'Philip Guston: The '50s,' in New York

Philip Guston has emerged in the past 30 years as the most influential figure of the Abstract Expressionist generation that, in the 1950s, gave international art its signature style and America the position of world artistic dominance it has held ever since. Pollock is still better known as an icon, and De Kooning is the artist of preference for some. But Guston's daring synthesis of Expressionism with what seemed at the time a grotesque, comic-strip version of Pop Art in the decade before his death in 1980 is what has fascinated the current generation of painters. It's easy to rip the style off, but impossible to replicate it.

When Guston first showed his new figurative style— really a revisiting of the iconography of his earliest style, filtered through a distorted, Krazy Kat-like lens— critics who had invoked him as the ultimate purist of abstraction were dismayed and (in the case of Hilton Kramer) outraged. Now, from a distance of four decades, we can see that Guston's late style, however superficially different from his middle-period Expressionism, represented not only a daring act of artistic renewal but also the culmination of a continuous, life-long project. In the aftermath of Pop, when an often-shallow eclecticism reigned, Guston's art offered an example of gritty, hard-won integrity.

Where, one may ask, does that leave Guston's earlier, notionally abstract decade of the 1950s, the one that originally made his reputation? The current show of eight large works from 1954-1960 at L & M Arts in Manhattan offers no catalogue or essay, nor even wall commentary; it simply hangs the art with the gallery's usual understated elegance and lets viewers make their own judgments.

Daring then, cohesive now

These works no longer look as they once did, when they represented the ne plus ultra of the avant-garde. Painting (1954) and Beggar's Joys (1954-55) were considered utterly daring then in their apparent absence of structure and even gesture— realms of painterly mist that looked as though they could shift in any wind. Now they appear luminously cohesive, and almost classically beautiful.

Indeed, you won't find two more splendid rooms in New York than on L & M's current ground floor, nor will you find them often, since all but two of the works on exhibit come from private collections.

This isn't to say that mid-period Gustons, like all great art, don't present enduring challenges. But their beauty is now transparent to us— that is, their language has been assimilated into the recognized idiom of art--even as their meaning continues to elude easy or stable definition.

Pregnant with images

Like all the Abstract Expressionists of the New York school, Guston came to abstraction after an early career as a figurative painter; always an urban-oriented artist, he did WPA murals in the 1930s, and street scenes in the 1940s. His transition to abstraction was particularly intriguing, his canvases becoming increasingly two-dimensional as his break with direct representation came, almost crowding his figures off the stage.

Even at his most seemingly abstract, however, Guston never ceased to feel the pressure of the image, a point he made in commentary. As one moves chronologically through the 1950s with him, his surfaces become more and more densely clotted, pregnant one might say with images not ready to be born (or, perhaps, to take definitive shape— something they never did even when he returned to figuration).

A sense of urgency

In Prague (1956), for example, there's a thick, cluster-like buildup of raw daubs of paint, very reminiscent of the work Guston was to produce in the 1970s, even including hints of the shoe soles that later became a signature image, as well as suggestions of Ensor-like masks. A passage in red in Dial, also from 1956, likewise suggests the down-pointing hand that appears so often in the late works, while the broken, highly dynamic blacks of To Fellini (1958) seem to quote Matisse dancers. The hauntingly inexplicit imagery of these works— present, but gestatory, withheld— gives them what is still their great sense of urgency and force.

As a group, though, what impresses most now is their sheer gorgeousness and variety of color and texture. I can well imagine Guston dismayed, even enraged by such a remark (and quite properly so). But if beauty is the defeat of art— its resignation into the accepted— it is also one's admission into the pantheon. Like it or not, Philip, you're now one of the masters.