Philip Guston: some thoughts: sparked by a traveling retrospective and a recent memoir of the painter, the author proposes some new frames of reference for thinking about Guston's art - currently at London's Royal Academy - Cover Story

A Fantasy

In my ideal world, there would exist somewhere a Philip Guston Museum, in which a generous selection of Guston's paintings and drawings would be permanently on view. Let me quickly add that I don't feel this way about every artist whose work I admire. I'm perfectly content to wait out the decades between Joan Mitchell or Willem de Kooning retrospectives, for instance, satisfying myself with single works in museums and the occasional gallery show. When it comes to Guston, however, I feel a constant, almost physical hunger for his paintings, particularly the late ones, and rejoice in each chance I have to see some of them. This need is so keen that even as I am immersed in looking at a Guston canvas, I find it impossible to forget that the opportunity is fleeting, that all too soon the show will close or the museum will rehang its collection, and I will once again be forced to live in a Gustonless world.

In such a Guston Museum, visitors could return repeatedly to the artist's 1970s paintings, those seemingly inexhaustible visual commentaries on the human condition. They could also contemplate the exemplary way in which Guston developed and changed over the decades. There is an ethical aspect to his career and art that has been all too rare in recent art history, and I think this is one of the sources of his ability to fascinate viewers like me. In addition, beyond the rich visual, emotional and philosophical content of the work itself, a Guston Museum would help illuminate much art made in the years since Guston's death, for he has been one of the main influences on American painting, both abstract and figurative, in the last quarter century.

Given the rarity with which major American artists get their own museums, I don't expect my fantasy Guston Museum to actually materialize (though one prescient collector, Edward R. Broida, owns enough Gustons to launch such an institution practically by himself), but seeing the traveling Guston retrospective at tile Metropolitan Museum of Art last fall and winter made me yearn for it all the more. This is the first full-scale Guston survey in this country since the artist's death in 1980 (less than a month before Guston died, a big exhibition of his work began a national tour; in 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a show of Guston's drawings that spanned his career). The earliest works in the show date from 1930, when the precocious 17-year-old was cribbing effortlessly from Picasso and de Chirico, and the last from 1980, when, slowed by a heart attack the year before (a second attack would prove fatal on June 7, 1980), the artist turned to acrylic and ink to add a few final episodes to his darkly comic chronicle.

The show includes a number of rarely seen works, though not all of them made it into the Metropolitan's severely edited version. Unfortunately, when the exhibition came to New York alter stops in Fort Worth and San Francisco, it was given cramped quarters, and about one-third of the paintings were eliminated. (The show was also horribly underlit, making some paintings all but impossible to see adequately.) This was disappointing for the many New Yorkers who had waited so lung for a Guston retrospective. The failure of the Metropolitan, America's grand repository of art history, to give this artist the treatment he deserves seemed especially inexplicable when one considered how Guston, perhaps more than any other American painter of the past half century, saw his work in continuity with the last 500 years of Western painting.

Maskery and Self-Disclosure

At least, Guston's engagement with the art of the past was evoked by the very first painting that visitors encountered. Out of sequence in an otherwise chronological hanging, Pantheon (1973) is a roughly 4-foot-square picture on which Guston painted a naked lightbulb and a blank canvas sitting on an easel (motifs that recur in his 1970s work) and lettered-in the names of five of his favorite painters: Masaccio, Piero, Giotto, Tiepolo and de Chirico. These Italian painters, and Italy itself, were indeed crucial to Guston, but as one turned the corner into a small gallery of Guston's early works, it was clear that Picasso and the Mexican muralists were the dominating presences at the beginning of his career.

Guston's apprentice years, from 1930 to the early 1940s in Los Angeles and New York, are represented in the show by three paintings and a pair of drawings, including Mother and Child (1930), a tender, if surreal, bathing scene that borrows its figures from Picasso's neo-classical period and its setting from one of de Chirico's early metaphysical city scenes. By his own account, Guston used house paint to make this picture. In the catalogue, the exhibition's curator, Michael Auping, even specifies the brand: Dutch Boy. I don't know whether anyone has done a chemical analysis of Mother and Child, but some commentators have been skeptical about the tale, including Guston's friend of the 1970s, the poet William Corbett, who observed: "He [Guston] claimed to have used house paint, and in reproduction the painting shows a yellowish cast as house paint will, but I recently saw it close-up, and the colors are bright and silky." (1) And so they are.