Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975, review: Master of satire

Are any portrayals of a US president more savage than Philip Guston’s drawings of Richard Nixon?

Guston kept the Nixon drawings, from 1971, largely hidden, except among friends. They finally appeared in 2001, two decades after his death, as a discrete group, the Poor Richard series, and in this extraordinary show, they’re embellished with more than a hundred drawings, mostly from the same year but some from 1975. A couple of humdinging paintings accompany them.

The drawings, in ink on paper, lacerate Nixon’s duplicities, hypocrisies, self-pity and vanity, but also accelerate Guston’s progress into his late, great figurative period, after years of abstraction. He refines the clumpy, raw style that dominates his final years and hones his lexicon of symbols, like comical Ku Klux Klan figures and lone lightbulbs.

Guston was then at a low ebb, disappointed by the critics’ reaction to his figurative paintings and furious at the social injustices and foreign policies of Nixon’s White House. But in writer Philip Roth, he had a kindred spirit in amused despair: Roth wrote Our Gang; Guston produced these drawings.

Roth described satire as “the imaginative flowering of the primitive urge to knock somebody’s block off”. In Guston’s case, Nixon’s “block” became a penis and balls. My president, Guston repeats time and again here, is a dickhead. And what a sardonic imagination Guston has. He pictures Nixon’s bumbling early life, nose growing ever more phallic, then his route to the presidency, from his earliest political scandal and the pathetic “Checkers speech” that followed in 1952, through his 1968 election campaign and the insincere appeals to groups of black and elderly voters and hippies. There’s his early virulently anti-communist rhetoric and the presidential volte-face in courting China. At one point, Guston imagines Nixon’s shaft-and-scrotum profile on Mount Rushmore. Remarkably, this was three years before Nixon’s final humiliation.

He returned to him just as vigorously afterwards. In the painting San Clemente and a group of related drawings, Guston envisions this disgraced figure, beset with phlebitis, captured in a vast oversized leg. Nixon, in this canvas, with his scarlet schnoz more flaccid and pendulous than ever, is pitiful; Guston is pitiless.

The mind boggles as to what he’d have made of Donald Trump.

Until July 29, Hauser Wirth Gallery; hauserwirth.com