Philip Guston : the studio

95 Pages·2014·1.658 MB·English

by  Guston, Philip, Burnett, Craig

First published in 2014
by Afterall Books
Afterall
Central Saint Martins
University of the Arts London
Granary Building
1 Granary Square
London N1C 4AA
www.afterall.org
© Afterall, Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London,
the artists and the authors
eISBN: 978–1–84638–140–9
eISBN: 978–1–84638–141–6
eISBN: 978–1–84638–142–3
Distribution by The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London
www.mitpress.mit.edu
Art Direction and Typeface Design
A2/SW/HK
cover:
Philip Guston,
The Studio, 1969,
oil on canvas,
122 × 107cm
Private Collection
All works by Philip Guston © and courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and David McKee Gallery
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
Publication Fund of the College Art Association.
An Afterall Book
Distributed by The MIT Press
O ne Work is a unique series of books published by Afterall, based at Cen-
tral Saint Martins in London. Each book presents a single work of art
considered in detail by a single author. The focus of the series is on con-
temporary art and its aim is to provoke debate about significant moments
in art’s recent development.
Over the course of more than one hundred books, important works will
be presented in a meticulous and generous manner by writers who
believe passionately in the originality and significance of the works about
which they have chosen to write. Each book contains a comprehensive
and detailed formal description of the work, followed by a critical map-
ping of the aesthetic and cultural context in which it was made and has
gone on to shape. The changing presentation and reception of the work
throughout its existence is also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim
on the influence ‘their’ work has on the making and understanding of
other works of art.
The books insist that a single contemporary work of art (in all of its
different manifestations), through a unique and radical aesthetic articu-
lation or invention, can affect our understanding of art in general. More
than that, these books suggest that a single work of art can literally trans-
form, however modestly, the way we look at and understand the world. In
this sense the One Work series, while by no means exhaustive, will even-
tually become a veritable library of works of art that have made a
difference.
Enormous thanks to David McKee for his time and generosity, not only
for arranging an extended viewing of The Studio but for his help with the
McKee Gallery archive. Thanks to Clark Coolidge for his remarkable
work on Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations
(2010); a boon for anyone interested in Guston, it had a huge impact on
the direction of this book. Robert Slifkin, Annie Ochmanek, Stephanie
Strasnick and Matt McAllester all supplied articles I couldn't get my
hands on, for which I am grateful. An extra nod to Robert Slifkin for his
superb Guston scholarship. For thoughts and conversation, I am
indebted to David Anfam, Achim Borchardt-Hume and Tom Morton.
For the dialogue between the hood's eyes and the puff of smoke,I stole
many of the lines from poets and philisophers. Thanks, anonymously, to
all of them. Finally, thanks to Eve and Lucas for the time and space, and to
Elodie, for her enthusiastic love of pictures. The editors would like to
thank The Estate of Philip Guston and David McKee for their generosity
and support in providing material from the artist's archive during the
production of this book.
Craig Burnett is a writer, curator and the author of Jeff Wall (2005).
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Plates Section
Endnotes
1
Golla, all to a suddin I find out that I’m all alone by myself – alone
– would you rillze that?
— George Herriman, Krazy Kat, 25 October 19251
It’s 1969, it feels a bit like the end of the world outside, and a hooded thug
slips into his studio for a quiet afternoon of painting. He sits down, squeezes
out some black, white and orange paint onto a palette of primary red, puts on
a dandyish white glove, lights a thick cigarette and gets t o work. He starts to
paint – what else? – a self-portrait. He makes a few marks of red on the bot-
tom of the canvas, a bit of blood, perhaps, from a bout of everyday brutish-
ness, or maybe he just wants to test the red. He puts the red-tipped brush back
into the bucket, takes out another brush and paints two black bars to indicate
his eyes, some dotted lines for the stitching on the cloth of the hood, and then
he starts to paint his hood. As he rounds the top of his head, he stops his brush
in front of the two black bars of his eyes. The artist pauses. He seems stuck,
lost in thought, mesmerised for a moment by the looming puff of smoke that
obscures the space between the hood and his work.
What are we to make of this fat-fingered bozo? He paints, he smokes, he
takes a break from murder and bigotry. Surely he’s not worthy of our atten-
tion. Surely within an hour or two he’ll walk out of the studio and get
whacked by a two-by-four or crash his jalopy. Maybe the implication here is
that he won’t taste a morsel of cartoonish justice, that even an everyday thug
has the urge and the imagination to paint a self-portrait. But is the hooded fig-
ure even the subject of the painting? Although I began by describing the pic-
ture as a fragment of a story, as if it were a cell in a comic book, the painting is
marked everywhere by a surfeit of suggestive, non-narrative details, formal
red herrings, ghosts of abstraction. What is the black rectangle on the lower
left? Does it depict a portal or an object, an abyss or a form? Why the fleshy
red canopy, the overall pink glow, the red rectangle behind the canvas, the
bulbous red hand, the clock with a single hand that points permanently to
about two o’clock? It’s difficult to disentangle the artist himself from his sub-
ject, who seems to be in the process of creating the very picture he inhabits, of
a homunculus with the power to conjure the monsters of his fancy. Some-
thing remarkable happens when this meathead is alone in his studio. Not
6 | Philip Guston
only is he pretty good with the brush, but it looks like he can reflect, and
reflect with wit, on the nature of his medium.
Philip Guston’s The Studio (1969, fig.1) is not so much a cornerstone of
twentieth-century art as one of its most salient outposts. First shown with
over thirty similarly cartoonish paintings at the Marlborough Gallery in
New York in October 1970, the painting has since become the fulcrum of
Guston’s uptown apostasy, the occasion that heralded his final, feverish
decade of painting figuratively. The work gained an immediate afterlife
when, its paint scarcely dry, it served to illustrate Hilton Kramer’s stone-
faced denunciation in the The New York Times, where it was captioned ‘a
taste for something funky, clumsy and demotic’, an excerpt from the review.2
As the frontispiece in monographs such as Robert Storr’s Guston (1986) or
the Whitechapel catalogue Philip Guston: Paintings 1969–80 (1981), the
painting has become a de facto self-portrait. Art historians hardly disagree.
The Studio, in Robert Zaller’s estimation, is ‘in many respects the prototypi-
cal painting of Guston’s new style’,3 while for Harry Cooper it is ‘the most
emblematic, programmatic hood painting’.4 Writer and Guston confidante
Ross Feld called the brute in The Studio ‘the truest, happiest Monster of all’.5
Guston himself realised that he had made a breakthrough: at some point,
whether hours after finishing the work or days before exhibiting it, he turned
the painting around and wrote ‘N.F.S.’ and ‘COLLECTION OF THE ART-
IST’ on the raw canvas, emphatically declaring its importance to him. Rather
than his standard ‘Guston’ signature in cursive, the painting is marked by a
small medallion of paint inscribed with the initials ‘PG’, an emblem he
reserved for paintings he wouldn’t sell.6 Before the critics had even sharp-
ened their hatchets, Guston knew that The Studio was a good painting, a
turning point for him – and, as it turned out, for the history of American
painting.
Why has The Studio emerged over the past few decades as the icon of
Guston’s shift away from Greenbergian modernism and the New York
School? Plenty of other candidates might serve the same purpose: Riding
Around (1969, fig.4), Edge of Town (1969, fig.6), Bad Habits (1970, fig.7)
and Flatlands (1970, fig.8). These are great paintings, and just as representa-
tive of his shift. Full of cartoonish melodrama and menace, their subject mat-
ter is more reflective of the turmoil of the era. That The Studio depicts an art-
ist painting a self-portrait offers some explanation, and yet it’s not the only
The Studio | 7
self-reflexive work of the period. Guston referred to it from time to time over
the next decade of his life, suggesting he had a special affection for the pic-
ture. A few years after he painted The Studio, while discussing his work with
students (and defending himself against Kramer’s Times attack), he said that
he ‘put in everything I knew about painting’, calling it a ‘sophisticated pic-
ture’.7 On other occasions, he called the work ‘very tightly organised’ and
‘very carefully constructed’.8 He held the painting in particular esteem
because he knew the composition possessed an almost neoclassical poise
despite the loose handling of paint and B-movie subject matter, with enough
allusive wit thrown in to demonstrate his deep engagement with and admira-
tion of painters past. The Studio is an exquisite hybrid of his favourite ante-
cedents, from the tight composition of a Renaissance Madonna and Child;
through the fleshiness of a late Rembrandt self-portrait; the dream-like inte-
riority of de Chirico’s Il Poeta e la sua Musa (The Poet and his Muse, 1925;
fig.36) and the pastel palette and creepy carnivalesque of James Ensor’s
Masks Confronting Death (1888, fig.33); to the slapstick of his beloved
Krazy Kat (fig.37), the long-running comic strip by George Herriman. The
Studio is an ecstatic unleashing of everything Guston venerated, all bound
together by a passage of supreme poetry: the totemic puff of smoke and the
meathead’s black-eyed apprehension of it at the centre of the picture. The
work has grown in significance over the years because it might just be the best
picture Guston painted in his life.
Few noticed at the time. Harold Rosenberg, informed by his friendship
and conversations with the artist, responded with a long and thoughtful
review in The New Yorker,9 while Willem de Kooning embraced and con-
gratulated Guston at the opening. But most of the art world looked at the car-
nival of hoods and shook their heads with disapproval – not least one of Gus-
ton’s closest confidants, Morton Feldman. Fast friends since John Cage
introduced them in the early 1950s, they never spoke again after the Marl-
borough show, though Feldman did attend Guston’s funeral. Over the next
decade, apart from a drawing show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York in 1973 and a show at Boston University in 1974, Guston mostly
showed with his dealer David McKee, who left Marlborough in 1974 to start
his own gallery. Yet, by the time Guston’s retrospective opened at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980, admiration had begun to displace
hostility. Robert Hughes, for one, changed his mind, and the turn in tone
8 | Philip Guston
between his two reviews, from 1970 and 1981, reflects a general shift in criti-
cal climate. He had been ambivalent about the Marlborough show, describ-
ing the cartoon idiom as ‘overloaded to the edge of portentousness’. While he
recognised that the hooded figures offered an ‘authentic response to a per-
sonal sense of crisis’, and called the works ‘sumptuously painted’, he also
deemed them ‘as simple-minded as the bigotry they denounce’.10 Hughes
didn’t quite trash the show: he focused on the subject matter, denounced the
paintings as obsolete and suggested that film was a better medium for Gus-
ton’s enterprise. Then, in 1981, in a broadly positive review of the travelling
SFMoMA retrospective, which he saw at the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York, Hughes wrote movingly of the paintings, arguing that Gus-
ton’s ‘conviction . . . is worrisome and angry, full of a Celine-like misery’, and
declared him ‘the godfather’ to the ‘cunningly rude, expressionist-based dic-
tion’ of contemporary painting.11 If Guston was once regarded as naïve and
wrongheaded, he has since risen to critical acclaim as a wise and weary docu-
menter of human conflict and a model painter. Peter Schjeldahl, who ‘hated’
the 1970 show’s paintings, has since called him ‘a prophet and pioneer’,12
while in 2003 Michael Kimmelman wrote that ‘it is an exaggeration, but not
a big one, to say they [the late paintings] have had a cultish influence almost
akin to that Cézanne had on young painters a century ago’.13 Arthur Danto
has crowned Guston ‘the true hero of the post-historical artist’.14 And it is in
The Studio, above all other works, where we see Guston sequestering himself
and becoming that hero.
Let’s imagine for a moment that Guston’s career ended after his ‘Recent
Paintings and Drawings’ exhibition at the Jewish Museum in January 1966,
where he showed austere black-and-white paintings (fig.23) and drawings,
many with brooding, inchoate heads, work that reflected a growing frustra-
tion with abstraction. His legacy would have persisted through a few brief
passages in the history of twentieth-century US art: a WPA muralist of the
1930s; an American-born Max Beckmann who made private easel paintings
in the 40s; a restless reader and a gregarious chatterbox; and, most promi-
nently, a seemingly reluctant member of the New York School, whose shim-
mering veils of colour and accretive façades (fig.21) achieved minor acclaim
alongside Jackson Pollock’s blustery canvases and the transcendental yearn-
ings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Guston would have disappeared,
in other words, without a significant vision or body of work to secure him an
The Studio | 9
immovable position in the history of post-War painting. It is worth remem-
bering that Guston often considered himself to be looked upon as an unclas-
sifiable latecomer and a bit of an outsider in the New York School,15 a posi-
tion that made him anxious, and which he discussed with Morton Feldman,
who later noted: ‘I think the reason Philip changed was that the book was in
and he wasn’t included. And maybe he shouldn’t have been. What the hell
did he have to do with Jackson or de Kooning anyway?’ Leaving aside the fact
that he did have a hell of a lot do with de Kooning,16 not least an important
friendship, Feldman’s wisecrack rings painfully true. Guston hadn’t
achieved the art-historical heft of Pollock or de Kooning. Despite a high-pro-
file career and regular museum shows, Guston had yet to paint a game-
changing masterwork like the former’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
(1950, fig.38) or the latter’s Woman, I (1950–52, fig.39) – a painting that
would set him apart from his peers and place him unequivocally in the canon.
By the mid-1960s, Guston had begun to feel that he had achieved little of last-
ing value, and that he might be an established but ultimately second-rate art-
ist. Many of his contemporaries, including Pollock and Franz Kline, not to
mention the senior figure Hans Hofmann, had died, their place in the pan-
theon assured. Rothko was present, but seemed to Guston to be mired in a
rhetoric of religious feelings, while Newman kept painting the same old ‘sub-
limity by the square foot’, as Guston observed scornfully in response to a
press release.17
If he was going to match or surpass his peers, Guston needed to take a
break and find a way to remake himself. He often paused to reassess his
direction after an important show. Discussing his year-long break from
painting after his Guggenheim show in 1962, he said, ‘But that happens to me
every time I have a show. I get into too much awareness of myself and have to
withdraw and achieve an aloneness in the studio, where I feel no one is
watching me.’18 Continuing with this habit of post-show paralysis, Guston
stopped painting for about two years in the aftermath of his Jewish Museum
exhibition, a hiatus brought on in part by turmoil at home. He went to Siesta
Key, Florida, where he owned a house, and by the end of the winter 1966,
after reconciling with his wife Musa McKim, he gave up his New York City
studio for good and moved permanently to Woodstock, New York.19 Forsak-
ing the hubbub of Manhattan, where the emerging camps of Pop, Minimal-
ism and Conceptualism were advancing over painting’s ruins, he
10 | Philip Guston