{"id":105781,"date":"2016-12-13T18:18:35","date_gmt":"2016-12-13T23:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105781"},"modified":"2016-12-13T18:28:32","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T23:28:32","slug":"poor-richard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/13\/poor-richard\/","title":{"rendered":"Poor Richard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philip Guston\u2019s drawings of Nixon have transcended their subject.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Philip Guston, Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of work after the election looks very different,\u201d I overheard someone say in Hauser & Wirth as we followed the saga of Poor Richard<\/a><\/em>, Philip Guston\u2019s satirical drawings of Richard Nixon\u2019s rise to power. The show had been installed on November 1 as a last minute idea; on opening night it drew an amused crowd of boomers and millennials, the distance in their experience bridged by the convincing sense of security many of us had that doomed week. When I returned to the show less than a month into the Trump transition, the drawings had turned on us: a joke at the expense of our smugness.<\/p>\n

Guston made most of the drawings in August 1971, in Woodstock, egged on by his friend Philip Roth, who had taken Nixon as the subject of his novel Our Gang<\/i><\/em>. Just a month earlier, Nixon, who had built his political career as the wunderkind of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced he was planning to visit China. Poor Richard<\/em>\u00a0and its preparatory sketches ride the arc of this hypocrisy, from Dick\u2019s beginnings in California, where, lonely, poor, and studious, he dreams of the White House, crushing hammers and sickles in his path. He poses for photographs with his arm around the necessary demographics\u2014hippies, blacks, \u201cmom and pop\u201d whites\u2014bearing a grin betrayed by a hungry glare. Guston dresses him in a police uniform, a Ku Klux Klan hood, blackface, and, in the final panels, offensive Orientalist costumes as he sets sail confidently on his ill-fated \u201cjourney of peace.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Philip Roth wrote, \u201cThe wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the \u2018human touch\u2019 in their leaders.\u201d But Poor Richard<\/em>\u00a0has, in the years since Guston drew it, transcended Nixon himself, becoming a recurring character in American politics. It wasn\u2019t until 2001 that Guston\u2019s daughter, Musa Mayer, allowed the drawings to be published and exhibited for the first time. On that occasion, Tricky Dick and his follies were warning against that year\u2019s dangerous Republican president, George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Guston\u2019s career, more than any other artist in the modern period, took dramatic turns. He was a WPA muralist in the thirties; by 1962, he was treated to a midcareer Guggenheim retrospective as a member of the New York School; later, when he broke with abstraction, he was \u201cexcommunicated\u201d (his word) by the art establishment. Today, he\u2019s been canonized for his bravery as a freethinker with a moral compass. His work is often shown as a kind of before-and-after story, and this is the second time this year Hauser & Wirth has mounted unseen works from the period in-between.<\/p>\n

Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> came soon after Guston\u2019s return to the figure. Of this time he said, \u201cI am left only with a sense of my perversity. Yet I must trust this perversity.\u201d It was perhaps the \u201cperversity\u201d of these drawings that made him wary of publishing them\u2014Guston was already suffering disrepute for the crudeness he was beginning to explore in his art, and, having drawn Nixon only months before his landslide reelection, Guston risked being seen as just \u201canother Nixon hater.\u201d As he approached realism, he had to make boundaries for when to turn away from the world.<\/p>\n

Poor Richard<\/i><\/em>\u2019s closest predecessor may be Pablo Picasso\u2019s The Dream and Lie of Franco<\/i><\/em>, in which the title is needed to identify the tumorous, hairy monster on its path of carnage. In that sense, the greatest feat of Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> is how recognizable Nixon actually is, though his jowls, perpetually in need of a shave, double perfectly as a scrotum, his long nose an erect penis which grows Pinocchio-like in correlation with his ego.<\/p>\n

As much as his career zigged and zagged, Guston always worked in opposition to something. The impetus for his early work was a John Reed Club appeal to \u201cabandon decisively the treacherous illusion that art can exist for art\u2019s sake.\u201d In 1932 he made the Scottsboro Boys frescos, introduced towering Ku Klux Klan figures, their hollow eyes full of malice. Later, when he painted abstractly, it was always against the \u201cknown image,\u201d as he called it. Once he returned to figuration, he labored under a sort of scrutiny that the Pop artists avoided. Their slick, media-derived imagery was an appealing comment on commerce; his goal was to develop an iconography already half-ruined by iconoclasm. Guston infects his objects with tragicomic suffering. Bugs, shoes, bodiless heads, KKK fools, hands and the cigarette caught between their fingers\u2014all were, as he put it, \u201cdoomed.\u201d Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> fits into this late work because of its humor, more complex and insidious than the earnestness of his early murals. Guston understood that when you laugh in an art context, you are laughing alone; you are laughing at yourself. The moral question at the heart of his late work is complicity.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

Untitled (Poor Richard)<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 1\/2″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

<\/a>

Alone<\/i>, 1971, oil on canvas, 52″ x 93 1\/2″.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

That the self-pitying Richard Nixon reminds us of chest-pounding Donald Trump is a matter of genealogy. Nixon was the first to use dog-whistle politics to embolden the Southern Strategy, appealing to white voters resentful of civil rights legislation. In one sequence, Nixon and Spiro Agnew take turns peeking beneath each other\u2019s patchworked Klan hoods, only to find there is no head within. Today, Trump retweets white suprematists. These are politicians who endorse everything but advocate nothing. Their masks are sheet thin.<\/p>\n

Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> captures the paranoia and plotting of the Nixon White House tapes, the desperate need for affirmation from his cronies, whom he gathered close by way of insult, blame, and deceit. But we must remember these drawings were made two years before<\/i><\/em> the Watergate hearings, when the taping system was discovered. In 1971 Guston was working from the public record, which didn\u2019t contain the overt racism, homophobia, sexism or anti-Semitism of the tapes, but was just as dangerous. He saw Nixon stack the Supreme Court with three law-and-order judges, he saw him brutalize the 1971 May Day protesters, he had read the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times<\/i><\/em>, outlining the government\u2019s lies and hidden atrocities of the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

After Watergate, Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> looked very different; after 9\/11, it looked different again; today it\u2019s different still. In these drawings as in his career at large, Guston owes much of his success to the power of hindsight. Poor Richard<\/i><\/em> isn\u2019t an op-ed writer\u2019s hot take or an activist\u2019s solution. It trusts that feeling is the realm of artists, and such a realm is often prescient. In a 1982 documentary, Guston says, \u201cThe first thing in art is the only possession is freedom \u2026 that sounds easy, doesn\u2019t it? But it\u2019s rough.\u201d He goes on,<\/p>\n

\n

The most you can do is try. And I don\u2019t think it\u2019s courage and all those nice words. In fact, one could make a list of all the negative things [that compel me to] continue painting, and [it] would include things like boredom, disgust, all the things you\u2019re not supposed to think about. It\u2019s not inspiration \u2026 but anger.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The show ends with San Clemente<\/i><\/em><\/a> (1975), the only major painting by Guston that explicitly treats his long-tortured subject. Dick drags a swollen leg dripping in bandages. His nose hangs flaccid and swollen, and under a crimped Neanderthal\u2019s brow the bloodshot eyes release one thick tear. Most brilliant is the combination of the painting\u2019s sources: recent news that Nixon was suffering from phlebitis, inflammation of the vein in his foot, and an infamous 1971 photograph of Nixon strolling on the beach, in a stiff dark suit and wingtip shoes, the antithesis of Kennedy glamour. In Guston\u2019s hand the massive leg becomes divine retribution for the weight of his deeds, the jacket ratty, pierced by an imaginative addition: an American flag pin.<\/p>\n

\"gusto77524\"

Untitled<\/i>, 1975, ink on paper, 24″ x 19″.<\/p><\/div>

<\/a>

Untitled<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 7\/8″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

<\/a>

Untitled<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 10 7\/8″ x 13 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>

<\/a>

Untitled<\/i>, 1971, ink on paper, 14″ x 11″.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

All images \u00a9 The Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth<\/em><\/p>\n

Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975<\/a> is at Hauser & Wirth through January 14, 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Trump\u2019s America, Philip Guston\u2019s merciless Nixon drawings transcend their subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[35,26198,19381,12976,16425,7676,17127,26199,26200,4919,14233,99,2426,6850,7479,9396],"class_list":["post-105781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-art","tag-caricature","tag-donald-trump","tag-drawings","tag-exhibitions","tag-galleries","tag-hauser-wirth","tag-house-un-american-activities-committee","tag-ink-on-paper","tag-pablo-picasso","tag-philip-guston","tag-philip-roth","tag-politics","tag-richard-nixon","tag-satire","tag-wpa"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoor Richard: Philip Guston\u2019s Nixon Drawings Transcend Their Subject<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sarah Cowan on the Hauser & Wirth 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