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Philip Guston's Poor Richard
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by Debra Bricker Balken
University of Chicago Press
Due/Published
July 2001, 104 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0226036219
In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes--his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book--length publication of these drawings. A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists. As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime. |
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Review
After leaving the New York art world, Philip Guston moved to Woodstock and befriended author and fellow New York exile, Philip Roth. The two became fast friends brought together by a variety of shared interests, including their hatred for Richard Nixon. The series of drawings, begun in the summer of 1971, depict the life of Nixon and is one of the best examples of political cariacture in the history of art. The pictures of Nixon and his cohorts (Mitchell, Agnew, and Kissinger) are at once mocking and politically astute. Art Speiegleman writes, “Poor Richard captures that moment in American culture when outrage wasn’t mere shtick...when political protest and playfulness coult dance together. The poetry and wisdom of the febrile lines that make Guston’s goofy cartoons dance transcend the historical and political situations that occasioned them.” For other recent titles in: |
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