Review: As impeachment flashbacks go, few better than Philip Guston's 'Tricky Dick' drawings

That was the year the highly respected Abstract Expressionist painter fled New York for Rome, after the establishment art world crashed down on his head. Guston had the audacity to set aside pure abstraction, the putative “triumph of American art,” and dared to show new figurative paintings in a gallery show the prior October. Friends became moralizing enemies.

At Hauser & Wirth, 48 mostly small paintings and three drawings show him feeling his way through the ordeal. According to the gallery, this is the first Guston show in L.A. in more than half a century. It’s not the paintings that stand out though. Yes, there are some enlightening examples — Guston depicting an artist jamming stubby fingers at a resistant canvas, showing civilization’s ruins being rebuilt in plain but lovingly rendered bricks, pondering fragments of lost ancient grandeur and more.Perhaps the most important are the hooded figures.

The big reason to see the show, however, is the suite of 146 pen and ink drawings made that summer when the artist came back to the United States. Guston’s searingly funny caricatures of Richard M. Nixon and his corrupt White House cronies, drawn mostly in short, crabbed lines, have been exhibited only twice before — once in Manhattan and once in London . Today, in 2019, as presidential scandals erupt and an impeachment inquiry unfolds, be prepared for flashbacks.

Unsurprisingly, Guston draws Nixon with beady, shifty eyes. But they lurk above a sloping nose that is morphing into a penis and jowls that swell as a bulbous scrotum. In the juxtaposition, the nickname “Tricky Dick” takes pointed, devastating form.

KnightLAT One I liked from the LAT's.

KnightLAT How about the Clinton flashbacks, Mr. radical liberal Knight?

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