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Philip Guston at Morgan Library
Robert Zaller
Philip Guston:
Our American brother from another planet
ROBERT ZALLER
Philip Guston (1913-1980) is the unexceeded American artist of the 20th Century, by which I mean the painter who, though much imitated, remains the one whose vision still defines the boundary of who and where we are. Looking at the work Guston produced in the last months of his life— when, already too weak to paint, he had to rely solely on drawing— one senses the final, furious effort to get it all out, blanked at last by death. The irony, as he well knew, was that there could be no definitive revelation, that he could only point forward, as so many of the mysterious hands and clocks in his late work do, to a future that was simultaneously an encircling past.
Late Yeats, late Beckett . . . as these artists depict “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” where all art begins and ends, so late Guston leads us on a progress back to ourselves. It’s a distinctively native progress, too. As Yeats gave us the grandest paragraphs of Irish verse and Beckett deconstructed them through a pair of tramps, so Guston showed us our American selves. And no one has given us a truer or more capacious image yet.
Guston was what might be called a New Deal realist in the 1930s and 1940s, much drawn to social subjects although always with a private iconography. He followed his own idiosyncratic path into abstraction in the 1950s, and was esteemed by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg for what appeared the purity and absolutism of his style. In the 1960s, Guston’s work underwent a crisis, and in 1970 he suddenly began showing neorealist works featuring cartoon-like characters and objects: hooded Klansmen armed with two-by-fours; helpless-seeming, eyeball-like heads; arms clashing with manhole cover shields; pipestem legs on junk piles; encroaching spiders; ladders to nowhere.
Accused of betraying himself
His quondam admirers rejected him— “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum” was the title of Hilton Kramer’s derisive review— and, as with De Chirico (an early and permanent influence), Guston was accused of betraying himself, not to say the cause of modern art as such. Yet at his death ten years later a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sealed Guston’s renewed reputation as a master, and it is on the work of his last decade that his present influence chiefly rests.
The Morgan show of “Philip Guston: Works on Paper,” the last stop on a tour that has included Germany, Denmark and the Albertina in Vienna, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Guston’s drawings in America, and one long awaited. Like most artists, Guston used drawings as a preparative to painting, but he also valued them as independent works, and, at critical points in his life, he turned to drawing to reorient himself. This was particularly true during 1966-68, when Guston eschewed painting and worked out his return to figuration through drawings alone.
The gap between thought and action
The drawing that introduces the show is emblematic of this critical period. It consists of a tapering, leg-like form, squared off at the top and called, simply, Form (1967). Leg-like: not a leg, then; but not not a leg, either. The Platonic abstraction of a leg, perhaps? More, though, a stigma than one of Plato’s forms, for though powerful and compelling in its simplicity, it is unstable too, threatened, mutable. Form, then, expresses the gap between what can be thought and what must be acted.
What Guston aspires to in his work may be summed up in his description of Piero della Francesca: “a visitor to the earth, reflecting on distances, gravity and positions of essential forms.” That aspiration appears in all his work, abstract or figurative, but it is at the same time negated by what he actually achieves: a lesser, demiurgic, but seethingly vital world where no image is stable and no position settled, but all is in perpetual metamorphosis. To make even a single mark, Guston suggests, is to begin a world, but also to fall into that world; that is, into time. The creator— and it is this we suggest by the figure of the demiurge— is someone both realized and compromised by the very act of his creation.
‘Anybody can do that!’
There is, in fact, an untitled drawing in this show, also from 1967, that consists only of a single charcoal mark at the top of an otherwise blank white sheet. Even by the most severely minimalist standard, this is peremptory— a Barnett Newman Zip is baroque by comparison— and it is just the thing the lay skeptic has in mind when he says of modern art, Anybody can do that! Try it, though, and you will find that only Philip Guston could do it, and had to do it, at just that moment of his life and career. Try it— or, more simply, just look openly— and you’ll see the gesture, the authority, that summons a world.
Looking back on this moment in 1974, Guston remarked that “there was a desire, a powerful desire though an impossibility, to paint things as if one had just come from another planet.” To such a Piero-like visitor, everything would be defamiliarized, strange; everything would have to be done again, but as if for the first time. This is in fact the haunting quality of late Guston, a world that disappears in the very act of recognition.
Go back 20 or 30 years, to the abstractions of the 1950s, and one finds the reverse process at work: Here is a world whose elements resolve themselves from image to gesture, like unraveling skeins of thread. Two ways, you might say, opposite but not antithetical, of saying the same thing about the ungraspably Real.
Philip Roth and other writers
I’ve mentioned Guston in the company of writers, and in fact he had many friendships with writers, one of whom, Philip Roth, is depicted intimately with Guston himself. It’s not hard to see why, not only because the book is a central symbol in late Guston, but because he seems often to be forming the runic alphabet of a modern Apocrypha. There’s a suite of eight drawings in the Morgan show that illustrate poems by Clark Coolidge that were, in turn, inspired by works of Guston himself.
Out of critical favor, dogged by ill health and presentiments of mortality, alternately depressed and enraged by the gangsterism of the Nixon years, Guston largely retreated from the New York art world, working out a private vision that tapped deeply into the collective psyche of American culture. The poets, though, understood him, and greatly sustained him. “Guston’s forms incite words,” was the way the poet William Corbett put it. And it’s true. You can’t walk by a Guston without responding. His truth demands your own.
Our American brother from another planet
ROBERT ZALLER
Philip Guston (1913-1980) is the unexceeded American artist of the 20th Century, by which I mean the painter who, though much imitated, remains the one whose vision still defines the boundary of who and where we are. Looking at the work Guston produced in the last months of his life— when, already too weak to paint, he had to rely solely on drawing— one senses the final, furious effort to get it all out, blanked at last by death. The irony, as he well knew, was that there could be no definitive revelation, that he could only point forward, as so many of the mysterious hands and clocks in his late work do, to a future that was simultaneously an encircling past.
Late Yeats, late Beckett . . . as these artists depict “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” where all art begins and ends, so late Guston leads us on a progress back to ourselves. It’s a distinctively native progress, too. As Yeats gave us the grandest paragraphs of Irish verse and Beckett deconstructed them through a pair of tramps, so Guston showed us our American selves. And no one has given us a truer or more capacious image yet.
Guston was what might be called a New Deal realist in the 1930s and 1940s, much drawn to social subjects although always with a private iconography. He followed his own idiosyncratic path into abstraction in the 1950s, and was esteemed by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg for what appeared the purity and absolutism of his style. In the 1960s, Guston’s work underwent a crisis, and in 1970 he suddenly began showing neorealist works featuring cartoon-like characters and objects: hooded Klansmen armed with two-by-fours; helpless-seeming, eyeball-like heads; arms clashing with manhole cover shields; pipestem legs on junk piles; encroaching spiders; ladders to nowhere.
Accused of betraying himself
His quondam admirers rejected him— “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum” was the title of Hilton Kramer’s derisive review— and, as with De Chirico (an early and permanent influence), Guston was accused of betraying himself, not to say the cause of modern art as such. Yet at his death ten years later a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sealed Guston’s renewed reputation as a master, and it is on the work of his last decade that his present influence chiefly rests.
The Morgan show of “Philip Guston: Works on Paper,” the last stop on a tour that has included Germany, Denmark and the Albertina in Vienna, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Guston’s drawings in America, and one long awaited. Like most artists, Guston used drawings as a preparative to painting, but he also valued them as independent works, and, at critical points in his life, he turned to drawing to reorient himself. This was particularly true during 1966-68, when Guston eschewed painting and worked out his return to figuration through drawings alone.
The gap between thought and action
The drawing that introduces the show is emblematic of this critical period. It consists of a tapering, leg-like form, squared off at the top and called, simply, Form (1967). Leg-like: not a leg, then; but not not a leg, either. The Platonic abstraction of a leg, perhaps? More, though, a stigma than one of Plato’s forms, for though powerful and compelling in its simplicity, it is unstable too, threatened, mutable. Form, then, expresses the gap between what can be thought and what must be acted.
What Guston aspires to in his work may be summed up in his description of Piero della Francesca: “a visitor to the earth, reflecting on distances, gravity and positions of essential forms.” That aspiration appears in all his work, abstract or figurative, but it is at the same time negated by what he actually achieves: a lesser, demiurgic, but seethingly vital world where no image is stable and no position settled, but all is in perpetual metamorphosis. To make even a single mark, Guston suggests, is to begin a world, but also to fall into that world; that is, into time. The creator— and it is this we suggest by the figure of the demiurge— is someone both realized and compromised by the very act of his creation.
‘Anybody can do that!’
There is, in fact, an untitled drawing in this show, also from 1967, that consists only of a single charcoal mark at the top of an otherwise blank white sheet. Even by the most severely minimalist standard, this is peremptory— a Barnett Newman Zip is baroque by comparison— and it is just the thing the lay skeptic has in mind when he says of modern art, Anybody can do that! Try it, though, and you will find that only Philip Guston could do it, and had to do it, at just that moment of his life and career. Try it— or, more simply, just look openly— and you’ll see the gesture, the authority, that summons a world.
Looking back on this moment in 1974, Guston remarked that “there was a desire, a powerful desire though an impossibility, to paint things as if one had just come from another planet.” To such a Piero-like visitor, everything would be defamiliarized, strange; everything would have to be done again, but as if for the first time. This is in fact the haunting quality of late Guston, a world that disappears in the very act of recognition.
Go back 20 or 30 years, to the abstractions of the 1950s, and one finds the reverse process at work: Here is a world whose elements resolve themselves from image to gesture, like unraveling skeins of thread. Two ways, you might say, opposite but not antithetical, of saying the same thing about the ungraspably Real.
Philip Roth and other writers
I’ve mentioned Guston in the company of writers, and in fact he had many friendships with writers, one of whom, Philip Roth, is depicted intimately with Guston himself. It’s not hard to see why, not only because the book is a central symbol in late Guston, but because he seems often to be forming the runic alphabet of a modern Apocrypha. There’s a suite of eight drawings in the Morgan show that illustrate poems by Clark Coolidge that were, in turn, inspired by works of Guston himself.
Out of critical favor, dogged by ill health and presentiments of mortality, alternately depressed and enraged by the gangsterism of the Nixon years, Guston largely retreated from the New York art world, working out a private vision that tapped deeply into the collective psyche of American culture. The poets, though, understood him, and greatly sustained him. “Guston’s forms incite words,” was the way the poet William Corbett put it. And it’s true. You can’t walk by a Guston without responding. His truth demands your own.
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