![]() ![]() Now 61, Marshall has spent more than three decades making paintings in one genre after another after another that depict and honor the lives of black people. Kerry James Marshall’s work, in contrast, has always been avowedly political. NATHAN KEAY, MCA CHICAGO/©KERRY JAMES MARSHALL/METROPOLITAN PIER AND EXHIBITION AUTHORITY, MCCORMICK PLACE ART COLLECTION, CHICAGO Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997, acrylic and collage on canvas, 9′ 6″ x 13′. Those paintings have come to define the social and political upheavals of the time. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything-and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” And so, in 1967, he abandoned the abstract work he had been making, and began painting figures-creepy, cartoonish Klansmen and insomniac Everymen. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. Speaking with a reporter in 1977, Guston said that in the 1960s, “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. As a substantial segment of the country protests a new president’s policies, Guston’s approach stands as an inspiring model of dissent. ![]() Viewing the drawings, lined up in a long row along the gallery walls, we almost feel sorry for Nixon, even as we snigger. Guston titled his 1971 series “Poor Richard” and in work after work goes after the president, not for being a menace to the republic (which, to be sure, he was), but for being a bumbling, self-hating striver. His bandaged foot-a reference to Nixon’s bout with phlebitis-fills almost half the picture. In the stunning painting San Clemente (1975), the disgraced politician is hunched over like a brooding vulture, a single tear frozen midway down his cheek. One drawing shows a young Dick studying in bed, pennants for Whittier and Duke hanging on his wall. Guston took the clever tack of humanizing Nixon as he roasted him. ![]() With his inimitable scowl and his penchant for self-pity, Nixon was pretty much a walking caricature, which made satirizing him a tricky business. GENEVIEVE HANSON/©THE ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON/COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH Philip Guston, San Clemente, 1975, oil on canvas, 68″ x 73¼”. Guston’s Nixon dons a spacesuit to lecture a crescent moon, wagging his finger at it, holds a little black girl for a photo op, and goes swimming at Key Biscayne, where he once had the compound dubbed the Winter White House. In Guston’s hands, Nixon’s jowls become unmistakably testicular, and his nose takes on the shape of a bulging phallus, which he is constantly sticking somewhere he shouldn’t-between two butt cheeks labeled “U.S.A.,” for example, or through the neck and into the hollow head of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who resembles a bulbous, lumpy pyramid. Guston made the works in two extended bursts of activity: the first in 1971, when Nixon was in his prime and gearing up for reelection, and the second in 1975, the year after his shameful, post-Watergate resignation. ![]() A week before the 2016 presidential election, Hauser & Wirth gallery opened the exhibition “ Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975.” Organized by Sally Radic, of the Guston Foundation, and Musa Mayer, Guston’s daughter, the show included scores of ink drawings-and one remarkable painting-lampooning Richard Nixon. ![]()
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