Philip Guston – A Life Lived
Matt Bourbon
Writing about Philip
Guston is like writing about a religious icon. One need be careful, because the
reverence he’s afforded is extreme. Of course, there are many reasons why
Guston is adored. First, he is a traditional painter who’s smitten with
art history. The conservatives love him. Second, his paintings are satirically
reckless. The radicals love him. Third, his art fluctuates between representation
and abstraction. I suppose that means the schizophrenics love him. Basically,
Guston’s art has a bit of something for everyone. Despite his wide appeal,
Guston’s aesthetic is not watered down. His paintings are fervently rendered.
This is patently obvious if one examines the recent traveling retrospective born
at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. With 138 works on display, the chronological
format gives the viewer a palatable impression of Guston’s pictorial shifts
and artistic motivations.
When viewing the
exhibition, what becomes clear is that the historical stance frequently taken
toward Guston’s art is in need of some reworking. The commonly espoused
commentary on Guston goes something like this—Guston begins his career with
representational paintings that exhibit motifs to be utilized in his later narratives.
Politics and Surrealism are influential. Guston develops his art from representation
to abstraction. He paints for over a decade tied in stead with Abstract Expressionism.
Guston then breaks from abstraction and forms a new representation built from
the language of comics and personal references. He is severely criticized as
a traitor to the “earnest” endeavors of abstraction. Later, his cartoon
paintings are valorized. Well ok. the party line may be true in form, but I think
it misses the essential aspect of Guston’s work. In actuality, Guston is
less equivocal then we all think. He’s more of a representational artist
then an abstract one. In fact, I think Guston was always involved in some form
of depiction. Even at the height of his abstract period, he worked in a loose
and open representation, with hints of budding forms. Paradoxically, he never
seems fully vested in either representation or abstraction. He is, instead, bent
on finding a middle path. Guston said it best when he talked of a battle between
abstract painting and image making. “I’m seeking a place, an area where
these questions would be dissolved, where they don’t exist, where somehow
in me all this (abstraction and representation) would come together” (Philip
Guston, 1975-1980 Private and Public Battles, p. 30). Guston sought an art that
could encompass both his notions of painting and his notions of life. His late
depictive style is the best answer he could give for creating an art that would
be expansive in spirit and not limit one aspect of his interests for the other.
Maybe this is the key. Like Cézanne,
Guston gives himself
an impossible task. And it is from the inevitable frustration that ensues that
a vital art emerges.
In other words, like any good artist, Guston did not spring from Zeus’ head
preternaturally formed. Instead he struggled for his aesthetic ideals. This is
evidenced in his early paintings, which are hard fought, but frequently awkward
and sometimes stale. These paintings do, however, provide much of the genetic
material that emerges in later work. The anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects
and the violence of hooded hoodlums appear as fascinations for a young Guston.
Following his narrative inclinations, his paintings from the 1930’s and
40’s are largely defined by an illustrational style common to the social
realists. The gray toned palette and figure simplification in paintings like
“Martial Memory” feel much like the work of Ben Shahn. Other works
like “If This Be Not I” combine the narrative illustration in Shahn
with the claustrophobic tumbling space of Max Beckmann. In fact, Guston uses
a kind of drama and stage design that feels decidedly similar to the structural
arrangements of Beckmann. In this sense, Guston’s art feels like a mental
construction instead of a reproduction of a real space. This does not mean that
there isn’t a tactile space in his paintings. There is. It’s just that
dimension emerges from mark making, rather then from a translation of visual
cues. Essentially, his is an imaginary world grounded in the ethos of traditional
depiction.
Even during the
time when Guston explores abstraction, the idea of depiction is not entirely
lost. In paintings like “Zone” Guston allows the subtle nuance of touch
to take center stage—-literally. Paintings from this era are encrusted with
hatching marks that focus the painting action toward the center of the canvas.
One might think paintings like this are only about the autonomy of mark making.
Were this true Guston would fit nicely into the Abstract Expressionist cadre;
but Guston’s paintings feel as if he is concretely depicting something that
falls a few steps short of being namable. The solidity of his brushwork, and
the sense that Guston is shaping specific forms, make the paintings feel like
an anomaly set against the current of his abstractionist peers. Even his middle
paintings, that are all brushy gesture, upon closer inspection, reveal vague
drawings of interacting bodies and shadowy forms. These paintings use the idea
of narration from Guston’s early paintings as a starting point to deteriorate
the clarity of vision. Depiction becomes camouflaged among a style of non-objective
painting. This is much like De Kooning, who constantly played with the line between
recognition of something and its breakdown into “pure” form. Look closely
at paintings like “Fable I” and “To Fellini”. Smudge marks
reveal figures cavorting through a mushy abstractionist space.
As we all know
these smudges and smears of paint soon cohered into Guston’s most talked
about work—the cartoon paintings. This period of romantically goopy painting
crossbred with cartoon imagery elicits both objurgation and admiration. From
a critical stance, it is true that these paintings feed the cliché of
the tormented self-absorbed artist crafting his or her troubles into art. In
fact, these paintings prove that Guston is Guston’s favorite subject. Yet,
at the same time the work has a dark sense of humor that undercuts his solipsism.
Due to these complications, the melancholic whimsy of Guston’s later art
is endearing and slightly pathetic. Look at how Guston transformed the menacing
hooded figures of his early years into some king of self-referential stand in
for the artist. The late hooded figures are bumbling, doughy creatures filled
with vice, yet impotent to do much harm. They swagger and threaten as big pointed
fingers wag at them, condemning them to shame. All Guston’s characters of
this period seem to be burdened by an existential dread. One feels sad for their
dour life, but also irritated by their perpetual malaise.
In the last group of paintings Guston created, he jettisons the hooded figures
for a sharper, more uncertain cast of characters. If not for these paintings
one might assume that had Guston lived longer he might of fallen trap of his
own persona. One could easily see him continue his style ad nauseam, much like
the late formulaic paintings of Marc Chagall. Instead these last works show Guston
vibrant and working toward a new territory that we’ll sadly never see.
In the end, Guston
helped define and open a realm of artistic possibilities for a whole generation
of artists schooled by the mantra of late Abstract Expressionism. For this, he
should certainly be recognized. Guston took risks and dramatically shifted his
style of painting in order to seek his ideal art. He did this with a determination
to locate that magical place he spoke of where all notions of abstraction and
image making vaporize into a form that can speak directly of a life lived.
The exhibition
is traveling to:
Museum Modern Art Fort Worth, March 30 to June 8, 2003, www.mamfw.org;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 28-September 27, 2003 www.sfmoma.org;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 27, 2003-January 4, 2004, www.metmuseum.org;
Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 24-April 12, 2004, www.royalacademy.org.uk.
