CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/24/2017

A book for our times: Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings

“I don’t think Philip Guston thought he was going to stop Richard Nixon,” Katy Siegel said at a 2017 panel on the Nixon Drawings. “But I think he understood something about Richard Nixon. And I think he also said that these were the things that drove him crazy since he was a teenager—from the Scottsboro Boys to the Klan to the Holocaust. And he said that the holocausts of our time—plural—from Chile to Indochina, were the things that he cared about. So it’s not some misguided idea of his own importance or misunderstanding of his own social power. I do think it’s something profound that adds a dimension beyond a comedy routine about the way the world works. And I hope there is someone else working away in their studio who’s going to show us something similar that I don’t understand yet about what’s going on.”