds and conditions of his subjects. He expresses concern, admiration and appreciation. Practically, as a wartime post-president/sovereign, Bush has everything to do with them. And yet, there is no expression of responsibility, remorse or apology in Bush’s description of the wars’ wrought havoc and its myriad victims. So what is being represented in the paintings? Who is representing whom, and in what capacity? Who has the power in these settings?

The splits and relays of perspective, illumination, and gazes in Las Meninas are reproduced and amplified in these portraits by Bush. Displacement and indirection also figure in both painters’ strategies. For example, like the reflecting, mirrored presence of the King and Queen of Spain in ‘Las Meninas’, the veterans’ portraits are re-produced. All are painted from photographs (taken by others) rather than sustained face-to-face sittings, though Bush had personally met the veterans in wounded warrior biking and golf events. ¹¹ As Peter Schjeldahl writes in his New Yorker review of the book: ‘There’s a remoteness in the use of photographs. The subjects aren’t present to the artist. They’re elsewhere. But they look honestly observed and persuasively alive’. ¹² The displacement and evasion of the representational encounter cannot, however, be so lightly dismissed, I think. Bush’s avoidance of a sustained face-to-face gaze between artist and subject suggests something more profound about the impossibility of intersubjectivity in this enterprise. Perhaps, even in the contemporary context of a civilian republic, a certain ritual distance between subject and sovereign must be maintained, as reflected in the several mediating stages of visual representation that keep the veterans at a physical distance from the portraitist. ¹³

The word ‘subject’ is complex and contradictory in its own right. A subject can be either passive or active, deferential or in command, or an object of attention. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subject as:

a. A person who is under the control of another or who owes obedience to another . . . a person who is under the control of or owes obedience to an abstract principle or power . . . owing allegiance to and under the protection of a monarch or government . . . A being (or power) that thinks, knows, or perceives (more fully conscious subject, thinking subject); the conscious mind, esp. as opposed to any objects external to it . . . In later use . . . : the person or self, considered as a conscious agent . . . III. Something that is the focus of activity or object of attention . . . A figure, incident, type of scene, etc., represented by an artist. ¹⁴

Encompassing all of these meanings, it is a challenge to determine who is the subject and what is the subject of these paintings. Bush declares in his exhibition’s and book’s title that the overarching subject or theme of his paintings is courage. The most obvious reading is that courage attaches itself to the veterans who have been courageous on the battlefield. Yet the narratives accompanying each portrait speak mostly about the post-war challenges faced by the veterans – many of whom suffer not just from physical wounds, but also from post-traumatic stress. So, the courage might be that of the veterans facing life after war. Or perhaps the courage is attached to the former president who has the courage to look his wounded warrior subjects in their (mediated) eyes and render them in all their pain, knowing he is the reason they are now in this condition. In that case, the former president, who titled the exhibits and book Portraits of Courage, would be hailing his own courage, an unseemly if not an un-sovereignly act. But, the point is made, above all else: This is Bush’s project, not that of his subjects.

Witnesses to War and the projects of redemption

What is the attitude of the exhibits and book on the subject of war? Could Portraits of Courage ever be viewed as an anti-war project? Or, alternatively, is it a project that actually ennobles war through renderings of wars’ maimed heroes? Strangely, reading the detailed narratives written by Bush accompanying each portrait, the subject of war itself, rarely seems to be at issue. Rather the issues are adjustment to civilian life, dealing with the physical and psychological wounds, finding one’s way through depression and disability. The general avoidance of an explicit statement of responsibility for sending the soldiers to war creates the impression that the wars are more akin to natural disasters than geo-political strategy formulated and carried out by the Bush administration. One unusual reference to Bush’s explicit role and authority in the wars is overtly self-complimenting. In the text accompanying the portrait of Staff Sergeant Ben Dellinger, Bush writes,

Ben went to Baghdad in 2007 as a part of what became known as the Surge, the increase in troop levels I ordered that successfully quelled the violent insurgency in Iraq and helped bring order to the young democracy. After losing his leg in an IED blast, Ben had to learn to walk again on a prosthesis. ¹⁵

With roles that oscillate between concerned observer, witness to post-war history, sympathetic benefactor, Commander in Chief and (semi)official portraitist, Bush’s visual and textual representational projects forestall a clear narrative of responsibility for the conditions in which the wounded veterans find themselves.

These narratives accompanying each portrait appear to have been written by George W. Bush himself. And they have a patterned structure even with the specific details of individual soldiers recounted. They often begin with recognition of the soldier’s patriotic motivation for enlisting or attending a military academy. The attacks of September 11, 2001 are often cited as the trigger. The narratives then briefly shift into descriptions of the battles in which the soldiers were wounded, their often heroic acts in these battles, and their subsequent long and difficult recoveries from wounds incurred. The narratives specify that wounds are both physical and psychological and that the issues of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress are often the worst parts of the injuries suffered. ¹⁶ And then, as in the folktales, analyzed by Vladimir Propp in his groundbreaking structuralist analysis, The Morphology of the Folktale, there comes the intervention of a magic helper. In these cases, it is often the former president himself who invites the veteran to a sporting event and challenges him (all but two of the portraits are of male veterans) to perform in these sports arenas. Success in these sporting events, the capacity to ride a mountain bike or hit the golf ball down the fairway, is taken as either the cause or the indication of an incipient recovery. Sports truly has a magical healing quality in the narratives. There is also, sometimes (perhaps less than would be anticipated) a reference to a loyal and stalwart wife and/or a religious faith as facilitating this healing process. These narratives are both conventional and somewhat perplexing. Their tones oscillate between a tragic and sober register and outright jocularity. The role of sports is truly outsized, though sporting events were often the context in which the former president and his solders first encounter each other. The battlefield is left behind, both practically and symbolically and is replaced by the mountain bike trail and the golf fairway. What becomes of war in the narratives and in the paintings?

Wars are, as suggested above, just there, like a harsh and dangerous landscape to be traversed, the background of the lives of warriors, with all its perils to body and psyche. Nevertheless, the repetitive, obsessive artistic rendering of veteran after veteran by Bush implies a nearly impossible totalizing project and belies the expiatory impulse behind it.

There are 98 individual portraits in the published book, but with estimates of more than US 52,000 military service members having been physically wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as many as 400,000 with psychological wounds, a complete rendering beggars the imagination. ¹⁷ An interview after the original exhibit of the paintings reveals Bush’s answer to a question about the therapeutic quality of his project, therapeutic, that is, for him: ‘It’s an interesting question’, Bush said.

In a sense, it is therapeutic. Not that it unburdens my soul. It’s not the painting that unburdens my soul. It’s the belief in the cause and the people – to the extent that a soul needs to be unburdened. The painting was a joyful experience, and if that’s therapy, that’s therapy. ¹⁸

This reference to therapy and to souls that need unburdening suggests the possibility of imagining Bush the sovereign portraitist as simultaneously a perpetrator and a victim himself. Indeed, his project of painting nearly a hundred portraits of wounded veterans, with no logical end in sight allows us to contemplate a strange dialectic in the meaning of the practice and its protagonist. On one hand, we might consider Bush a perpetrator who indirectly caused the enduring wounds of the veterans and who is now engaging in obsessional expiatory acts. On the other hand, Bush renders himself as a victim requiring recuperative therapy (and, incongruously, a new ‘adventure’ in his post-sovereign life), managing his own trauma through therapeutic rituals like the painting of the portraits. With caveats about armchair psychoanalysis, we might suggest that, in the case of Bush (as sovereign, commander-in-chief, perpetrator of a flawed and endless war and portrait artist), expiation and therapy seem complexly intertwined and almost indistinguishable.

Bush himself, of course, leaves unclear what is ‘the extent that a soul needs to be unburdened’. In a review of Bush’s book in the New York Times, Jonathan Alter is less equivocal and, in a certain sense, more forgiving. He writes: ‘An evocative and surprisingly adept artist who has dramatically improved his technique while also doing penance for one of the greatest disasters in American history’. ¹⁹ The (ex)sovereign Bush ends up relying upon the (ex)soldiers for his own redemption, their judgment of him as a morally righteous and courageous president.

The decision to select wounded veterans as his artistic subjects deserves attention. The decision was practical – Bush personally met most of these veterans at his Bush Institute sponsored sporting events and could honestly claim he ‘knew’ them. It was also psychological, political, and aesthetic. George W. Bush does not sugarcoat the wounds marking the veterans he painted as scars and facial disfigurements, and prostheses are in bold evidence throughout. The close-up nature of many of the portraits provides an intimate view of the impacts of the wounds. It also highlights the cultural and symbolic mediations that wounded veterans provide for absorbing the impacts of war on a society. ²⁰

Wounds play an important role in representational and commemorative projects involving wars and sovereign legitimacy. As Barry Schwartz and I wrote many years ago about wounded Vietnam War veteran Jan Scruggs (with 11 pieces of shrapnel in his body), the animating force behind the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

The fact that Scruggs was recognized as a wounded veteran is very important. Wounds in general play a significant role in the discourse about the Vietnam veterans and their memorial. That Scruggs’s wounds are invariably noted [in press reports] means that he is understood to speak authoritatively for the needs of the veterans. Wounds here are legitimating marks. The body of the veteran is, itself, the proof of intimate experience with war, of courage and manhood. Scruggs’s wounds make him a generalizable veteran, a collective representation in his own right. ²¹

Wounded veterans mediate war and peace, the military and the civilian worlds, and the living and the dead. But as the portraits and accompanying narratives in Portraits of Courage make clear, the ongoing lives of wounded veterans are full of pain and struggle and, often, pathologies of body and mind. Thus, wounds can be both legitimating and contaminating at the same time and inevitably raise the specter of the hideousness and inhumanity of war. Particularly in the context of the Bush Doctrine’s bellicose justification of ‘preemptive war’ and the general rejection of any narrative justifying the wars in which these veterans fought (the infamous claim of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction), these wounded veterans as artistic subjects bear ever more symbolic burdens.

The symbolic burdens of soldiers and veterans are multiple and contradictory. Association with violence, war and death, taking on varying roles, including combatant, comrade, subordinate and witness, the soldier must be motivated to overcome fear and transgress norms against violence. The sociologist Randall Collins has written that, ‘social order is to a considerable extent underpinned by a very strong motivation to avoid violence’. ²² This being the case, the soldier’s plight is an existential trial in its essence, regardless of the nature of the conflict, its moral righteousness or its outcome. And, of course, there is the very real possibility of the soldier’s own injury or death.

On this important point, the anti-war book published by Ernst Friedrich in the aftermath of World War I provides a provocative contrast to Portraits of Courage. Titled War against War!, and published in Germany in 1925, the book is composed entirely of photographs and captions, and includes 24 close-ups of disfigured faces of wounded and dead soldiers. As Michele Martini writes about the graphic and disturbing photos of dead soldiers: ‘Consequently, the image of the dead soldier eventually summarises in itself both “the perpetrator” and “the victim” as interchangeable roles . . . The militaristic rhetoric is presented as a de facto, suicidal one’. ²³

Along with dead soldiers, wounded veterans of any war, back in civilian life, can also contingently inhabit combined and contradictory roles. As Ruth Millar writes: ‘For wounded veterans . . . this dynamic of subjectification is further complicated by the fact that individuals find themselves “nominated” as a “hero or sacrificial victim”, simultaneously infinitely deserving and direly in need’. ²⁴ The veterans painted and described by Bush are portrayed as navigating (some more deftly and explicitly than others) these same contradictory subject positions. Writing about Sergeant Bryce Franklin Cole, Bush explains: ‘Bryce understands what the Bush Institute calls a civilian-military divide – a lack of understanding in our country between those who have served and those who haven’t’. To bridge that divide, Bryce has simple messages. To civilians, he says, ‘I’m no different than anyone else. Please treat me the same. My service and injuries don’t make me a victim’. And to his fellow veterans: ‘Don’t get stuck in the rut of letting your service and injuries define you. You are so much more. Get the help you need and deserve so you can move on’. ²⁵ What such exhortations reveal, but do not reflect upon, is the way that the portrait series project itself also acts to call these veterans into representational duty, once again, by their former Commander-in-Chief.

Invisibility and the ghost of sovereignty

The conviction that character is best reflected in the face is one expressed by Bush himself:

Most of the paintings are closely cropped portraits that I hope give viewers a sense of the remarkable character of these men and women. I wanted to show their determination to recover, lack of self-pity, and desire to continue to serve in new ways as civilians. ²⁶

The faces Bush paints (from the photographs he receives from others) are mobile and alert even when they are obviously sad or depressed. There are a range of emotions, but the colors are bright, strong and contrasting. These subjects demand attention, one way or another.

Although Bush began his painterly career with a series of bathroom sited self-portraits (with a series of rather infamous bathtub scenes, including one of his semi-submerged legs and toes), he is largely unseen in Portraits of Courage. Bush the artist and former Commander in Chief wields almost all power here, the power to select the worthy subjects, to request or command their presence, to portray in words and images their struggles and their wounds, to call them friends. ²⁷

Only one of the paintings in the book features Bush himself. But, as the organizer and summoner-in-chief of the wounded veterans’ golfing and mountain biking events, and as the ever-present interlocutor in the descriptive narrations that accompany the portraits in the book, Bush manages to draw considerable attention to himself. This is in spite of the fact that the explicit subjects of the portraits and the book are the veterans. The one self-portrait of Bush functions in a way that is reminiscent of the peekaboo mirror images of the King and Queen of Spain in Las Meninas. Sovereignty manages to be present even when the focus is on someone and something else.

Bush is painted dancing with a First Lieutenant, Melissa Stockwell (one of the only two women veterans portrayed in the book). The painting shows both of them in full-length – she has a prosthesis where her leg was amputated, as do all other veteran full-length portraits in the book. His self-portrait in this dancing scene is the only full-length portrait in the book to feature no visible wounds. Thus, we find a distinct, perhaps unique form of sovereign exception – that being the intact body of the sovereign among his damaged and mutilated subjects.

But claiming a sovereign exception requires a legitimate claim to sovereignty. And here it is important to specify, to remind ourselves, that Bush is a former sovereign. And the veterans are former soldiers. For both sovereign and subjects, these portraits limn a temporal threshold, but one that is not easy to traverse or to specify with certitude. It certainly involves identity and identity transformations. With few exceptions, there is an absence of military insignia, symbols, or uniforms. ²⁸ In the individual portraits, the veterans are dressed in their civilian garb, most in casual tee shirts or sports shirts. Bush is dressed in a dark green shirt and blue pants in his one appearance as a dancer. But many elements of the book and the projects behind and around it, including the sports events organized by the Bush Institute, raise questions about sovereignty and its purview. As noted earlier, the exhibitions and book’s subtitle is ‘A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to American Warriors’, and several narratives in the book refer to Bush as the Commander whom the veterans obey and to whom they owe loyalty. To what extent does Bush’s sovereignty still attach to his person, many years after his presidency? It is an unexpected and open question, given the adamant commitment in the United States to democratic transfers of power after elections.

A telling detail of the way that Bush the President slides into Bush the painter, eliding to an interesting degree the difference between the two, is the fact that while the wounded veteran paintings were inspired by a suggestion from one of his painting teachers (to paint those individuals Bush knew personally but who were not famous) and are not signed, his early works were signed with the number of his administration, ‘43’. As art historian Kim Grant elucidates some of the contradictions in these demurrals and evasions:

This can be interpreted as another instance of modesty, but it can also be understood as a statement about the nature of his art as a strategically considered product that signifies individual authorship without a foundation in personal engagement. Although he initially signed his paintings with the economical and enigmatic ‘43’, his public portraits have no visible signatures at all, an intriguing gesture of self-effacement with multiple significations. ²⁹

Even without a signature (either a name or a number), the shadow of Bush’s sovereign status hovers over each painting and over Bush’s continuing interactions with the veterans. One way this issue comes up regards the duties and perquisites of office. For example, Bush paints and writes about one veteran officer who is still in the military, Daniel Gade, and highlights the occasion of his promotion:

In May 2013, my staff informed me that Dan was being promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. In a break with protocol, I invited him to my office so I could administer the ceremony myself. As I pinned Dan’s new insignia on his uniform and saluted him, I was overcome with an incredible sense of pride and gratitude for Dan’s service to our country both on and off the battlefield. ³⁰

By 2013, Barack Obama was in his second administration as President of the United States and George W. Bush was, by his own description, a painter. It is not clear under what authority Bush was able to administer a ceremony of military promotion (breaking with protocol, as Bush acknowledges), as there is no reference in the description to his having requested special permission to perform the ceremony ex-officio. The narrative simply assumes the authority and the reader does not, should not, blink. Bush himself ended his own military career in 1974, having been discharged from the Air Force Reserve at that time. His position as Commander in Chief during his two administrations had likewise definitively ended well before 2013. The administration of a promotion ceremony might seem like a small act on which to hang a thesis about unresolved shadows of sovereign privilege, legitimacy or democratic transition. But perhaps not too small to raise important issues about the legitimacy and resonance of acts of recognition and representation. Pulling on this minor thread of sovereign privilege and its peculiar afterlife also returns us to the conundrums of reciprocal visibility in the Velazquez masterpiece.

Las Meninas captures a network of relations at a moment in time, that time in the 17th century, when Spain’s monarchs who had dominated 16th-century Europe were in a period of military and economic decline. ³¹ Nevertheless, it was a period of great artistic and literary accomplishment, a golden age for the arts. And Velazquez puts the power of art and artists on display. The King and Queen still reign at the moment of the painting’s rendering, but they do so in a dimly reflected manner while the artist is shown full bodied and provocatively wielding his brush. But time passes there too. Velazquez would die soon after in 1660 and Philip IV in 1665. After the painting was completed, legend has it that Philip IV himself painted the red cross of St James onto Velazquez’s vest in 1659 when Velazquez had finally been granted his own ‘promotion’ to knighthood, the Order of Santiago. So, in both 17th-century Spain and 21st-century United States, we find moments in which the Sovereign ‘paints’ his subjects and in doing so, actually transforms their very identities.

Conclusion

What is at stake when the ravages of war on individual service members are recognized and represented by those who conceived of and launched the war? Whose vision and understanding matters most? Who has the license to describe and portray? Returning to the theme of reciprocal visibility, we ask: What does it mean to truly see each other across hierarchies of power and authority? Sharon Sliwinski has reflected on the turn toward portraiture among photojournalists covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the parallel (and paradoxical) tendency to turn away from scenes of war:

I have been trying to describe the way war diminishes our appetite for that aspect of visual experience which does not yield directly to sight – the way it lessens our tolerance for anything that resists the sovereignty of the ego’s gaze. Perhaps the other way to come at this question is to ask how the Other’s subjectivity reveals itself – indeed, how it reveals itself as Other, and in so doing interrupts our sense of self. ³²

It remains an open question whether the most sovereign of these sovereign gazes (that of the Sovereign himself) has indeed recognized the Other as a challenge to itself.

We revisit past political regimes with trepidation. Current public health crises, economic, and political travails, historical reckonings with systemic racism, and rule-of-law institutional shocks may prompt us to review the Bush years with some nostalgia, as I noted at the beginning. The folksy, humorous and earnest presentation of the ex-president painter may distract us away from memory of the shame of misbegotten imperial wars with all its victims, of torture as a legitimate interrogation technique of those wars, of preventive war as a formal strategic policy, of the battlefield’s injuries and privations. The individual full frontal portraits of the wounded veterans, along with the biographical narratives recounting their military and post-war actions and challenges, present a contradictory reality. That reality is one in which the democratic impulse to honor each citizen-soldier is in tension with the impulse to retain the sovereign powers of an imperial presidency. ³³ So, it is with our eyes wide open that we should assess the multiple questions related to the portraits George W. Bush has painted, questions about who gets to paint whom, about what it means to render and to rend, about power and visibility in the aftermath of an era.