In Philip Guston’s pictures we see a panorama of scabrousness, of clogged desire, a cloaca of thwarted vigour, a pestilent ague. This is – perhaps surprisingly – a balsam to the nerves and over-active mind.
Did Guston mean to depict Richard Nixon, his subject at Hauser & Wirth in London (until July 29), like this? Perhaps he was drawing from his own state of mind. Guston and Nixon seemed to have various similarities. They were both born in 1913 and grew up in relatively hardscrabble backgrounds in southern California. Both also loathed their critics in the print media (Nixon loved TV). They also went through the biggest change in their lives in 1968: Nixon with his presidential campaign (he assumed office in 1969) and Guston with his abandonment of the Abstract Expressionism of De Kooning and Motherwell and his journey into the style he is known and celebrated for today.
