philip guston is mentioned often when the art comics world discuss about art and comics. but i did not know that he made one of the finest early graphic novels Philip Gustons Poor Richard For much of his career, Philip Guston was known as an abstract artist. Later, he began to include cartoon-like figures and objects in his works. In 1971, he did a series of drawings of Richard Nixon and company (Agnew, Kissinger, & Mitchell). The entire series of drawings is included in this book. Guston captures Nixon and his cohorts perfectly and nails them to the wall.
New exhibition with additional artwork: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/art... Philip Gustons Poor Richard Another American comics artifact. Art and Seth also presented Poor Richard as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery's exhibit Krazy! The Delirious World Of Anime + Comics + Video Games. This is a weird one - this book came out of a month of prodigious illustration by Guston, who had been a well-known New York abstract artist. He had a show that was lambasted and retreated to Woodstock, where he befriended Phillip Roth. These drawings came out of dinner conversations about Richard Nixon and pre-dated his impeachment by three years.
Richard Nixon's face is a dick-and-balls. It's pretty great. Philip Gustons Poor Richard
In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes—his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book—length publication of these drawings.
A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists.
As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime. Philip Gustons Poor Richard