"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.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Massachusetts

Other Important Exhibitions in North Adams