From:
Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer. Munich, Sieveking Verlag/Hauser & Wirth, 2016.
Something John Cage had said to him during the 1950s often came to his mind. “When you start working, everybody is in your studio -the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” [7]
He treasured Willem de Kooning’s use of the word “freedom” to describe his “heresy” at the Marlborough opening in 1970. … “The other important thing that de Kooning said to me,” my father told an interviewer in 1980, “which I think is wonderful, was this: he said, “Well, now you are on your own! You’ve paid off all your debts! ...I think I am… I don’t look at my pantheon of the masters of the last 500 years of European painting as I used to. Or when I do I see them differently.” [8] (Mayer, p.235-36)
[7] Philip Guston, statement in It Is, No. 5, Spring 1960.
[8] Philip Guston, as quoted in Jan Butterfield, “Philip Guston- A Very Anxious Fix,” Images and Issues, Summer 1980.
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I’ve never really looked at Guston much.
Starting out in the mid-1980s when looking to painters of his generation I tended to gravitate more towards the likes of Motherwell, Kline, Rothko, and de Kooning, and the women who were still considered peripheral figures thirty years ago. Later, leaving the New York School behind, I went further back to the European painters of the movements between the wars, German Expressionist, Surrealists, the French and Spanish painters. Eventually I just looked at painting, and forgot the painters.
By the mid-1980s what filtered through to me looking at painting of the past half-century on Philip Guston was the paintings of the last 10-15 years of his life. His period as a heretic. Only, I did not know what paintings came before, and facing the painting of the period in which I stood -after Pop Art, the Neue Wilden and the Pictures Generation- I really was at a lost to what the scandal of these late works of Guston might be. The Philip Guston paintings I saw in the museums and galleries were no longer the ‘early’ or even ‘mid-career’ Guston's, but these late, scandalous paintings so I had nothing to compare to.
Was it the imagery? A big, hairy eyeball. Stubbly, fat face. Gigantic shoe. Cigarette in a big, cartoon like hand. Maybe the hooded, Klu Klux Klan figures? The imagery seemed to pop and the Klan figures pointed to a political commentary that for the time they were painted was not too out of place. Lacking knowledge of the artist’s intent, the imagery he employed was not in itself scandalous.
Was it the color or handling of the paint? In this period of ‘post-...’ Guston’s palette, handling or anything that could be viewed from a formal or technical perspective could not be the instigator of a scandal of any scale.
Rather than spend the time figuring out why, I simply walked past.
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Early this spring I received a short email from a. with a link and the comment “if you’ve never seen this film Robyn it’s well worth a look:” followed by a link. The link led to the film Philip Guston: A Life Lived (1982) directed by Michael Blackwood. Released two years after Guston’s death the film contains older footage of the artist painting in his studio in Woodstock, NY, giving lectures, and, importantly, viewing, reflecting upon, and discussing paintings in the career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during the days prior to its opening in May 1980 - three weeks before the artist’s death.
During a conversation over coffee a week later, in an aside, a. mentioned the memoir written by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and how difficult of a personality/parent Mr. Guston must have been. We did not discuss Guston’s painting. However, after watching the film days before my curiosity had been piqued. In the film I’d finally seen the early and mid-career work in relation to the late work, heard Guston in his own words speak of the change the work underwent, what others deemed radical though he himself did not.
I watched the film again. Then I ordered Musa Mayer’s book.
The impetus for taking a closer look at Guston was the way in which he saw the shift in his work as part of a natural progression, despite how radical others might have seen it, and how the reaction to this shift by the ‘art world’ was so incredibly harsh that, in spite of the acceptance of those same paintings today, is still talked about in terms of the scandal they caused.
Unlike the late works of Guston’s friend and colleague, Willem de Kooning, whose own radical shift in painting can be traced to the effect of physiological changes in the brain due to dementia, Guston’s shift came from within the painter’s practice. It was part of a process that happened the way painting happens in the artist’s studio, in the course of a long career, when -as in the words of John Cage cited above- even the painter has left the studio.
Hearing Guston speak of the work hanging in the museum in San Fransisco, reading the reflections of his daughter and the words she collected from various interviews her father gave, from conversations he had with friends, colleagues and his wife, it became clearer to me the scandal of the late paintings had little to do with the paintings themselves, and much more to do with the heretic act of the painter who painted them. Guston had the audacity to follow the painting, letting the painting become itself.
The retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the Spring/Summer of 1980 was not the first career retrospective of Philip Guston’s paintings. Eighteen years earlier, in 1962, a retrospective had been held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Guston was not yet fifty years old.
By the time that first retrospective was held Guston’s career had developed from a semi-autodidactic easel painter and politically motivated muralist working collaboratively in Los Angeles, to a New York City based, WPA sanctioned muralist, a professor at midwestern universities painting celestial navigation murals for the U.S. Navy during the Second World War alongside easel paintings that were becoming less and less representational and more and more abstract, until the early 1950s, when back in New York City he became known for his ‘abstract expressionist’ paintings in Mars black, cadmium red medium and titanium white. When viewed today in relation to all of the work that preceded the late paintings, not just to the work that immediately preceded, the progression seems quite logical -as it did to Guston.
A closer examination of Guston and the shifts that occurred in his painting over the course of his fifty year career in relation to the topic of my research is warranted. As is the freedom per de Kooning that Guston found within the process of the final shift. There are indications of a playful approach to the process that enabled the shifts; a playful-ness that led to the emptying of the studio of everyone except the painting per Cage. Although there is no indication that Guston worked with personas in the way I am suggesting, there is an interesting autobiographical fact that might be taken into consideration: Philip Guston was not always Philip Guston. Philip Guston was a creation of Phillip Goldstein.