"Sometime during the summer of 1971, Philip Guston (1913-1980) began a visual narrative of Richard Nixon's life, a series of almost eighty drawings that caught one of America's most maligned politicians in a depraved, monstrous state. Titled Poor Richard, these caricatures play on the brooding, self-pitying character that Nixon exuded throughout his life. While much has been made in the ongoing interpretations of the radical content of Guston's late work of his brash betrayal of abstract painting and the New York School and his introduction of quirky, incongruous, cartoon-type figures and shapes around 1968-nothing quite approximates the mocking and satiric nature of these renderings of an American president. Their transgressive nature explains, perhaps, the deep ambivalence that Guston felt in pursuing his initial plan to publish the images as a book, and the reason they have remained almost wholly unknown to date. Like Guston's Poem-Pictures or the collaborations he effected with various writers during the last decade of his life, Poor Richard grew out of a friendship with a neighbor, Philip Roth, the novelist, who began living near Guston in Woodstock, New York, in 1969."
Excerpt from www.ubu.com/papers/balken_guston.html
You can browse through the book here: www.ubu.com/historical/guston/guston_nixon.html
