Philip Guston Exhibition - Musée national Picasso - Paris

n the early 1920s, Philip Guston was expelled from art school in Los Angeles for producing satirical images of the teaching staff. Art would always be a tool for him in his fight against authority figures. His early works, which depicted the abuses committed by members of the KKK, were vandalized by hooded men during a public exhibition.

At the end of the 1960s, after being one of the leading figures of the New York School, the first American abstract avant-garde movement, he caused a scandal by returning to figurative art inspired by comic books.

In 1969, Philip Roth, a writer who had broken with the New York literary scene, moved into a house a few doors down from Guston's studio. The writer had just begun work on a satirical novel featuring President Nixon and his entourage (Our Gang). Guston produced more than 80 drawings that echoed Roth's text. Their style and iconography were inspired by Picasso's 1937 illustrations for Songes et mensonges de Franco, the political causticity of George Grosz's drawings for Americana magazine in the 1930s, and the biting humor of George Harriman's cartoons, which he admired in American newspapers. Go to Website

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