American quartet

Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row.

These were the most exuberant, scatological, obsessive and imaginative such works since 1937 when Picasso produced an extraordinary strip-cartoon vilification and lampoon entitled ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’. Indeed, the two series have a good deal in common. Picasso portrayed the Generalissimo as a sort of obscene, moustachioed set of bagpipes. Similarly, Guston (1913–80) has endless fun with Tricky Dicky’s ski-jump nose, which is transformed into a long, phallic tendril while his equally celebrated jowls sag into a bristly scrotum. Meanwhile, vice-president Spiro Agnew is a shambling cone, attorney general John Mitchell a set of flaccid, pipe-smoking buttocks, and Henry Kissinger a pair of disembodied, heavily black-rimmed glasses.

There is untrammelled fantasy in sheet after sheet of this series, entitled ‘Poor Richard’ (1971), and contempt, but not much anger and even, perhaps, a bit of self-identification. Guston found Nixon’s seediness deplorable but also inspiring (as did the painter’s friend, the writer Philip Roth, in his book on the president and his circle, Our Gang). As we seem doomed to recapitulate the mid-1970s — with impeachment in the air, tied elections in Britain and an unending series of calamities in the news — there is a scrap of comfort in knowing that such dismal times can be artistically fruitful.