Why Philip Guston Can Still Provoke Such Furor, and Passion
Guston’s Ku Klux Klan paintings are but one facet of an incendiary
artist’s storied career, stretching from social realism to abstraction
and back.
Philip Guston in New York, in 1952, when he was on the rise as a painter
of vigorous abstraction. Later, he would switch gears.
Philip Guston in New York, in 1952, when he was on the rise as a painter
of vigorous abstraction. Later, he would switch gears. Credit...Martha
Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
ByMartha Schwendener
* NY Times, PublishedOct. 2, 2020UpdatedOct. 4, 2020,3:12 p.m. ET
*
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Last week, a handful of museums decided to postpone a retrospective of
the painter Philip Guston over concerns that Ku Klux Klan imagery in his
work, intended to criticize racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry, would
upset viewers or that the works would be “misinterpreted
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/arts/design/philip-guston-shows-open-letter.html?searchResultPosition=1>.”
On Wednesday, a letter drafted by the art critic Barry Schwabsky
addressed to those museums — the National Gallery of Art in Washington;
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Tate
Modern, London — and signed by nearly 100 artists, writers and curators,
was published by theBrooklyn Rail
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LVXTB30hp2oNz1Vm4P8jpXgg4sIieWNbdaqWqffHcN4/edit>,
protesting the postponement. To date, more than 2,000 names have been
added — young and old, Black, Asian, Persian, Arab, L.G.B.T.Q.
For people outside the art world, however, the question remains: Who is
Philip Guston and why did this postponement (already delayed by
Covid-19) raise such a furor?
ImageIn Guston’s “The Studio” (1969), with hooded figures, the artist
turns the brush on himself, suggesting the racism ingrained in all of us.
In Guston’s “The Studio” (1969), with hooded figures, the artist turns
the brush on himself, suggesting the racism ingrained in all of
us.Credit...The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
The simple answer is that Guston (1913-1980) was an artist’s artist. The
influence of his deceptively simple subjects and emphatic brush strokes
still ripples through the work of many painters who signed the letter:
Henry Taylor, Ellen Gallagher, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Mickalene
Thomas, Peter Doig and others. Guston’s enduring influence was also
evident in his lifetime. He was famous in the 1940s, but exerted a large
influence in the 1970s. Moreover, part of the reason he is embraced by
artists in the current moment is that he stood up to the bullies in the
art world who wanted art to be a certain way — notably writers like
Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential art critics of the 20th
century, who thought that serious, modern painting should be abstract,
rather than representing humans, landscapes or still lifes.
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Born in Montreal in 1913 to Russian Jewish émigrés, Guston moved with
his family to Los Angeles in 1919. He attended the same Los Angeles high
school as Jackson Pollock, who would become a friend, and in the 1920s
and ’30s was captivated by Mexican art, Picasso and Cubism introduced to
him by a high school teacher. (In 1936, he and Pollock made a pilgrimage
to New Hampshire to see the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco’s
graphic new 24-panel mural “The Epic of American Civilization” in the
Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College
<https://www.dartmouth.edu/digitalorozco/app/>.) His childhood was
marked, however, by the suicide of his father, who hanged himself on the
back porch of their house. (Another tragedy occurred in 1932, when
Guston’s brother died after being crushed by his own car.)
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Image
“Open Window II” (1969) features the signature hooded
figures that Guston drew in a crude, cartoonish fashion in his later
years, startling viewers and his peers.
“Open Window II” (1969) features the signature hooded figures that
Guston drew in a crude, cartoonish fashion in his later years, startling
viewers and his peers.Credit...The Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser &
Wirth
The specter of violence hangs over Guston’s early work — although it is
often the politically incited conflict of the period. In 1932 Guston and
some friends painted murals for a local John Reed Club in Los Angeles —
part of a group of Communist clubs started by New York writers for the
journalNew Masses
<https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1932/v07n08-jan-1932-New-Masses.pdf>.
The subject of the fresco murals was the Scottsboro Boys, nine young
Black men falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death.
However, the murals were vandalized by a band of raiders known as the
Red Squad who went after Communists and strikers, a unit associated with
the Los Angeles Police Department, according to the National Gallery’s
Guston catalog. They entered the club with pipes and guns.
In 1934, with the artists Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, and arranged
by the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Guston began“The
Struggle Against Terrorism”
<http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/14352>(1934-35). This fresco in
Morelia, Mexico, which depicts tyranny from the Spanish Inquisition to
1930s Fascism, includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol
of bigotry for the artist. Guston later created the disturbing
“Bombardment” (1937), a maelstrom of figures, one with a gas mask, that
he painted after reading a newspaper article about the atrocities
carried out during the Spanish Civil War.
Image
“Bombardment” by Philip Guston (1937) is in the Whitney Museum’s current
“Vida Americana” show.
“Bombardment” by Philip Guston (1937) is in the Whitney Museum’s current
“Vida Americana” show.Credit...Emiliano Granado for The New York Times
Then, over the next decade, Guston began to switch gears, a new recruit
from figurative work to full-blown abstraction. His paintings from the
late ’40s — around the time his friends Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem
de Kooning were developing their signature abstract styles — carried
titles like “The Tormentors
<https://postwar.hausderkunst.de/en/artworks-artists/artworks/the-tormentors-die-peiniger>”
(1947-48), but the human figures were becoming geometric shapes and
merging with the background.
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It would be another few years until Guston had his first exhibition of
completely abstract works in New York — no human figures, no objects in
sight, marked by clusters of color at their centers. In works like
“Voyage” (1956) or “Native’s Return” (1957), urgent brush strokes
coalesce into hovering almost-orbs that dominate the painting. In his
40s he was fighting battles with his own mental health as well as the
long arm of Western art history from the Renaissance to de Kooning.
Then, still another shift, back toward representing objects and people.
Human heads slowly started returning to his paintings, as in “Painter”
(1959), which served as a kind of abstract self-portrait. It would take
the spring and summer of 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the attacks by police and National
Guardsmen on crowds outside the Democratic Convention, to push Guston
over the edge. “I got sick and tired of all that Purity!” he said in a
1977 interview, referring to abstraction. “Wanted to tell Stories!”
Image
In Philip Guston’s paintings of the 1950s, like “Voyage” (1956), urgent
brush strokes dominate the work. He was fighting battles with his own
mental health as well as the long arm of Western art history.
In Philip Guston’s paintings of the 1950s, like “Voyage” (1956), urgent
brush strokes dominate the work. He was fighting battles with his own
mental health as well as the long arm of Western art
history.Credit...Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth
In paintings like “Bad Habits” (1970), with its crudely drawn hooded
goons in a dungeonlike space — one of them brandishing a whip or some
other torture device — Guston showed a return to his obsessions of the
’30s; they demonstrate how our civilization’s “bad habits” (violence,
racism, oppression) had hardly disappeared in the ensuing decades.
Guston could turn the brush on himself, as well, in works like “The
Studio” (1969), where a silent hooded figure paints a self-portrait
suggesting the racism ingrained in all of us. The artist Glenn Ligon
offers a more sympathetic reading of this painting in the National
Gallery’s exhibition catalog; however, he writes, “The comedian George
Carlin once said, ‘The reason they call it the “American Dream” is
because you have to be asleep to believe in it.’”
“Guston’s ‘hood’ paintings, with their ambiguous narratives and
incendiary subject matter, are not asleep,” Mr. Ligon goes on. “They’re
woke.”
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Along with the return of figures and the hoods — now drawn in a crude,
cartoonish fashion that shocked even his peers in the early ’70s —
Guston continued to paint ordinary objects: shoes, cans, clocks and
bricks that asserted both the materiality and everydayness of painting.
The critic Harold Rosenberg called his later work “a liberation from
detachment” — which is to say, it was unafraid to address messy
politics, the body, failure, or the changes an artist goes through in
his lifetime.
And this is why artists have rallied behind Guston: They see an ally in
his work, a dedication to craft and self-reflection — but also a model
of courage and liberation in the face of oppression, whether in the art
world or beyond.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/arts/design/philip-guston-shows-open-letter.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>
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