As good a picture as any on which to hang thoughts about Philip Guston is San Clemente, painted in 1975. It shows Richard Nixon on the Californian shore. His pink, phallic nose droops between gross, grey, stubbled testicular cheeks. A tear runs down one of them. Bloodshot eyes swivel from under a black hedge of eyebrow. He looks back and down towards his enlarged, veined, pustular, phlebitic left leg. A grey, blood-stained bandage winds round it. The foot has burst through its sock. His coat tails flap behind him. A tiny American flag shines in his buttonhole. In the picture the cruel, coarse and energetic are melded with the monumental - as though one of Picasso's neoclassical girls-on-the-beach scenes had been taken over by one of Gillray's grossest caricatures.

LRB 5 February 2004 | PDF Download