Existing comment:
Tomi Ungerer
born Strasbourg, France 1931 -- died Cork, Ireland 2019
Eat
1967
offset lithograph
Oakland Museum of California, All Of Us Or None
Archive, Gift of the Rossman Family
In Ungerer's poster, the friendly imperative "EAT," reminiscent of restaurant and diner signage, takes a sinister tone. The U.S. government's stated intention was to free the people of Vietnam and give them the tools of democracy. Yet Ungerer renders this ideological nourishment as a force-feeding. Even as he recognized American hypocrisy, the artist, too, wore cultural blinders. His racially stereotyped depiction of a Vietnamese as a helpless victim of American aggression overlooks that Vietnamese people were not mere bystanders of the war but actors in it. |