Spotlight on America at the Picasso-Paris Museum

The Musée Picasso Paris devotes two concurrent exhibitions to master of satire Philip Guston and California underground pioneer Raymond Pettibon.

By presenting two exhibitions dedicated to Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon, simultaneously, the Musée national Picasso-Paris aims to offer “a unique dialogue between two figures of North American art, united by the same subversive force and a shared taste for satire and critical irony.”

The pairing of these two American artists at the Picasso Museum is no accident. Like Picasso before them – who created the satirical etchings “The Dream and Lie of Franco” using comic-strip style panels to mock the Spanish dictator – both Guston and Pettibon transformed popular visual languages into weapons of political critique. Canadian-American Guston’s exhibition centres on the illustrations conceived in echo to Philip Roth’s book “Our gang”, and drawings inspired by President Nixon and his administration.

From the very moment Philip Guston was expelled from Manual Arts High School in 1927 with his friend Jackson Pollock for distributing satirical pamphlets about the English department, his art would become a sharp tool to challenge authority. At the age of 18 he presented a series of drawings which depicted members of the Ku Klux Klan for the first time, denouncing the “judicial lynching” of the “Scottsboro Boys”, nine young African Americans who were wrongly accused of rape and given disproportionate prison sentences and death sentences.

Why the Picasso Museum? The link is found in the early 1920s when Guston discovered Picasso’s work in the collection of Louise and Walter Arensberg in Los Angeles. This revelation had a lasting influence and in 1937, the painting that Guston conceived in response to the bombing of Guernica was displayed alongside Picasso’s visual commentary on Franco. A recognised and major figure in the abstract expressionism of the New York School, it was partly through his memories of Picasso’s satirical and grotesque paintings and drawings that Guston made a radical return to figurative art more than thirty years later.

A drastic change came in 1979 following a heart attack. Now forced to sit due to health limitations, Guston switched from large formats to works on paper distilling his work into what curators describe as a “state of technical and iconographic grace”.

From the Nixon drawings to his final paintings, the exhibition at the Picasso Museum highlights Guston’s dance between grotesque and caricature, and the scathing power of his work.

Raymond Pettibon

In parallel with Guston, the Musée national Picasso-Paris is dedicating an exhibition to American artist Raymond Pettibon, with the support of the David Zwirner Gallery. Through seventy drawings and a dozen fanzines, the exhibition explores the world of this major artist of our time who uniquely captures the punk rock zeitgeist.

A self-taught artist born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Pettibon made his debut in the late 1970s on the Californian punk rock scene, designing album covers for the band Black Flag in Hermosa Beach, California. His drawings were in keeping with the DIY aesthetic of comics and fanzines characteristic of the punk movement. He drew on a wide range of sources, from literature to art history, religion, or politics to sports. He paints a biting portrait of a nihilistic and violent American society, marked by the end of the hippie dream and the return of conservatism — forcing the viewer to confront their own values.

By pairing two major American artists Guston and Pettibon through their link with Picasso’s legacy, the museum creates a dialogue between European and American traditions of political art.

Philip Guston. L’ironie de l’histoire
Raymond Pettibon. Underground
Until March 1, 2026
Musée national Picasso-Paris
5 rue de Thorigny, Paris 3e.
www.museepicassoparis.fr

Lead photo credit : View of the Philip Guston exhibition at Musée Picasso-Paris © Sylvia Edwards Davis