Let’s laugh a little at Philip Guston exhibition

Only in America you could mock a president in an entire series of drawings. So that Philip Guston did, in his 73 drawings exposed at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street, New York, in the exhibition “Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975”. In three rooms viewers will see the artist’s never-before-exhibited Nixon drawings and the Poor Richard narrative from 1971, as well as works from The Phlebitis Series from 1975.

“Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975”, at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street, 1 November 2016 – 14 January 2017, www.hauserwirth.info

Guston caricatured Nixon’s self-mythologizing identity, sly political manoeuvers, and disposable morals into a farcical cartoon canon proving, again, that he doesn’t like at all the American president.

Selecting 73 drawings from his scores of Nixon caricatures created in the summer of 1971, Philip Guston edited the compositional chronology that makes up the Poor Richard series. Philip Guston had originally intended to publish this sequence as a book. In the three decades that followed, only a handful of the drawings – images produced two years before the Watergate scandal and three before Nixon’s political demise – were publically seen: In 2001, the Poor Richard series of 73 drawings were at last exhibited together and published in a volume of the same name by the University of Chicago Press.

(Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street, 1 November 2016 – 14 January 2017, www.hauserwirth.info)

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