Customer Reviews

Philip Guston's Poor Richard

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This is an amazing book. It's witty, scatalogical, AND handsome. STarting in 1969 and continuing up to the eve of Watergate, American modern artist Philip Guston developed a series of ruthless cartoons lampooning Richard Nixon's rise to power. Metanymic in strategy, Nixon's physiognomy is rendered as a very [...phallic] schnoz and [...similarly-themed]jowls; Kissinger is simply a pair of horn-rimmed glasses skipping along beside; etc. We see Nixon ascend from a homely quaker childhood, survive the Checkers scandal, and eventually triumph in his second bid for the presidency. We accompany him to Key Biscayne and to China...all via Guston's comic vision. This book is a must for anyone interested in the 1960s, in political cartoons, in Nixon, or in Philip Guston's career.

One of the most brilliant pieces of political satire of the XXth century, Guston's series of drawings on what could be called "Nixon's adventures and woes" is magnificently rendered in these pages which enable the reader to follow the character's presidential career through the witty and implacable eye of a great artist. The illustrations are wonderful (you almost feel that you are holding the actual original drawings) and show the scope and depth of Guston's art, whose importance has steadily grown over the years. An interesting essay places these works in the historical context of the late 1960's and early 1970's, a period when the artist radically evolved from soft abstraction to crude figuration.