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Indepth Arts News:
"Philip Guston's Caricatures of Richard Nixon"
2002-06-01 until 2002-10-01
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA,
USA United States of America
In 1971, during a re-election year, Philip
Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of President Richard
Nixon. Titled Poor Richard, these provocative, searing renderings of a
head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire produced two years
before Watergate and three years ahead of Nixons resignation. The series
will be on display in MASS MoCAs Michael and Agnese Meehan Gallery
throughout the summer.
Guston was born in Montreal, Canada, to a family who emigrated from Odessa,
in the Ukraine. His family moved to Los Angeles where Guston attended high
school and where he met Jackson Pollock. By age 15, he had decided to become
an artist, and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in 1930. In 1936, Guston
joined Pollock in New York City where he worked in the mural painting
division of the Federal Art Project. In the early 1940s, he held teaching
positions in the Mid-West, returning to New York in 1947. His career spanned
50 years. He began as a political muralist, and by the early 1950s was
associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. He called
his signature style abstract impressionism, a style of irregular abstraction
with small brushstrokes of delicate color - often pinks -- on a white field.
In the late 1960s, Guston returned to figurative painting. He developed a
complex and highly personal iconography including images of Ku Klux Klan
members, shoes, and bottles that are brightly and sometimes crudely painted.
Philip Gustons Poor Richard opens on Saturday, June 1, in the Michael and
Agnese Meehan Gallery and Prints and Drawings Gallery at MASS MoCA. The
exhibition will be up through the summer.
> Gustons drawings of Poor Richard, a history of Nixons life which focuses
on his years in the White House, represent one of the few instances of an
artist in the late twentieth century using caricature in his work. In
addition to being a caustic denunciation of a political figure and his
cabinet (Kissinger, Agnew and Mitchell also figure prominently in the Poor
Richard drawings), within Gustons career -- and the history of modern art
-- the drawings stand as a marker of sorts: in their resort to caricature to
communicate important political ideas, the works highlight how rarely
conventional modernist painting to connected with larger cultural, social
and political issues. While intended to be published as a book, these
images languished in Gustons studio until long after his death in 1980 and
have remained wholly unknown until this exhibition, guest-curated by Debra
Bricker Balken, and accompanying catalogue published by University of
Chicago Press.
Philip Roth describes Poor Richard as a great American document,
commemorating the national disgust that President Nixon inspired and
reminding us of how he turned patriotism into junk. Art Speigelman said,
In the 70s Guston gracefully galumphed through the then barely explored
borderlands between High Art and Low.
Guston was born in Montreal, Canada, to a family who emigrated from Odessa,
in the Ukraine. His family moved to Los Angeles where Guston attended high
school and where he met Jackson Pollock. By age 15, he had decided to become
an artist, and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in 1930. In 1936, Guston
joined Pollock in New York City where he worked in the mural painting
division of the Federal Art Project. In the early 1940s, he held teaching
positions in the Mid-West, returning to New York in 1947. His career spanned
50 years. He began as a political muralist, and by the early 1950s was
associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. He called
his signature style abstract impressionism, a style of irregular abstraction
with small brushstrokes of delicate color - often pinks -- on a white field.
In the late 1960s, Guston returned to figurative painting. He developed a
complex and highly personal iconography including images of Ku Klux Klan
members, shoes, and bottles that are brightly and sometimes crudely painted.
Philip Gustons Poor Richard opens on Saturday, June 1, in the Michael and
Agnese Meehan Gallery and Prints and Drawings Gallery at MASS MoCA. The
exhibition will be up through the summer.
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