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Philip Guston at David McKee - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney
Today the once popular sport of "Nixon-hating" seems a distant memory. But in the summer of 1971, painter Philip Guston and novelist Philip Roth bonded during weekly dinners in the Catskills over their shared revulsion for "Tricky Dick," who was then preparing for his reelection campaign. The result of Roth's musings was the' novel Our Gang, a satirical take on the president's administration. Guston's creative response was "Poor Richard," a heretofore unexhibited suite of drawings that scrutinize the sitting president with a darkly comic savagery.
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This exhibition of Guston's Nixon drawings appeared in conjunction with their publication in the book Philip Guston's Poor Richard, by art historian Debra Bricker Balken. Noting that these drawings were created in a burst of activity in August 1971, while Guston was still smarting from the critical denunciation of his return to figuration, Balken argues that Guston's political outrage mingled with his conflicted feelings about the death of modernism. In her view, Guston subtly conflated his rage at Nixon's opportunism and hypocrisy with his anger at the prevailing formalist esthetic's disavowal of social commentary. That he had earlier benefitted from this same critical regime gave him a certain kinship with the duplicitous Richard Nixon.
And indeed, a complicated set of emotions is evident in the "Poor Richard" drawings. Guston's Nixon is identified by a phallic nose protruding from a pair of hairy, scrotumlike jowls. The repellent nature of this image evokes the almost primitive disgust that Nixon was able to elicit from his liberal enemies. Nor do his cohorts fare any better. Spiro Agnew is a cone head stuck with nails, John Mitchell a potato head with a pipe, and Henry Kissinger often appears simply as a pair of beady eyes framed by thick square glasses.
The drawings follow a rough narrative from Nixon's childhood on the wrong side of the tracks through his ascent to the presidency. Curiously, the war in Vietnam does not figure in Guston's narrative, and, of course, the ultimate disgrace of Watergate still lay in the future. Instead, the focus is on Nixon's self-promoted mythology as the poor boy who made good, his creation of a cadre of insiders and his overtures to the People's Republic of China. (This latter initiative, which reversed Nixon's lifelong pose as an anticommunist crusader, provided Nixon-haters a primary example of his duplicity.) The latter half of the portfolio follows Nixon on a fantasy tour of Asia--a prescient conceit, as his actual trip to China occurred after these drawings were completed. In one drawing Nixon sports a Fu Manchu mustache; in another he abandons chopsticks to dip his phallic nose directly in a rice bowl. He and his trusty companions Kissinger and Agnew ride a rickshaw, sail in a Chinese junk, sport tattoos in the form of Chinese characters and peer into the mouth of a Chinese lion.
Stylistically, the drawings follow the mode of Guston's late work, and many familiar motifs reappear here, including the setting sun, the discarded shoes, the Klansman robes and the toppled building blocks. In her text, Balken speculates as to why Guston never made these works public, even though they were clearly created for publication. She suggests that he feared they would be misunderstood or would simply add to the notoriety generated by his recent return to figuration.
Appearing now, long after the events and figures they chronicle have passed into history, the "Poor Richard" drawings deepen our understanding of Guston's late work. While the tragicomic tableaux of his final decade have generally been interpreted in personal terms, with reference to Guston's professional disappointments, fear of aging and struggles with alcohol, it is now clear that politics were an equally potent source of inspiration.
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