Portrait of a President
From Richard Dean Sir: Philip Guston's retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy certainly deserves all the nice things your critic says about it (Arts, 24 January), but he and your readers might be interested to know that the 'cruel self-portrait, the artist with bloated unshaven cheeks, beetle-brows and a nose like a rack of lamb' whom Mr Lambirth identifies in his review is not Guston at all, but rather his portrait of that great liberal hate figure, Richard Milhous Nixon.
The painting, 'San Clemente', takes its title from Nixon's Californian hideaway, where, in a disastrous effort by his press officer to make the President seem somewhat normal, the famously uptight leader was once photographed 'casually' strolling along the beach in a suit and tie. The 'great swollen burden of a diseased leg' he drags along the sand refers to the phlebitis that afflicted Nixon during the Watergate summer of 1973. The resemblance between the face of Nixon, with its ski nose and heavily sagging jowls, to the male genitalia was not exactly lost on Guston either, as this work and others in the series of very funny and quite cruel works he created about old Tyrannus Nix and his gang demonstrates.
Also. the 'sun like a judge's wig coming up over the horizon' in another painting is really Guston's pictorial shorthand for his wife Musa, who fills the sky in many of his late works and can be recognised by her blond hair and huge, sometimes weeping, eyes.
Richard Dean
Whitstable, Kent
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