Exhibition Philip Guston

At the Musée national Picasso-Paris

Through to March 1st, 2026.

Philip Guston (1913-1980) is said to have been one of the most unpredictable painters of the New York School. Between figuration and abstraction, comic and tragic, the drawings presented until March 1st at the National Picasso Museum-Paris, in the exhibition, "Philip Guston, the Irony of History", highlight the expressive and caricatural breath of a singular artist.

Philip Guston exhibited at the Picasso Museum, what could be more natural! The American painter was particularly interested in Picasso, his thinking and his work at the heart of European modern art, which he discovered very young at the beginning of the 1920s. He even had the opportunity in 1937 to see one of his own works featured, during an exhibition in New York, alongside plates of engravings by the Spanish master.

The exhibition unfolds on the ground floor and in the lower part of the museum, echoing a novel by the American writer Philip Roth, Our Gang. This satirical text evokes President Nixon and his entourage in a political charge considered to be one of the most biting against the former American president. Following this publication, Philip Guston would create more than 80 caricatured drawings of Nixon, the Nixon drawings, whose iconography, marked by dark and biting humour, is freely inspired by Picasso.

The journey also highlights the artist's social commitment and his deeply political painting in the face of the rise of fascism. A friend of Philip Roth, who lived near his studio, Guston shared with him the same taste for popular and trivial forms, not

hesitating to caricature President Nixon as a phalloid creature. Close to his fellow students Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, or Willem de Kooning, Guston would become one of the pillars of the "New York School," and of American abstract and modern

painting in the 1950s. He will also surprise the art world by returning, twenty years later, to a raw and off beat figuration, close to comics.

This entire evolution of the painter's work, from the first canvases to his final works, is traced during a fascinating journey that plunges the visitor into the heart of a major artistic and political reflection. A captivating exhibition in one of the most beautiful private mansions in the Marais district of Paris.

Affiche de l'exposition © DR

5 Rue de Thorigny

75003 Paris