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 Guston?s late figurative paintings were met with overwhelmingly negative critical response when first shown at Marlborough Gallery in New York City in October 1970. After the opening, Guston fled to Italy with his wife, spending eight months at the American Academy in Rome. The following spring, Guston returned to a wounded America, still at war in Vietnam, devastated by the assassinations of its leaders, and divided by antiwar protests and the social and political upheavals begun in the 1960s. It was Richard Nixon?s first term as president.0Guston?s outpouring of satirical drawings was inspired partly by conversations with his friend Philip Roth, at work on his own scathing Nixon satire, ?Our Gang?. ?When I came back from Europe in the summer of 1971,? Guston later said, ?I was pretty disturbed about everything in the country politically, the administration specifically, and I started doing cartoon characters. And one thing led to another, and so for months I did hundreds of drawings and they seemed to form a kind of story line, a sequence.? Completed during July and August 1971, these drawings were not publicly shown for three decades.0In 1975, after the Watergate scandal led to Nixon being forced to resign under threat of impeachment, Guston created more drawings and a final painting with Nixon as subject: ?San Clemente?. This book gathers this extraordinary body of work for the first time in its entirety.00Exhibition: Hauser & Wirth, New York, USA (01.11.2016-28.01.2017) / Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (19.05.-29.07.2017).

Guston disagreed, famously saying: 'I got sick and tired of all that purity--I wanted to tell stories!' And what stories he told, with his Klansmen, ominous but somehow familiar, perhaps even ourselves under those hoods, as suggested in 'Untitled' (1971), which features a fleshy head enclosed by two hooded figures. This was not the path of refinement a leading abstract expressionist painter should be taking, yet Guston pushed forward: challenging tradition and expectations, guided solely by his own intuition and determination. Guston and his wife left for Italy immediately after the 1970 Marlborough opening, taking up residency at the American Academy in Rome over the next seven months. He spent the first two months brooding, despairing at the reviews and the rigidity of the art world, and revisiting the great art of the past that had first moved him to paint as a young man. .

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a subtantial, accessible, and revealing analysis of his work. With more than 800 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications, and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.

After Many Springs is the title of a Thomas Hart Benton painting that evokes nostalgia for a fertile, creative time gone by. This bold new book--taking the name of this work by Benton--examines the intersections between Regionalist and Modernist paintings, photography, and film during the Great Depression, a period when the two approaches to art making were perhaps at their zenith. It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood reacted to the economic and social devastation of their era by harking back in tranquil bucolic paintings to a departed utopia. However, this volume compares their work to that of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn and filmmakers such as Josef von Sternberg--all of whom documented the desolation of the Depression--and finds surprising commonalities. The book also notes intriguing connections between Regionalist artists and Modernists Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, countering prevailing assumptions that Regionalism was an anathema to these New York School painters and showing their shared fascination with the Midwest. Distributed for the Des Moines Art Center Exhibition Schedule: Des Moines Art Center (January 30 - May 17, 2009)

Philip Guston always had eminent artist friends. Tireless in his quest for the unknown, the still undiscovered, Guston engaged poets and literati in intense dialogues that, starting in the sixties, led to fruitful collaborations - including the creation of numerous illustrations and cover images for works by poets such as William Corbett, Bill Berkson, and Clark Coolidge. In his 'poem-pictures', Guston ultimately turned to producing interactions of text and drawings - as responses to poems by his writer friends or as independent works that incorporated selected lines of poetry.