^
Born on 27 June 1913: Philip
Goldstein “Guston”, in Montreal, Canada,
US Abtract
Expressionist painter who died on 07 June 1980.
— He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1919. He began to paint
and draw in 1927 and attended the Otis Art Institute for three months (1930).
At this stage he based his technique on a close study of the art of Giorgio
de Chirico and painters of the Italian Renaissance such as Paolo Uccello,
Andrea Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. He was attempting to integrate
the modelled architectural space of Renaissance art with the contracted,
reassembled space of Cubism, for example in paintings of sinister hooded
figures reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan such as Conspirators (1930).
— Born in Montreal but grew up in Los Angeles. Studied briefly at
the Otis Art Institute in 1930, but otherwise self-taught as a painter.
His early work was influenced by Renaissance masters such as Uccello, but
combined their type of figure composition with a compressed treatment of
space derived from Cubism and de Chirico. Worked 1934-42 almost exclusively
as a mural painter on the WPA Federal Art Project and other public works
projects in Los Angeles and New York. Turned to easel painting after moving
to Iowa City in 1941 and had his first one-man exhibition at the State University
of Iowa 1944. Awarded First Prize at the 1945 Pittsburgh International.
Began to develop an abstract style in 1947, then settled in New York in
1950 and joined the circle of the Abstract Expressionists. Turned in the
late 1960s to a form of figuration with schematic images of an enigmatic
Surrealistic kind. Moved in 1967 to Woodstock, New York. Died at Woodstock.
— When Philip Guston in the
autumn of 1970 exhibited his new figurative paintings in the New York Marlborough
Gallery, a storm broke over his head. His contemporary critics could apparently
not get over the fact that a painter, whom they had for over two decades
counted among the heroes of Abstract
Expressionism, had with no apparent warning changed camps.
Since the 50s, the relationship between abstraction
and figuration had become so hardened that a vote for the one or the other
was tantamount to a religious avowal. At first this was politically colored.
Nazi Germany's complete elimination of abstract tendencies, on the one hand,
and the doctrine of Social Realism, on the other, made abstract painting
a symbolic bastion of postwar freedom and democracy - on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Not till Pop
Art could this pitfall to consciousness be amended, insofar as art then
became dedicated to a world that saw its political values absorbed into
its consumer goods. If artistic liberty multiplied in view of the new aesthetics
of products, the dogmatic position associated with abstract painting continued
in another form. The dogmatism that began politically was gradually replaced
by one that concerned more the inner surface of painting, yet was no less
ideologically determined. It found its highpoint and its endpoint in the
theory of Radical Painting: an emphatic avowal of 'pure' color that placed
all narrative forms of art under suspicion of heresy. This was the mid-eighties
when, in Europe, a Neo-Expressionism
returned with a vengeance, the roots of which converged on the change in
direction that Guston had taken in 1968.
The feat that Guston accomplished can hardly
be appraised highly enough. Even if his new figurativeness had already been
foreshadowed in 1966 at the exhibition in the Jewish Museum in New York,
the majority of the art public had studiously ignored this important half-way
step and continued to commit the artist to continue in the painting style
he had so long delighted in. In fact, Guston's recent switch to the figurative
remained unusual even to those of the following generation. In contrast
to his colleague and friend Willem
de Kooning, for example, who had drawn criticism when he exhibited his
Women series in 1953 with its early rebuff of Abstract Expressionism, Guston
considered his conversion to be irreversible. This made him an exception
in a world where the number of artists who turned from figuration to abstraction
was legion. Their shining example was the path that High Modernism had gone,
with Mondrian
and Kandinsky
as pathfinders, a path whose inner necessity and logic seemed so convincing
that it marginalized every other divergent possibility.
Particularly Mondrian's artistic development
was considered as paradigmatic for American as it was for European art,
because color-field painting could so go against the grain of Mondrian's
relational concept. It was in the nature of things that the reversal of
this paradigm, which for many decades was absolutely identified with the
genesis of Modernism, was destined to provoke contradiction. And, finally,
the purist aesthetics of Minimal Art made their own contribution to the
uproar Guston caused in 1970.
That Guston was not out for provocation is
clear from his own statements. As early as 1960 the public should have been
alerted when he spoke of the 'impurity' of painting during a public discussion
(in which Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkow and Robert Motherwell also participated),
at the same time stressing its representational function: “There is
something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art:
That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself - therefore we habitually
analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'.
It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are
image-makers and image-ridden. There are no "wiggly or straight lines" or
any other elements. You work until they vanish. The picture isn't finished
if they are seen.
This was not only directed against Ad Reinhardt,
whose manifesto Twelve Rules for a New Academy, published in 1957,
was an obsessive avowal of purified painting, it also, above all, applied
to Guston's art itself, which could be read at the time solely as color-form
events. In truth, Guston, as Robert Storr shows, only produced art that
was completely non-representational between 1951 and 1954: "By the mid-1950s
Guston had abandoned the practice of giving his paintings numerical or generic
names, and his new titles reflected the growing 'thingness' of his images,
suggesting a wide variety of specific subjects, moods, and art historical
references.' On the other hand, the evolutionary logic inherent in his abstract
works demonstrates how the new figurativeness came about almost of necessity.
How much Guston's abstraction of the 50s
was parallel to his times was something Lawrence Alloway recognized when
he stressed the way lyrical abstraction was built up in the rigorous structure
of the 'pink paintings' between 1952 and 1954. "These are the works in which,
under the mask of discrete lyricism, he has been most radical, presenting
paintings that are the sum of their discrete visible parts. In this structural
candor he can be likened to Pollock
in his open drip paintings... One reason for suggesting that these paintings
are 'radical' Is that they make almost no use of one of the most persistent
conventions of Western art, the hierarchic ranking of forms... Non-hierarchic
forms can be achieved either holistically by unbroken color areas (Newman,
Rothko)
or by the repetition of small visible elements (Pollock, Guston)."
Starting with a work like Ochre Painting
1 (1951) via To
BWT (1952), and Zone
(1954), up to Untitled (1958), a continual line is being drawn:
it begins with the egalitarian structure described by Alloway; all the elements,
however relate at first to the picture plane. In To BWT the grid structure
is concentrated at the center of the picture; an imaginary optical plane
is created that pulls the foreground elements together with those of the
background into a continuum. In Zone the massed paint takes on a material
character that presses forward out of the picture plane. This materiality
in Untitled encompasses the whole body of the painting, while the elementary
structure of small particles is abandoned. Although it looks like Guston
has here returned to traditional composition, his compositional method is
based less on a planimetric order - on the contrary, this becomes disorganized
- than on the step-by-step spatial transference of individual color-forms
from the background. The whole canvas develops quasi from back to front
and so, in a certain way preserves its non-hierarchic status. ...
What the figurative aspect finally crystallized
into was that cartoon-like, slightly coarse style that was to characterize
his late paintings from 1968 on. The dualism had now completely evolved.
Guston was partly spared a constant tug-of-war in that he did his 'pure'
drawings during the day and gave himself up to the world of objects at night.
This dichotomy tells us much. It testifies to the fact that the artist was
aware of having invaded 'forbidden' territory, that he was about to create
something that the sober light of day could hardly bear The title of Goya's
famous caprice supplies us with the suitable metaphor: The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters. What was monstrous was less the things themselves that
Guston put down on paper than the profound dichotomy of the working method
itself. It tells us how much the historical paradigm that describes the
path from the figurative to the abstract (the reversal of which proves recalcitrant)
has even become inscribed in the artist's own idea of himself.
If the return to the world of things, as
the 'dark pictures' make clear are based in part on the painting process
itself, what was certainly essential was a lively political awareness that
Guston had shown since his artistic beginnings. In 1977 he retrospectively
spoke of this aspect in a quite clear-cut way: "So when the 1960's came
along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to
America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am 1, sitting at home,
reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then
going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. [..] I wanted to be complete
again, as I was when I was a kid.... Wanted to be whole between what I thought
and what I felt."
One picture can perhaps equally articulate
Guston's schizophrenia and his desire for wholeness. It is one of a collection
of works that contains a head turned to the right, with eyes wide open and
a furrowed brow. Basically the mouth is missing in these faces, while a
cigarette usually juts from the lower half: a sure indication that it is
the chain smoking Guston. Although this insignia is absent in our picture,
the other motifs allow it to be classified without doubt as a self-portrait.
Spleen was painted in 1975 and its pink background contains only few figurative
elements. In front of a line, interpretable as a table edge, lies a thin,
limp paintbrush. From it juts the profile of the head and a single fist.
A picture within a picture, which dashingly portrays a sparkling sun, has
been placed directly vis-a-vis the eye; it nearly seems to be stuck there.
The link between picture and eye has been arranged almost obsessively in
that the student's diameter is exactly the same as the sun's. The picture
of the sun has the character of an idee fixe. It points to that counterworld
that normally remains invisible in his pictures: his longing for holistic
beauty - a childhood dream. Present in the work is the awareness that this
longing is a vain one. The pendant to the sun is the fist, into which all
indignation about the existing state of affairs is concentrated.
The picture's few ingredients express the
dilemma that is never to let Guston go. There can be no mediation between
the beauty that he called up in his works of the 50s and his reference to
the social world as It affected him and that he felt to be bitter and violent.
Which is why the paintbrush in this picture is limp and dull.
Guston made the decision to portray the world
as represented by the clenched fist. The artistic means he used to do so
and that first turn up In the drawings have been debated: his early interest
in cartoons, namely the comics of George Herriman and later of Robert Crumb,
his fascination for the paintings and drawings of Max
Beckmann, which he was able to see as early as 1938 in New York and
especially to study during his years of teaching in St. Louis (1945-1947).
Beckmann did not only appeal to him thematically; for his new works Guston
also borrowed his method of drawing closed contours around the figures.
And yet none of the influences that were
doubtlessly at work here give an adequate explanation of the enormous turnabout
that Guston made between 1968 and 1970 with the introduction of his crude,
casual and comic-strip-like images. We need to go back one step to find
the key. While working on the 'dark pictures' from 1961 to 1965, Guston
had, as he himself noted, reached a point where painting had become 'crucial'.
He had advanced to its most elementary state, by eliminating all painting's
seductive means such as the use of color. The alternate application of black
and white paint led to a process of mutual erasing, whereby the paint became
amassed into various gray tones. It was a continual trial of strength from
which, in the end, form and arrangement emerged. And, in fact, these paintings
lacked any kind of virtuosity in its conventional sense. They are the result
of a restriction he inflicted on himself, not so as to sound out the limits
of his capacities, but so as to experience the inner essence of the painting
process - how does form, how does a picture originate?
When Guston decided to dedicate himself again
to the world of things, this experience stood him in good stead. He had
the example of Pop Art directly before his eyes, which opened up our everyday
world by taking its most superficial and, at the same time, most significant
aspect as a reproach: advertising. But could credibility become possible
by bringing the artistic medium in line with consumer aesthetics, as did
Pop Art? And, on the other hand, could you tell stories by using an artistic
skill, which he, Guston, had already almost twenty years ago brought to
a level that in every way was convincing and unquestionable?
Against this background it was only consistent
to again lay down a restriction. No more 'beautiful' pictures for the sake
of credibility. 'Bad' painting for the sake of story-telling. Painting that
articulates its proximity to caricature, so as to be able to bring violence,
wit, politics and the grotesque into play. And finally, self-inflicted restriction
so as to be finally free of those outside restrictions that an academically-neutered
Modernism, its public and critics demanded of an artist like Guston. The
'dark pictures' were an important, indispensable lesson in a process of
liberation, since they allowed the artist to reach a point where the crude,
violent and simplified style of the late works was to a certain degree anticipated.
In Flatlands (1970), the possibilities
of this newly won freedom are spread out like a tableau - the possibility,
say, of looking back without anger and at the same time being lord of the
present. In his earliest works Guston had portrayed the martial activity
of the Ku Klux Klan with the necessary gloom and acuity (Conspirators,
1930). These killers now appear again on the scene, limbs of corpses paving
their way. In fact there is nothing whole in this landscape: a conglomerate
of ruinous elements, the result of a devastation that time has revealed.
But the protagonists themselves have lost their nether parts like figures
in a game whose rules they cannot fathom. The seams of their hoods expose
the overblown puppets for what they are: the seams show that it is the women
in the background who have sustained the masquerade with their handiwork.
Herein lay Guston's new possibility of coping
with everyday violence and terror - by exposing them to ridicule. This could
only ensue from an equal portion of brute force and the pseudo-gay, as it
has been put to the test here in all deliberateness. The artist did not
hesitate to include a bit of self-criticism - in the form of a swollen hand
that points to the only intact object, an abstract picture. The sun is also
not missing, the sun that later in Spleen becomes a trauma. Here it is,
together with the pink clouds, an ingredient that lends the scene's gay
cynicism the last bit of spice.
The grotesque was inscribed in Guston's late
work as an expression of his split consciousness vis-a-vis the everyday,
political terror and his very real powerlessness as an artist. The grotesque
world is our world - and is not. Horror mixed with smiles has its basis
in the experience that our familiar world, seemingly moored in a fixed order
turns topsy-turvy, its order nullified. This seems to have been Guston's
basic mood these last ten years. The massive irruption of those hooded figures
into his new picture-world speaks a clear language. Whether they gang up
before the gates to the city, ride through the neighborhood in open cars,
or after a day of work - dismembered bodies piled up in the background as
trophies - hold a palaver, their presence seem ubiquitous, almost normal.
This is what makes such paintings and drawings so uncanny, that the evil
arrives with the greatest matter-of-factness and, as such, seems to be an
outright synonym of middle-class citizenry.
The awareness of his own powerlessness led
Guston to put himself into the role of the pursuer. We are suddenly confronted
with the hooded man in the studio, holding the unavoidable cigarette in
the right, plying the paintbrush with the right. "The idea of evil fascinated
me... " Guston said. "I almost tried to imagine I was living with the Klan.
What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot?" "In the last years
this grotesque-comic side in his work was to recede more and more, while
his dark pessimism about the state of the world grew. This is the period
of apocalyptic fantasies like Yellow Light (1975), or the three
versions of a flood (e.g., Deluge
II, 1975), from which there is no escape. He recognized his own
alter ego in Goya's darkest engraving [sic]: it shows a dog trying in vain
to climb a hill while he is being relentlessly buried under sand. (Un
perro, 1821).
It is significant that in Guston's late works
there is as good as no complete body to be seen, including his self-portraits.
Anatomy is reduced to the
head. In view of a world out of joint, his feeling of being imprisoned
in the role of spectator must have taken over his consciousness more and
more. And when some part of the body other than a head damned to watch and
suffer appeared, It was no less dismembered. The paintings Feet on Rug
(1978), and Ravine (1979), among the most agitating of his last
years, show just such mutilation. The one shows two foot stumps, motionless
on a rug specially made for them, before an empty horizon. The other is
a ravine into which beetles make their way over what is, in reality, the
anatomy between head and shoulder transformed into a topographical formation.
These are documents of desolation that have yet found a unique form, testimony
to an artist who is painting against his own downfall.
— LINKS
— Pit
(526x849pix, 84kb — ZOOM
to 1052x1698pix, 146kb)
— City Limits
(591x792pix, 64kb — ZOOM
to 1182x1584pix, 112kb)
— Green Rug
(848x606pix, 75kb — ZOOM
to 1272x909pix, 84kb)
— Head
(673x734pix, 52kb — ZOOM
to 1346x1468pix, 98kb)
— Paint, Smoke, Eat
(612x816pix, 68kb — ZOOM
to 1224x1632pix, 122kb)
— Roma
(1971; 800x1134pix, 46kb) _ compare Notsug's Amor
di Ettone (2001; 800x1134pix, 48kb)
— The Street
(554x896pix, 52kb)
— The
Return (1958, 178x199cm; 460x512pix, 30kb) _ Before the Second World
War Guston painted figurative works with a specific social content. Then,
in 1951, he made his first truly abstract paintings. By the middle of the
decade, in paintings such as this one, Guston had begun to paint block-like
forms in strong colors, grouped at the center of the image. He thought of
the shapes in this painting as being equivalent to figures who had been
away for some time and were now returning.
— Bad
habits (1970, 185x198cm; 561x600pix, 112kb) _ After the delicate painterly
abstraction that had characterized Guston's art since the early 1950s and
made him a well-known member of Abstract Expressionism, the raw figurative
paintings of 1970 came as a shock not altogether welcomed by art critics.
Guston said later about the generally hostile reaction: “I was excommunicated
for a while”
In retrospect, the affinities between the
late figurative paintings and his previous work are as apparent as their
novelty; the inflected, creamy paint surface of his abstract paintings remains
undiminished and his images re-invoke themes from his figurative paintings
of the 1930s and 1940s. The hooded figures that appear in Bad habits
recall his paintings of the Ku Klux Klan of the early 1930s, as does the
image of flagellation.
In a lecture in March 1978 Guston spoke of
his relationship between his recent and earlier work in a way that is illuminating
of Bad habits:
“As a young boy I was an activist in
radical politics, and although I am no longer an activist, I keep track
of everything. In 1967-1968 I became very disturbed by the war [Vietnam]
and the demonstrations. They became my subject matter and I was flooded
by a memory. When I was about 17 or 18, I had done a whole series of paintings
about the Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in Los Angeles at that time
… In the new series of 'hoods' my attempt was really not to illustrate,
to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated
me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with
them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was
living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot.
Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan.
I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures
in mind and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos,
'Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer'. Ideas and feelings
kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave.”
— To
B.W.T. (1952, 123x131cm; 690x747pix, 130kb) — Zone
(1954) — The
Clock (1957)
— City
Limits (1969) — Outskirts
(1969) — The
Studio (1969) — A
Day's Work (1970)
— Painting,
Smoking, Eating (1973) — Head
(1975) — Deluge
II (1975) — Ancient
Wall (1976)
— Green
Rug (1976) — The
Pit (1976) — Room
(1976) — Curtain
(1977)
— Sleeping
(1977) — Entrance
(1979) — Talking
(1979)
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