The Left’s special hatred was reserved for the American president, Richard Nixon. The Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark (1932–2008) used Nixon’s face in a number of works, including pasted into his passport. In the series Nixon Visions (1971), we are confronted by Nixon’s portrait overlaid by a hand holding a coffee cup. The coffee-drinking president has then been cut up and put back together again in more or less psychedelic combinations, with Nixon becoming increasingly demonic and grotesque. The series was a protest against Gevalia, a Swedish coffee company that had just been bought up by America’s General Foods, and thus could be seen as being complicit in America’s imperialism.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
