Philip Guston. The irony of History

From October 14, 2025 to March 1, 2026, the Musée national Picasso-Paris will present an exhibition dedicated to the work of Philip Guston, on the first floor and the basement of the Hôtel Salé. Designed around Guston's drawings in response to Philip Roth's book Our Gang, the exhibition will highlight the links between Guston's painting and the satirical, cartoonish verve of his drawings inspired by President Nixon and his administration.

In the early 1920s, Philip Guston was expelled from art school in Los Angeles for producing satirical images of the teaching staff. For him, art was always a tool in the fight against authority figures. His first works, depicting the exactions committed by members of the KKK, were vandalized by hooded men during their public exhibition.

At the end of the sixties, after having been one of the protagonists of the New York School and of the first American abstract avant-garde, he caused a scandal by returning to comic-book-inspired figuration.

In 1969, Philip Roth, a writer at odds with the New York literary scene, moves in only a few houses away from Guston's studio. The writer had just begun working on a satirical book about President Nixon and his entourage (Our Gang). Guston produced over 80 drawings that echoed Roth's text. Their style and iconography are inspired by the plates from Songes et mensonges de Franco, drawn in 1937 by Picasso, by the political causticity of George Grosz's drawings for Americana magazine in the 1930s, and by the wry humor of George Harriman's plates, which he admired in American daily newspapers.

From the "Nixon Drawings" series to the artist's final paintings, the Musée Picasso exhibition highlights the porosity Guston skilfully maintained between the grotesque, caricatured verve of his drawings and the expressive power of his paintings. A transfer of energy takes place, nourished by a black humor that lends his work a grating depth, making him a kind of Kafka or Gogol of painting.

The exhibition is supported by the Philip Guston Foundation and the artist's Musa Mayer daughter, who have entrusted the museum with the entire Nixon's drawings series, as well as a number of previously unseen works.

The exhibition was also generously supported by François Xavier de Mallmann and Renée McKee.