Philip Guston

Philip Guston lived in extremes. He smoked too much, he drank too much, he holed up in his studio for weeks and months, sunk deep into moody depressions. At other times he happily held court with a constant flow of admirers. He was impressively witty and gregarious, as reported by his family, friends and former students. But he saw attention as a burden—an interruption from painting—and wanted most to be left alone in his studio. In Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Alfred A Knopf, 1988) his daughter, Musa Mayer (named after her mother), describes his working style as a “near psychosis,” what can be compared only to the “creative illnesses” endured by Jung, Freud, van Gogh, Nietzsche and other artists, mystics, writers and poets. Guston’s long stretches of isolation and introspection were marked by intense yearnings to pull authentic forms from his subconscious, to unmask what was masked. “There is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember,” he wrote in the late 1970s, his daughter recorded in Night Studio. “I want to see this place. I paint what I want to see.”

“Philip Guston and the Poets,” an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Italy, presented well-chosen paintings and drawings from all stages of Guston’s 50-year career. Together, they reveal his agonizing struggle with both his medium and his subconscious. With this work runs another narrative composed of the faces, lives and words of five modernist poets whom Guston is known to have read: TS Eliot, WB Yeats, DH Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and Eugenio Montale. With their distinctive use of symbolic systems and stream of consciousness, and their focus on everyday objects, these poets are logical, but perhaps unnecessary, choices for consideration alongside Guston, whose symbolic system is already so richly complex that brief excerpts from five equally enigmatic figures is only a curious intellectual distraction. Of greater and more intimate interest is the inclusion of his wife’s, Musa McKim’s, poetry, which Guston periodically illustrated. From the memoir it is clear there were other poets and writers whom he read and may have admired more than this group; he quoted Rilke on his deathbed and had a Dickens quote permanently on the wall in his studio.

Musa’s poem “Alone with the Moon” crowns the entrance to the exhibition. In it she displays her characteristic interest in nature while hinting at the extreme privacy and seclusion the couple enforced. Musa was once a painter, too, competing for mural commissions alongside Guston in the 1930s, but she gave up painting after the birth of their daughter, who, in her memoir, describes with disappointment her mother’s opinion that her own painting paled in comparison with Guston’s. It’s clear that for both Musas, it was hard to live in Guston’s reflected light.

Amid the maze of the large galleries in the exhibition is a tiny room displaying several of Musa’s poems, which, scribed by Guston’s hand and accompanied by his illustrations, have become known as his “poem-pictures.” Here we see, in the blossoming of Musa’s words into images, that the greater or equal influence of any of the modernist poets on Guston was, in fact, his closest companion. As a constant source of advice and creative support, she was woven into his complex psyche, a motif in his enormous late paintings recurring diversely as a forehead and pair of big eyes, a wheel, a horseshoe and a sun.

Walking past Musa’s crowning poem, we enter a room with some of Guston’s earliest work and a selection of his sketches on paper. Intended to demonstrate the influence of Italian painting on his early work, two Renaissance Madonna and Child paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Cosimo Tura hang beside Guston’s Mother and Child from 1930 and his Young Mother, 1944. In the earlier version, painted when he was only 17, the influence of both surrealism and the Italian Renaissance is immediately evident. The mother, a gargantuan figure with a tiny head, is seated in a surreal outdoor scene, embracing baby Jesus, painted in a striking bright red. An angular, receding wall behind her instantly invokes Giorgio de Chirico, who was an enormous inspiration for Guston. Her inflated body also recalls Michelangelo’s puffed and distorted figures, especially his Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, with her solid, rectangular shape and exaggerated musculature.

Indeed, Guston’s own mother was obliged to take on major proportions in his early years, after Guston, at the age of 10 or 11, found his father dead by suicide. In later years, Guston did not talk much about his childhood, even to his daughter, who would grow up never meeting her grandmother or many distant relatives. Concealing was part of Guston’s character. It was only in college that his daughter found out that her last name was Goldstein and not Guston, which he’d changed in 1935, the year he moved from Los Angeles to New York to continue working on mural commissions. His murals all across America are much in the style of his early Mother and Child, 1930— surreal, political scenes populated with colossal, sad figures.

When Guston felt he had possibly exhausted an approach to painting, he would fall into prolonged and dark personal crises. One of these came in the late 1940s when his figurative work was becoming increasingly sombre and contained few recognizable forms. Winning the Prix de Rome and visiting Italy in 1948 provoked one such depression, and when he finally emerged he was making abstract paintings. Now living in New York, drinking at bars with fellow abstract expressionists, he adopted a working method drawn from psychoanalytic automatism— marathon painting done without his ever stepping back to appraise where the stream of his paint was leading next. He recalls wanting to test if he had internalized a system of order for colour and composition, a kind of voluntary blindness used to uncover the latent order underneath.

Several of these abstract works from the 1950s are on display in the exhibition. Large canvases contain a collection of paint marks clustered on a foggy, pastel ground, hovering between emerging and disappearing. Guston obsessively scraped off and repainted wet on wet, leaving a luxurious and highly nuanced surface. His eventual transition toward more concrete forms and identifiable objects is represented in the show by three paintings where the pastel-toned paint marks have turned ominous and dark. His previously diffuse atmospheres were now populated by looming “actors.” Position I from 1965 shows a circular black shape hovering like a moon or a clock on a textured grey background. The world of things was mischievously breaking through the purity of abstraction.

Guston’s second crisis occurred in 1966 when these abstract paintings could no longer sustain his interest. Moreover, he began to loathe the art world, especially the newly emerged pop art and minimalist movements, and the endless spinoffs of abstract expressionist and colour field painting. For two years, a battle ensued in his studio between abstract images and the rendering of everyday objects. In the end, the objects won, and they formed legions with a lexicon of symbols and characters. If the nature of the symbol is to point to or cover over some meaning or referent, perhaps these propagations of characters were stand-ins for himself, another form of Guston’s hiding.

One such stand-in, and the one that caused the greatest controversy, was his character of a Ku Klux Klan member. This silly, hapless- looking protagonist could be seen smoking, painting, driving a car and drinking booze—all the things that Guston himself did but here with a culturally startling mask. “They are self-portraits,” he said in 1978. “I perceive myself as being behind the hood.” That a Jew would paint himself as a Klansman is a riddle sadly as relevant today as it was during the civil rights movement of 1964. Guston may have been suggesting that to expose the enemy we must first empathize with them, to wear their hoods to truly understand what they and we are in a world where it is the very symbol that separates us.

This complex, symbolic and highly personal work garnered hateful criticism. The public lamented that his beautiful abstract paintings had been replaced by crude, cartoonish renderings. The art world was shocked; he was accused of “heresy.”

Guston’s obsession with being in a transcendental state came at a high cost, but the magnetism and power of his paintings are undeniable. His total dedication to being in that state, to staying interested in what he was painting and allowing his style to change, is as admirable today as it was then. During the years of his extreme unpopularity from the mid-1960s to just before his death in 1980, Guston often complained about the impoverished state of the art world. But it was also then that his daughter noticed her normally depressed father was finally happy. And while his work was being reviewed so poorly, his daughter writes, he himself was “working freely, prolifically, with an almost joyful abandon.” ❚

“Philip Guston and the Poets” was exhibited at Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, Venice, from May 10 to September 3, 2017.

Anna Kovler is an artist and writer living in Toronto.