Dark humor gives his work a caustic depth
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In an exhibition devoted to Philip Guston, the Musée Picasso Paris traces the artist’s deployment of satire as a weapon against authority. When the writer Philip Roth moved next door to Guston’s studio in the New York Catskills, in 1969, the pair struck up a friendship based on shared interests in humor and the fantastic. Roth had begun working on a satirical novel, “Our Gang,” which lambasted the corruption of President Nixon and his administration. Echoing this text, Guston produced a series of approximately 80 drawings titled “Poor Richard,” which caricatured the president as a phallic creature. These works form the basis of the exhibition and are shown alongside a selection of paintings that link Guston’s penchant for caricature with the expressive power of his figural paintings, which shocked the art world when he gave up the abstract style that had defined his output as leader of the New York School, then the prevailing style of modern American art.
Philip Guston, “Dawn,” 1970. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Photograph by Christopher Burke
