Existing comment:
Nixon on Horseback
1985
Bronze, Edition 4/12
Richard Nixon (1913-1994) resigned from office on August 9, 1974. Over the course of the next twenty years until his death in 1994, Nixon devoted all his efforts to rehabilitating his reputation: traveling to China; dispensing advice in secret to Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush; raising money for the Nixon Library; and looking to recover financially by publishing his memoirs, writing books on foreign police, and even selling a televised interview to David Frost. As Oliphant saw it, Nixon was "trying to reinvent himself" until the end of his life.
Well into Nixon's post-Watergate years, Oliphant made a sculpture of the deposed president, in familiar pose from nineteenth-century paintings of Napoleon, depicting him on horseback with arms folded, wearing a nineteenth century military uniform with a bicorn hat. And very much like a Napoleon in retreat, Oliphant saw Nixon always plotting possibilities for coming back. |