Philip Guston

This century has seen lots of able-bodied young men and women take up a brush and smear random strokes of paint across a canvas. Sometimes their work was brilliant. Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Helen Frankenthaler, among a score of others, were profound artists whose feckless randomness now seems to be a sublime and haphazard dip into a vital stream. One of my favorite painters from this era, Philip Guston, took this randomness and ran with it. And ran and ran, until he conjured a set of powerful and enigmatic symbols -- (shoe heels, KKK hoods, cyclops, cigarrettes)-- that he painted earnestly, despite critical derision and public laughter. Now, Guston seems to be the Goya of our century -- the most potent and resonant of the modernist painters.

He began painting in earnest as a muralist for the Public Works Administration -- the U.S. federal government gave him his start, and his earliest work was politically committed. His most famous mural features a set of evil cartoonish Ku Klux Klan members in full dress. (This image of sinister primal white-hooded evil would return -- much more ambiguously -- in his later work.)

Hip to the scene, and wanting to make a name for himself, Philip Guston was among the abstract expressionist smudgers and drippers in the fifties, and his work in that period remains very disquieting and unique. Architectural constructions of blood-red gashes were his trademark -- kinda like Willem de Kooning without a fear of women and with a taste for blood. Beautiful stuff, in retrospect, though you can see why the critics put him in the periphery of abstract expressionism. He was playing the game, and it was not his barking soul that he dabbed on those trendy canvases. Or maybe it was -- at times his best abstract work looks like the retina of one of the drowsy cyclopic drunk eyeballs that populate his later work.

His later work: that’s why he’s one of the century’s greatest. “I got sick and tired of that purity! I wanted to tell stories.” That’s how he explained his decision to start including strange images of shoe heels, smoking hooded men, and cartoonish one-eyed boozers in his paintings. The critics sneered. Robert Hughes is the most famous critic to admit an error of judgment when first looking at these strange paintings. At first, Hughes thought Guston had lost his mind, that the unabashedly ugly slapdash new paintings were the product of a feckless nutcase. Or a charlatan. Hughes publicly corrected this intial judgment as host of the PBS documentary series Shock of the New, and he admitted Guston into the canon more ostentatiously than a score of museum curators. According to my eyes, Guston’s late work is best. His symbols -- especially the shoe heels and the strangely sympathetic KKK figures -- evade easy interpretation. But they hit you hard, and they stay inside you.

If you turn the corner at your local art museum and see the painting “Head,” -- one head, one eye, one ear, a blood-red landscape -- you can’t help but just stand and stare. He does what most artists dream of doing in a gallery setting -- he grabs you by the collar and unnerves you. It’s hard to just glance and keep walking. Most of his paintings are like this, actually, even the namby-pamby abstract expressionist stuff.

Guston was weird and distinctive, in a very authentic way. He never played the game, “I’m a strange and insane artist. Look upon me.” His personal life seems rather normal, though mostly melancholy. He evades easy interpretation. His paintings are unflinching responses to the nasty and awkward spirits that live in all of us-- the anti-life-force that encourages our drinking, hoarding, sleeping, smoking, fighting, and hating. When I see a new Guston painting, first I frown. Then I gasp at the realization that the sublime need not include the noblest elements of the human personality. Naw. The sublime can be like a sucker punch -- quick, ugly, fast, funny, and unforgettable.

Philip Guston page by m.a.d. 06.24.2001