Art Is Life by Jerry Saltz

Author:Jerry Saltz [Saltz, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

How Philip Guston Reinvented the Sublime

As late as he came to the style, by 1957 Philip Guston was a highly admired first-generation Abstract Expressionist—a phrase he hated. How late to the party was Guston? In the 1940s, peers like Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were already finding their ways into all-out abstraction. Yet throughout that time Guston was still experimenting with figures, grounds, solid spaces, and objects. Pollock, who attended high school with Guston in Los Angeles (the two were expelled for designing satirical leaflets) and who urged Guston to move to New York in 1935, had been making abstract paintings since 1939. Gorky had done so since 1932; Rothko and Willem de Kooning reached these farther shores by the early 1940s. Guston didn’t go fully abstract until about 1950. History is lucky; had he waited a minute longer, the Ab Ex train would have left without him and we might never have heard of him.

Guston was always hesitant, and when he finally did get to real abstraction he stayed ambivalent about it. “Every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be, a realist,” he said. The abstract works that deservedly won him fame are beautiful shimmering lyrical fields of broken brushstrokes, flickering grounds of pearly blue and pink, serene combinations of Monet and Turner with inflections of Mondrian’s early piers-reflected-in-water. But Guston started to feel that he was only taking small bites in his work. By the 1950s, he felt he “had nowhere to go.” Saying “I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face . . . to paint a single form in the middle of the canvas,” he started doing exactly that. And he had the courage to do it at the apex of his career.

By 1970, he’d finished “clearing the decks.” From then until his death, in 1980, at the age of sixty-six, Guston left abstraction behind and made some of the most memorable and influential paintings of the late twentieth century, big and small: huge, gloppy, opaque-colored images of what appear to be Ku Klux Klansmen driving around in convertibles, smoking cigars; cyclops heads, in bed, staring at bare lightbulbs; piles of legs and shoes; figures hiding under blankets, clutching paintbrushes in bed. Many of these are so narratively accessible they can seem almost like panels from comic strips. But they are also cryptic. In this body of work I see spiders, newts, malignant clouds, boatmen, snake charmers, lanterns lighting up existential nights. The list of artists influenced by this incredible work includes Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray, and Georg Baselitz, who saw as early as 1959 that Guston was involved with “a distortion of the abstract [that was] full of concrete forms.” Jasper Johns saw that, too.

But the stakes of abandoning abstraction were high. Recognition had come late to Guston’s generation. The Abstract Expressionists had labored alone in America, dirt poor, with no audience, no art world apparatus to support them—only one another.

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