ART MONOGRAPHS

Philip Guston
A Life Lived

Philip Guston: A Life Lived catches Guston at an important stage in his development as an artist; late in his career in the 1970's, when he has returned to figurative paintings that are packed with symbols, both political and autobiographical. That an established and respected artist like Guston, who was considered a major figure in the New York School of the 40's and 50's, would make such a drastic stylistic change shocked and outraged the art world. Yet, this later work is what he is known for today, and was influential to a generation of artists known as Neo-Expressionists who were emboldened to paint in a similar figurative style. The film takes us to his studio in Woodstock, where he discusses his philosophy and motivations while he works on a large canvas that he ultimately paints over the next day, feeling that it did not succeed. As his retrospective is being installed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the artist reflects on 4 decades of his work . His statements in response to questions from critics and art historians constitute a testament. Philip Guston died shortly after the opening of the exhibition.

Background

Philip Guston was born in 1913 as the son of Russian emigrants in Montreal, Canada. His family moved to California when he was seven years old. Except for a year at the Manual Arts High School and three months at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles he was a self-taught painter. His career reflects a wide-ranging variety of styles - from social realism, to abstraction, to figurative painting. Guston expressed his frustration with the confines of the abstract school: "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. There are no wiggly or straight lines..."1

Inspired by muralists such as Sigueiros and Orozcos, Guston began his career producing socially engaged artwork. He moved to New York City in 1936 to work as an assistant to Reginald Marsh on the Customs House building. He went on to work on mural designs for the Penn Station Subway and Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn which were projects sponsored by the WPA mural division. Neither of these projects were ever realized. In 1938 Holger Cahill commissioned Guston to do the outdoor facade mural of the WPA building for the World's Fair. Later he designed and executed murals for the Community Building of the Queensbridge Housing Project on Long Island; the Commerce, GA Post Office; the Forestry Building in Laconia, NH; and the Social Security Building in Washington D.C.

In the early 40's he gave up murals to devote himself to easel painting in oils. His work gradually moved beyond direct representation and became progressively abstracted. By the late 40's Guston devoted his energies to exploring the qualities of paint, and its expressive potential. Like Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, the act of painting became a spontaneous one. Guston: "The desire for direct expression finally became so strong that even the interval necessary to reach back to the palette beside me became too long, so one day I put up a large canvas and placed the palette in front of me. Then I forced myself to paint the entire work without stepping back to look at it. I remember that I painted [White Painting] in an hour."

During the late 50's the brush strokes in Guston's paintings were simplified to the point that his work began to resemble interlocked planes of color. His palette became more restricted also, until it was reduced to a few shades of blue, gray, black and occasionally red. These planes of simplified color schemes assumed geometric forms and can be interpreted as the genesis of Guston's return to realism in the late 60's. He explains in the film: "My quarrel with modern painting is that...it is too easy to elicit a response. Painters could put down swatches of color and everyone responds. I think I wanted more and more specificity in the work. There's too much of a love affair in modern art".

With this new figurative work Guston incorporated the pictorial imagery that he had been exploring in earlier work. The figures in these paintings become cartoon-like in their simple yet exaggerated form. As a child Guston would copy comic-strips, specifically "Barney Google" and "Krazy Kat" and stylistically his later work refers to this comic book aesthetic. The hooded Ku Klux Klansman is one of the more ominous recurring images and in his paintings of the 1970's is a sort of self-portrait in the guise of evil. As early as the 1930's Guston had used the hooded figure when he was protesting, by means of a series of frescoes, the Scottsboro case. The cartoonish qualities of Guston's later paintings render these figures ridiculous somehow - their inherent evil is reduced to laughable thugishness. Another motif, the single hanging light bulb, refers to Guston's childhood when he would retreat to a closet with a similar light source in order to draw. All of these later paintings have a stage-set or story board quality. Guston comments in the film: "I felt like Fellini, I felt like a movie director." In this way Guston's later paintings manage to meld autobiographical and personal elements, now presented in a tableau or theatrical way, with archetypal, universal concerns.

1. Robert Storr, Philip Guston, New York-London (1986), p. 34.

2. Ibid., p. 31.