5/7/2002
Debra Bricker Balken
Mass MoCA, North Adams
MASS MoCA guest curator Debra Bricker Balken will speak about her exhibition of drawings by Philip Guston entitled Poor Richard on Saturday, July 6, at 4:00 P.M.
Curator of Poor Richard to Speak July 6
MASS MoCA guest curator Debra Bricker Balken
will speak about her exhibition of drawings by Philip Guston entitled Poor
Richard on Saturday, July 6, at 4:00 P.M. The talk is free with museum
admission.
In 1971, during a re-election year, Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a
series of caricatures of President Richard Nixon. Produced two years
before Watergate and three years ahead of Nixon's resignation, these
provocative, renderings of a president are prescient political satire.
Guston's visual history of Nixon's life focuses on his years in the White
House and are a caustic denunciation of a political figure and his cabinet
(Kissinger, Agnew, and Mitchell also figure prominently in the Poor Richard
drawings).
In addition, the drawings stand as a marker of sorts. In their resort to
caricature to communicate important political ideas, the works highlight how
rarely conventional modernist painting connected with larger cultural,
social and political issues.
Philip Roth describes Poor Richard as "a great American document,
commemorating the national disgust that President Nixon inspired and
reminding us of how he turned patriotism into junk." Art Speigelman said,
"In the '70s Guston gracefully galumphed through the then barely explored
borderlands between High Art and Low."
While intended to be published as a book, these images languished in
Guston's studio until long after his death in 1980 and have remained wholly
unknown until this exhibition and accompanying catalogue published by The
University of Chicago Press.
For her talk, Balken will explore the dramatic transformation of Guston's
work - how, in response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to
question the viability of private art given exclusively to self-expression.
Guston's abandonment of abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal
and political meaning was largely responsible for a renewed interest in
figural painting in the 1970s.
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and writer. She has assembled
numerous exhibitions in the United States, including a retrospective of
Arthur Dove's work at the Addison Gallery of American Art. She is the
author of several books and catalogues including Arthur Dove: A
Retrospective. Balken was the curator at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield
in the early '80s.
Philip Guston's Poor Richard is at MASS MoCA through August in the Michael
and Agnese Meehan Gallery and Prints and Drawings Gallery at MASS MoCA.
MASS MoCA's galleries are open from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. every day. Admission
is $9 adults, $3 children 6-16, and free for children under 6. Admission is
free for members at all times. MASS MoCA, housed on a 13-acre campus of
restored 19th-century factory buildings, is the largest center for
contemporary art in the country.
MASS MoCA is located off Marshall Street in
North Adams, Massachusetts.
For additional information, call 413 662 2111
MASS MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way
North Adams, MA 01247
413-664-4481 ext. 8111
FX: 413-663-8548