There are some painters for whom one waits eagerly for a retrospective and for me Philip Guston is just one of those. Why do I find his work so intriguing? For a start, there is the colour pink, which features throughout his work – not a frilly, Barbie pink, but a salmon shade which fades from blood-red through to the palest blush, dominating a remarkable signature palette of cadmium red, greys, black and flashes of emerald green. Then there is the reassuringly, overtly political nature of the work. All art is made in a specific geo-social and political context, and the best art, for me, refers to that context explicitly or implicitly. Preferably explicitly. Then there is Guston’s lifelong struggle to discover a personal style, and a personal vocabulary. And the humour – a refusal to take himself over-seriously, and the dark humour of his cartoonish self-portraits and Ku Klux Klan pictures. There is humility in the humour, and a self-questioning restlessness in the work. He was pre-occupied with the problem of seeing; he saw the artist as a see-er: “the thing is recognised only as it comes into existence.”
I don’t remember when I first came across Guston, though it was relatively recently – this century, I am sure. I found the pictures instantly compelling and was surprised by how different they were from those of his abstract expressionist contemporaries. He did experiment with abstraction, in his trademark palette, and the Tate shows some of these pictures alongside a photograph of the exhibition of his abstract work which took place at the Guggenheim in 1962. But I find these pictures the least satisfying of all his work and I am not surprised that the exhibition was considered disappointing in its time.
Researching this post, I am lost down the rabbit hole of the Philip Guston Foundation website, set up by his daughter Misa Guston Meyer, who has dedicated her life to conserving and promoting her father’s legacy. This outstanding website, the best I know of any artist, includes every single known painting by Guston, who was prolific – listed by date, searchable by year, exhibition, museum, even paintings whose whereabouts are unknown, suggesting that Guston kept methodical records of his work.
So we can see all the paintings shown in the Guggenheim exhibition, which received poor reviews and after which Guston abandoned painting for a year. His hazy and uncertain abstracts do not suit the colour pink – which seems to demand figuration -- and are followed by some frankly crude pictures in which the pink background struggles against black, rough square or rectangular shapes, which to me represent the face of the artist fighting through the abstraction, as if trying to rediscover himself. Guston is quoted in “I paint what I want to see” saying “actually I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face. But it is very confusing because I think that’s what I’m doing in a more total way …. What I really want to do is to paint a single form in the middle of the canvas.”
Philip Guston was a Jewish Canadian artist, whose family moved to the US while he was a child. His youth was scarred by the suicide by hanging of his father when he was eight and the death of his brother in an accident. He was largely self-taught, and his early work was influenced by renaissance artists, including Piero del la Francesco, and the surrealists. At 17 he painted an extraordinary Madonna and Child, and he was a member of the New Deal WPA (Works Progress Administration) group of artists and one of those who painted the monumental mural of 1935, The Struggle against Terrorism, shown in detail in the Tate. He was a schoolfriend of Jackson Pollock and aligned himself with the New York abstract expressionists but he did not abandon figuration for long. De Chirico was a big influence, in whose work we find the trademark pink, sometimes to colour flesh but more often used for the urban backdrop common to many of his pictures. Guston also frequently quotes from de Chirico the rising sun, the clock and a curious riveted triangular shape. From the black rectangles of the windows de Chirico’s cityscapes seem to come the black vertical mark that litters Guston’s pictures, representing the words on the pages of a book, the hooded eyes of the KKK, the windows of buildings. Guston was haunted by images of the Holocaust, shown perhaps in the tangled limbs and piles of shoes that appear in some pictures. The ring pull of a window blind is a noose, fingers are trigger-pointed. The repeated motifs in his work come, however, from his dreams, says his daughter – “to ask for meaning is to misunderstand his process”.
Photos and documentaries depict Guston as relaxed, avuncular, sociable, invariably with a cigarette and/or drink in hand. He had, said his daughter, a warm personality. The paintings, on the other hand, suggest a more tortured soul: insomniac, burdened by the injustices and violence of the world, challenged by the search for artistic identity, continually experimenting and reinventing himself. In the documentary being shown at Tate Modern, Guston speaks of his attraction to struggle – expressed for me so much better by the French word “la lutte”, conveying its existential nature – the struggle between Guston and himself, and his identity as a painter, between abstraction and figuration, between oppressor and oppressed, between communism and fascism, against racism. Some of his earliest paintings are of children play-fighting in the streets with sticks, sometimes the struggle is infused with a dark and surrealist humour. “He constantly questioned whether painting could be a legitimate response to human suffering and cruelty”, wrote his daughter.
In 1967 Guston withdrew from the art world to Woodstock in upstate New York where he finally settled into his trademark cartoonlike, figurative style and an explosion of work followed – the pink and red taking over his palette almost completely. Suffering increasing ill health, Guston died of a heart attack, in June 1980, during a retrospective shown by the San Francisco Museum. Challenging as it did the artistic conventions of its time, his work fell out of favour but the Tate retrospective guarantees Guston’s place among the most unique and visionary artists of the 20th century.