Philip Guston - The irony of history

Catalogue of the exhibition Philip Guston: The Irony of History, presented at the Musée Picasso, Paris (14 October 2025 - 1 February 2026).

In 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 vandalised by hooded men during their public exhibition.

In the late 1960s, after being one of the leading figures of the New York School, the first American abstract avant-garde, he caused a scandal by returning to a figurative style 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 ‘plates’ for Songes et mensonges de Franco, the political causticity of George Grosz's drawings for Americana magazine in the 1930s, and the biting humour of George Harriman's plates, which he admired in American daily newspapers.

From the Nixon Drawings series to the artist's final paintings, the exhibition highlights the porosity skilfully maintained by Guston between the grotesque and caricatural verve of his drawings and the expressive power of his painting. A transfer of energy takes place, fuelled by a black humour that gives his work a dark depth, making him a kind of Kafka or Gogol of painting.