Stumblebum growing pains issue 1

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Growing Pains spawned the spin-off series, 

Kirk Cameron and Tracy Gold played siblings in McDonald’s commercial before they played siblings on Growing Pains

Rival network NBC poked fun at Growing Pains on their show Golden Girls in the episode “Family Affair” with Dorothy claiming “I can’t believe Alan Thicke has a hit series”.

Kirk Cameron and Tracey Gold were related to regular cast members of other ABC sitcoms airing during Growing Pains run. Tracey Gold’s sister Missy Gold was featured on Benson as Katie Gatling, while Kirk Cameron’s sister Candace Cameron co-starred on Full House as D.J. Tanner. While both Tracey Gold and Candace Cameron are still acting, Kirk and Missy haven’t on TV since the end of their hit series.

In May 1971, Philip Guston returned from an eight-month sojourn in Italy following the scathing critical response to his October 1970 Marlborough Gallery exhibition in New York. That first showing of his late paintings had been assailed by critics and admirers of high modernism as an act of heresy, a full-fledged betrayal of abstract painting. Unraveled and deflated by attacks from critics like Hilton Kramer, who publicly denounced Guston as ‘A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum’ (the headline of his biting New York Times review), the artist lamented the art world’s rigidity. ‘It was as though I had left the Church’, he stated at the time. ‘I was excommunicated’. Less than one year later, Guston would return to the U.S. with his immersion in figuration and the aesthetic of transgression only reinforced by criticism, now replete with the grotesque and the absurd.

In the newly exhibited works from Guston’s sketchbooks, visitors to the exhibition will get a closer look at the artist’s working process and the development of his imagery. They can study Guston’s parodies of the President’s humble upbringings and dirt-poor youth in the drawing of a locomotive engine billowing with black smoke. As the train departs from the ocean waves and exotic palm trees of the California coast, it reminds us of Nixon’s determined path toward early political success. To complete the dramatic scene-setting Guston borrows the phrase, ‘It seems like an impossible dream…’ from Nixon’s 1968 Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention, and memorializes it in clouds. In sketches where Nixon himself is depicted, Guston exaggerates anatomical attributes, notably Nixon’s famous 5 o’clock shadow, defiant gaze, swollen jowls, and ever-growing nose. Nixon’s ‘schnoz’ is rendered as phallic morphology, becoming a visual cue for Guston’s condemnation of the President’s obscene deceits.