Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately. This essay is about why. It is also a belated thank you note to him. I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide. Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities. (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.
In Boston in the early 1990s (Somerville, actually), I was a dime a dozen unemployed humanities PhD. In debt, I paid bills as a secretarial temp. My only marketable skill was the fact that I could touch type. My living-as-married girlfriend had just broken up with me. I couldn’t pay attention to her needs because I was too stuck on my fear I would never catch on as an academician after spending my twenties in training to do so. My father, himself a failed teacher, had died when I was ten. (By coincidence, Guston’s father, an émigré from Odessa by way of Montreal, hung himself in Los Angeles when Philip was ten.) I mention my father’s passing since I felt shadowed by his untimely demise at age forty- five. Not getting a teaching gig meant I was my father. He died weak, heavy, and in debt. His marriage was failing, and he was worried about losing his job for losing control of his sixth-grade class at Hicksville Elementary School in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. I didn’t acknowledge back then that he had untreated diabetes. The disease, not incompetence, is what lulled him to sleep at his desk in front of his unruly students. It was the disease that compelled him to gulp Tropicana orange juice directly from the triangular spout of the half gallon carton. He drank the juice at night in front of the fridge in his underwear and black work socks after another humiliating day in which his pupils asked him how to spell “fuck” and “shit” until the principal stepped into his classroom to halt the mayhem.
Did I see my father in Guston’s overweight frame when the Boston poet Bill Corbett introduced his work to me in 1990?1 Or Guston in my father? Both were heavyset Jewish men whose families had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement; Guston born in Montreal in 1913, my father born in Brooklyn in 1929. Guston changed his name from Goldstein; my father’s grandfather changed the family name to Morris from Kleshefsky when he landed in Scotland in route to New York after abandoning the Pale. I think of my father when I gaze at Guston’s signature late painting, “Painting, Smoking, Eating” (1973). I stare at that plate of wood plank-like French fries resting on the blanketed chest of the artist’s unshaven Cyclops late imago. The fries appear like a wicked treasure. Cyclops knows if he lifts his arms out of his blanket and grabs a handful of those fries, they will trigger another coronary. The thought is tempting. The fries signify a ticket to take him out of his misery – signified by an index finger pointing to a backdrop of shadowy icons associated with traumatic memories including the horseshoe boot heels, all painted in a bloody cadmium red. Oh, how my father lived and died for a paper boat serving of Nathan’s thick crinkle cut fries! For Guston, all three – painting, smoking, eating – were killer addictions. For my father, mostly it was the eating, although he did enjoy a cigar after grilling a T-bone steak in the backyard.
Thirty years ago, I wasn’t consciously thinking, as I am now, about how Guston’s late work indirectly reflected my own traumatic history. When I gave my job talk at Purdue about his work, I was laser focused on scoring academic points. I argued that Guston (and the Belgrade-born American poet Charles Simic, who died this year at age 84) represented a rejection of postmodern simulacra. Both engaged in figuration, objectivism, and social history without falling into confessionalism’s trap of mistaking representation for voice or personal image for the painter’s real presence. In my job talk, I contrasted Morris on Simic’s poem “My Shoes” (“secret face of my inner life”) and Guston’s representations of boot heels as synecdochic registrations of human suffering with Fredric Jameson’s dance with Warhol’s Halston-influenced “Diamond Dust Shoes” (1980) and (Guston’s close friend) Meyer Schapiro’s earlier detection of the Heideggerian life force bottoming up from Van Gogh’s 1886 still life painting “A Pair of Shoes.” Simic/Guston footwear synthesized Warhol and Van Gogh; something old married to something new to create a post-postmodern aesthetic. Like Warhol, Simic and Guston acknowledged the stagey dimension of personhood associated with straight up postmodernism of a Baudrillardian variety. Both were serious, but also playful. Both embraced popular culture, and the self-referentiality one typically associates with a postmodern aesthetic. I can rehearse the argument, but, at thirty, I had not lived long enough to appreciate, as I do now, how Guston’s late work reflected the expressions of a trauma artist. Unable to separate past wounds from current predicaments, Guston, a damaged survivor, represented the entanglement of Then on Now. One did what one could, in Freud’s terms, to “work through” early trauma. Guston’s late art, however, suggests early wounds remain open and that healing was never complete. Like the excessive eating and smoking, the painting was a compulsive repetition of the hurt that remained, a residue of the “acting out.”
Guston’s late style (roughly from 1968 until his death in 1980) is so interesting to me now from a psychological point of view because his late phase visual vocabulary – the white hoods, the boots, the light bulbs, the ropes, the bricks, the rubbery mangled limbs, the chunks of wood posts, the rusty nails, the trash cans and trash car covers, the irons – refer back to objects he represented to imagine historical disasters in his social realist and even quasi abstract phases from the 1930s through the 1950s. “My old interests came surging back,” the artist said in Philip Guston: A Life Lived (1981), a documentary film directed by Michael Blackwood, on view in a screening room as part of the Philip Guston Now exhibit currently showing at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. As Chadd Scott reports, iconic features of his late style resonate with personal trauma:
Three days after his 10th birthday and just over a year after moving to Los Angeles, Guston’s father hanged himself, despondent over not being able to carve out a better life for himself in America. In Canada, he worked as a boilermaker for the railroad, in California he had to settle for being a rag picker.
Maybe Guston found the body; maybe his mother did. Here, again, memory and reality prove difficult to parse. In any case, ropes and porches figured prominently in Guston’s work through the 1940s.
Another tragedy involved Guston’s brother who died in 1932 after his legs were crushed when he walked behind his car and it rolled over him. The shoes and piles of dismembered legs reoccurring in Guston’s work could be owed to this trauma. Or perhaps they take inspiration from an exhibition of large-scale photographs of liberated German concentration camps Guston saw in 1945 when teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. 2
Guston himself stated that one spur that initiated his iconic hood pictures from the late 1960s and 1970s was the memory of how in 1933 the Los Angeles police “Red Squad” had destroyed a mural he had painted depicting Klan violence. 3 “In 1967-68, I became very disturbed by the war and the demonstrations,” Guston said. “They became my subject matter and I was flooded by a memory [of the police destroying his anti-Klan mural].” Guston may be understood as a diver into the wreck of his subconscious impulses in a period when the dominant paradigm called for tricky surfaces, not manifestations of depth psychology. As Guston scholar Kosme de Barañano has remarked about the artist’s later oeuvre:
Guston’s images are immersed in a sinister place of faltering breath, subjected to the cold of the simple grayish, pinkish or white primer. They contain no impasto or terrain that allows for context. The results are symbols like geographies shattered by a feeling halfway between desolation and claustrophobia. They resemble an acidic X-ray scan of a time of defeat, an existential psychodrama just as in Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings.4
Theorists of the relationships between trauma, memory, testimony, and representation who have written about Holocaust testimony — Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, and Dori Laub — seem more relevant to the work of Guston than do theorists of the postmodern aesthetic.
Uncannily, I now find myself at the age — sixty — Guston was when he painted the trauma work that made him a rule-breaking “stumblebum” of bad taste, as the art critic Hilton Kramer declared him to be. By trauma work, I am referring to the caricature-type “hood” series of paintings that first appeared in the notorious Marlborough show of 1970. Curators deemed the “hood” series so controversial in 2020 that the comprehensive Philip Guston Now exhibition, currently on display this summer in D.C., was postponed from its original opening date of June of that year. A half century ago, Guston was controversial for different reasons. How could one of midcentury modernism’s leading abstractions break the taboo against figuration? And not only that, but how could he choose to do so in such a crude style? Art world gate keepers such as Kramer felt Guston’s 1970 style was more appropriate for subway graffiti, trippy Robert Crumb images of big booted hipsters chanting “Keep on Truckin’” from Zap comix, and George Herrimann’s pop anarchist Krazy Kat imagery from the old Sunday Funnies — Guston described the hue he selected for the “hood” series as “a nice pink Sunday comics color” — than it was for museum art by a painter who rubbed shoulders with New York School heroes such as de Kooning and Rothko.
On a stylistic level, the “hood” paintings departed from Guston’s abstract work from the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas in the “hood” pictures the paint is thinly applied, saturated into the canvas, and reminiscent of a comic strip aesthetic, the abstract paintings revel in the wedding cake frosting quality of the sensuously painted surface. In retrospect, we now see that even Guston’s abstract work foreshadows motifs found in his influential (and yet reviled) return to figuration in the late 1960s. “Red Paintings” from 1947-1950 and abstract paintings from the late 1950s already suggest a return to pictorialism in titles such as “The Return” and “Passage.” In “The Tormentor” (1947-48), for example, we notice elements of figurative drawing that prefigure motifs repeated in the late phase work. Outlines of familiar objects, such as the thinly inscribed horseshoe like boot heels in black ink are apparent even as they seem to be “slowly dissolved into an acid sea of cadmium red paint,” as a wall note beside the work at the exhibit describes it. That cadmium red, a Guston favorite, would reappear as splotches of paint on the artists’ hoods as they smoke cigars and ponder their creations in paintings such as “The Studio” (1969).
In 2020, curators fretted about showing Guston for reasons other than his decision as a stylist to go low rather than high. There was co-vid to worry about, but the primary concern was that Guston’s depiction of racist terrorism and anti-Semitic violence might be too upsetting for viewers to witness in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, the violence and chanting against Jews and African Americans by white supremacists that took place as part of the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville in August, 2017, as well as the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh in October, 2018. We were not ready in 2020, the curators concluded, to deal with Guston’s uncomfortable message about his, our, and the art world’s complicity with violence and terror. As Dana Carvey’s imitation voice of George H.W. Bush might have said, had he remained a cast memory on Saturday Night Live: “Complicity. Not going to do it.” Guston’s “hood” paintings were, however, all about complicity. He pointed the finger at himself, and at what Musa Meyer, his daughter and head of the Guston Foundation, describes as “white culpability”:
They plan, they plot, they ride around in cars smoking cigars. We never see their acts of hatred. We never know what is in their minds. But it is clear that they are us. Our denial, our concealment. My father dared to unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles. 5
Philip Guston Now has opened this summer in DC, but with the following warning placard set on the wall beside the narrow entrance to the room that features “hood” paintings from the Marlborough Show6:
Please be advised that this exhibition contains anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism, including images of lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and victims of Nazism. If you prefer to bypass the large paintings with hooded figures, please walk through the hallway to your left, where the exhibition continues.
I believe Guston may well have chuckled, shrugged his shoulders, shook his head from side to side, taken another puff from his cigarette, and quoted from his beloved poet T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”: “that is not what I meant at all.” For Guston, the “hood” paintings did not require trigger warnings, or at least not for the reasons stated on the sign. They were not designed as mimetic objects to reflect in social documentarian fashion on events outside the painter’s studio in Woodstock, New York, where he famously painted late into the night, as if his goal was to conjure the imagery and associative logic that occur to us unconsciously, when we usually are sleeping and dreaming. Turning inward, as in Freud, rather than outward, as in Marx, the “hood” paintings mark a rethinking of his contributions to the social realist tradition such as is found in his impressive 1934 anti-fascist fresco mural, “The Struggle Against Terrorism,” painted with Ruben Kadish after visiting Mexico to study with Leftist Mexican social realists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Guston is challenging his conception of the artist as producer of “dangerous” content for viewers to consume in an art world context. The painter no longer perceives the museum as a relevant space for political action. He finds morally suspect his inevitable process of aestheticizing the suffering and violence of others that is already evident in the 1930s in “The Struggle Against Terrorism” and in his first important easel painting, “Bombardment.”
“Bombardment” (1937) is a major example from the early period of neo-classical social realism that Guston rejected in the “hood” paintings from three decades later. A “vortex of mayhem,” is how the panel beside the painting interprets the work in the current D.C. exhibition. Here is how the website for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the work’s permanent home, describes “Bombardment”:
Philip Guston painted Bombardment after reading newspaper reports of atrocities carried out during the Spanish Civil War, which began on July 17, 1936, when General Francisco Franco led a military coup against the democratically elected Republican government. The emotionally charged scene, which reflects the artist’s recent exposure to the activist art of the Mexican mural movement, depicts the aerial bombardment of a civilian population by Franco’s warplanes. However, the traditional tondo (circle) format, typically identified with Italian Renaissance painting, suggests that Guston intended to create a universal icon decrying human hatred and destruction rather than a specific commentary on the war in Spain.7
“Bombardment” is shown in a wide-open room at the front end of the exhibit space. It bears no special warning signs that the imagery might offend viewers. In fact, on one of my visits this summer, a friendly and knowledgeable guard encouraged me and my friends, Ethan and Marianne, to take a closer look at “Bombardment,” to compare the classical draperies on the mother in the front left part of the picture to how her drapery was cast in a preliminary drawing that appeared on the wall next to the painting. It is only the “hood” work from around 1970 that merits the warning note. And yet, one could argue, “Bombardment” depicts a much more historically resonant scene of political terror than does a “hood” painting such as “Courtroom” (1970). I say this because “Bombardment” represents an active scene of destructive terrorism and indiscriminate murdering of a civilian population. Guston portrays a naked boy who is about to be thrown from his mother’s arms, blown to bits. In the center point of the tondo (circle) format, streaky shards of white and black smoke and yellow and red rays of fire signify the blast. The bomb bursts like a volcanic eruption out of the deep core of the painting’s surface. It explodes into the foreground of the picture plane, splattering a naked man, a character wearing a gas mask and red cape (an aid worker), and the boy’s mother, who clings to the wailing child as he comes loose from her arms. In the background towards the top middle of the painting, we see a squadron of dark fighter planes – the Luftwaffe Hitler gifted to Franco as a kind of trial run for Germany’s 1939’s blitzkrieg invasion of Poland – receding into the painting’s border. “Bombardment” is documentary art. To a degree I believe Guston would lament in his later phase, it could be argued that what “Bombardment” really showcases is the artist’s skill at dealing with the technical problems of composing a jumble of material into a unified, properly proportioned whole within the peculiar tondo format – with its resonances to his beloved Italian Renaissance painting as well as to Picasso’s neo-classical phase work.
Besides the problem of aestheticizing violence, apparent in “The Struggle Against Terrorism” and “Bombardment,” Guston had concluded by the late 1960s that another problem of social realist work is that artist and audience immediately understand exactly where to point the accusatory fingers at the culprits. The finger points outward, at the easy targets. In Guston’s early work that means the following basket of deplorables: Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Spanish inquisitors, the Ku Klux Klan. There was no conversation, no self-reflection, no blurring of the lines between them and us in Guston’s political art from the 1930s.
Guston, of course, was not interested in defending criminals, bigots, anti-Semites, murderers in his “hood” series. In “City Lights” (1969), however, the hoods seem more like us than like them. Tooling around in a silly little roadster, possibly a Model T Ford, it is as if the homegrown terrorists are also middle-class working stiffs, carpooling to or from a day at the office in the city. Are they heading back to the suburbs for a TV dinner, a beer, or a bourbon, while catching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News before trudging upstairs to bed to watch Raquel Welch and Jonathan Winters entertain Johnny Carson? Guston was interested in exploring the uncanny, the banal, the complacent, and the quotidian aspects of terrorism. He investigated human behaviors, including art making, in their contradictory, unsettling, and often tragic dimensions. This is not to say there are not in Guston iconic tokens representing the victims as separate figures from the victimizers. There are the white hooded figures, and then there is the pile of rubbery, elongated pipe cleaner legs attached to oversized boot heels, discarded in a trash can, or lined up like a decapitated chorus line in “Rug” (1976).8 The images suggest the “victims of the gas chambers,” according to Aruna D’Souza in a New York Times review of the exhibition.9 In “Rug,” one might assume that Guston is suggesting a clearcut distinction between the iconic perpetrators of mass violence – the hoods– and the iconic image of victims of mass killing – the chorus line of legs. But here’s the thing: we never see the bottom half of the hooded figures, nor the top half of the legs. Guston’s point is that the hooded heads and skinny legs stem from the same imagination: his own. Revealing an intense identification with victimizer and victim, Guston resembles one of his key influences, the Odessa-born Jewish storyteller Isaac Babel (1894-1940). In the “Red Cavalry” stories (1926), Babel chronicled his experience during the Polish-Soviet War when in 1920 he accompanied the Red Cavalry Army, who had murdered fellow Jews in the Pale of settlement. 10 In Odessa Tales (1931), Babel narrated the doings of a Jewish gangster, Benya Krik. Contributing to a political discourse that might transcend our current situation of divisive finger pointing, Guston refused to separate his own destructive urges from the compulsions enacted by the crude killers he depicted. It was as if the “hoods,” like the legs in “Rug,” were the other within the self. In “Painter’s Forms No. 2” (1978), Guston draws the outlines of a jaw, a cheek, and a more forcefully rendered wide opened mouth painted with thick red lips and a set of teeth that remind me of a white picket fence. Spewing into or out of the opened mouth, we see white cylinders resembling cigarette filters, but also piles of limbs, boots, and boot heels, some painted in such an abstract manner that they resemble geometric shapes. The painter of “Paintings, Smoking, Eating” is suggesting in “Painter’s Forms No 2” that Guston’s voracious appetites included the need to ingest, digest, and regurgitate iconographic remnants of catastrophes such as the Holocaust and white terrorist Klan activity. It is as if these historical disasters had become translated into “painter’s forms,” the visual vocabulary through which he could explore his psyche in his night studio during the last decade of his life.
In Guston, aesthetic styles – neo-Italian Renaissance, surrealist, social realist, Ash Can school, abstract expressionist, underground comix – come and go. As he matured, however, the associative logic and connotative effect of the familiar elements of his restricted visual vocabulary became increasingly internalized, dissociated from sociopolitical reference. Autobiographical, philosophical, and art world meanings take over as political tropes become digested and regurgitated in the late phases. A social realist style drawing from 1930 for the painting called “Conspirator,” which was undertaken in support of the Scottsboro Boys, for example, includes a grouping of hooded Klan figures, brick walls, ropes, and a crucifixion scene in the background. These elements of Guston’s visual vocabulary reemerge in cartoonish form, virtually dissociated from their historical context, almost four decades later. One could argue that the “hoods” in the late work may also be interpreted as ghosts, spectral imaginings of Guston’s traumatic memories. “Martial Memory” (1941), regarded as his “first mature easel painting,” similarly portrays images and objects that Guston would recycle thirty years later. As in Foucault’s theory of history as genealogical, subjective, and a concept which “opposes itself to search for ‘origins’,” “Martial Memory” is itself Guston’s collation of a cluster of personal memories and aesthetic references stemming from the long history of Western art. Janus-faced, “Martial Memory” points in the direction of the art that was to emerge in his later phases.11 The painting is itself a revision of a Pierro Della Francesa’s “The Torture of the Jew” (1447-1446). As the exhibition text that accompanies the painting explains, Guston here is “turning a scene of torture into one of mock combat among street kids.” What is most important to me about “Martial Memory” is that this early painting that represents a childhood memory of “mock combat” features so many elements of the visual vocabulary that would become the iconic language Guston reconfigured in the “hood” paintings from the late 1960s and 1970s: bricks, rope, pieces of wood, trash can lids, the tea kettle, triangular head gear that serve as precursors to the Klan hoods. The figurative dimension of “Martial Memory,” if not the stylistics, recurs throughout his career in ways that increasingly associate destructive impulses with the internal drives of the creator, rather than with the more traditional, and, in my view, less provocative, earlier work in which Guston points the accusatory finger at others besides himself.
On the level of pictorial “content,” “Bombardment” is a more disturbing display of politically inspired terrorism against an innocent civilian population than is a “hood” painting such as “Courtroom.” By contrast to “Bombardment,” the controversial “hood” paintings lack scenes of immediate terror. It is all about the before and the after, not the during. It is about the artist, in his studio, doing a double take on a creative process that defies ethical considerations. In “Courtroom” (1970), icons that symbolize victimization now appear as mediated elements of the visual vocabulary that stimulated his ferocious imagination and narratological impulses. In “Courtroom,” Guston casts a pair of skinny legs in concentration camp type striped pants that is stuffed face down in a trash can as a trope in a completed canvas. Set behind the hooded artist, the cloak splattered with red cadmium paint, the skinny legs and trash can is tucked in the background nearby other tools the artist will need to put together his next work of art. Behind the image of the legs in trash can, we notice pieces of an easel, a stool or chair, and blank or only partially completed smaller canvases of scenes that remind me of Guston’s late landscapes, seascapes, or shorelines.
Why is “Courtroom” the troublemaker, but not “Bombardment”? We may find an answer if we consider what Guston selected to appear at the center of the picture plane in “Courtroom.” We recall the smoke and flames of an exploded air bomb on an innocent civilian population as the central imagery in “Bombardment.” In “Courtroom,” it is the lit cigar, clipped, Groucho Marx style, between two red fingers (gloved) of the “hood” who dominates the foreground of the composition. This is the image of the artist as brooding revisionist, ruminating over technical aesthetic problems. The painting is not primarily about political violence, although it bears resonances to historical catastrophe, but about Guston’s transformation of real horror into dark imaginative playscape. “Courtroom”’s referential elements are less political critique than features of a visual vocabulary that Guston would, as a statement attached to the exhibit explains, “combine in endless variations to create larger, more complex canvases.” Guston is condemning the character of the artist in love with paint. “I’ll just take white and I’ll take cadmium red medium, which is my favorite color, and mix it up and make a pink. That mess of pink make me want to paint,” Guston stated.
The composition also includes another symbol that points to another culprit: the viewer of the painting. I say this because Guston manipulates objects in the foreground of the composition to lead the viewer’s gaze back to himself or herself. On the right side of the large canvas, an oversized cartoon version of a thick red hand sticks out of a black robe. This large red hand features a large red index finger that is pointing to the black slits (the eyes) behind the Klan like, red splattered hood of the main figure who dominates the center of the painting. This red finger is Guston’s Kafkaesque figure for the Superego, a projection of displaced self-blaming. In terms of the composition, however, the large red finger also leads the viewer’s eyes to the cigar, which protrudes out of the hood’s twinned fingers and directly outward, as if beyond the picture plane, and towards the viewer. Guston is now pointing the finger at patrons of the art world. As Guston himself stated, “The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge.” The unchecked, monomaniacal power of the artist to adjudicate the world he imagines becomes one of Guston’s great themes in the late work. As with eating and smoking, Guston was addicted to an art process that involves taking something from outside the self, ingesting it, and transforming it into something else: smoke, waste, another canvas that regurgitates historical atrocity as a piece of art:
The [Vietnam] War, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world, what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything – and the going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?
As in Guston’s oeuvre, the Now of the exhibit was deferred because of the impact of historical traumas upon the meaning of art that was already saturated in personal disturbance and political catastrophe. Philip Guston Now – entangled as it is with the controversial historicity of the show itself – thus must reemerge in a different historical moment, a different Now, and with additional concerns attached to the grisly imagery. Guston’s art is all about the deferred impact of Then on Now. Isn’t that, after all, what trauma is all about? It is only now, at 60, when I have walked most of the hallway through what Yeats, in “Among School Children,” called “The Long Schoolroom,” I realize why Guston’s favorite line from his favorite poem from his favorite book of poetry was, “In my end is my beginning,” from “East Coker,” from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943). And I know now why Guston, after hospitalization for a heart attack, decided in 1979 – he died in 1980 — to paint a displaced self-portrait called “East Coker – tse.” Scarred with streaks of blood around the cheeks, chin, and neck, the grotesque head in profile resembles Eliot’s. This is a different type of unmasking (and remasking) of the artist’s previously hooded self than was the Cyclops in other late works such as “Painting, Smoking, Eating” (1973). I also realize why in the late “self-portrait” of the artist as Eliot on his deathbed, Guston painted the poet’s ear so prominently with the elongated lobe one associates with representations of the Buddha. In an interview, Guston noted that Eliot had become attracted to Buddhism later in his life. I invoke “In my end is my beginning,” here as well as the association of Eliot with Buddhism in the context of my remarks about how Now and Then persistently become encircled within each other throughout Guston’s work. For Guston, art making is not a linear journey in which creative discovery requires abandoning prior versions of the self to imagine new ones. Rather, art making consists of a continual turning and returning upon prior fixations. Now and Then become coterminous. Guston remarked, “The only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to change.” He also spoke of the “continuity of time.” More precisely, the exhibition highlights a transformational imagination. As we stroll through the retrospective, we notice Guston returning to compose strange new things within the self-imposed restraint of manipulating a relatively small set of iconic objects – book, clock, rope, hood, trash can lid, horseshoe shaped boot heel, pointing finger, brick wall, plank of wood, paint brush that doubles as bullwhip. Closer to my end than to my beginning, I finally have the opportunity to go face to face (and not through reproductions) with a half century of his metamorphic work at the Philip Guston Now exhibit currently on display at the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Notes
[1] Chadd Scott. “America’s Most Controversial Art Exhibition, ‘Philip Guston Now,’ Debuts At MFA, Boston.” Forbes. May 1, 2022 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chaddscott/2022/05/01/americas-most-controversial-art-exhibition-philip-guston-now-debuts-at-mfa-boston
[2] In 1932 Guston painted a mural of a Black man being whipped by a Ku Klux Klansman as part of a larger series on racism in America, which he was making with friends in the John Reed Club, a local outpost of a network of Communist clubs. Several months later, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Red Squad, a unit that went after Communists, destroyed the murals. Some Los Angeles police officers were known to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. https://www.nga.gov/stories/philip-guston-10-things-to-know.html
“Artist Spotlight: Philip Guston: 10 Things to Know” (National Gallery of Art Website).
[3] https://www.phillips.com/article/49861501/in-the-small-hours-philip-gustons-late-figurative-painting
[4] Quoted in “America’s Most Controversial Art Exhibition, ‘Philip Guston Now,’ Debuts At MFA, Boston.” Chadd Scott. Forbes. May 1, 2022
[5] A National Gallery Press Release Announcing the Show reports, “As Guston contemplated his complicity in the injustices of his time, he made “self-portraits” of artists in Klan hoods in works such as The Studio (1969). Philip Guston Now includes the largest reunion of paintings from his pivotal Marlborough Gallery show—in total 12 of the original 33 paintings shown. At the National Gallery these include the imposing Courtroom (1970).”
[6] https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/305249
[7] “Where’s the Controversy in ‘Philip Guston Now’?” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/arts/design/philip-guston-national-gallery-washington.html
[8] Gregory Freidin writes: “In the spring of 1920, under a Russian-sounding pen name, Kiril Lyutov, Babel joined Semyon Budenny’s First Cavalry Army as a reporter for YugROSTA (the southern branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency) and was soon thereafter assigned to the 6th Division of the army for the duration of the Russo-Polish War. While there he also performed staff duties at the division headquarters, contributed to the army broadsheet Red Cavalryman, and on occasion accompanied his detachment into action. Much of the fighting done by Budenny’s Cavalry Army took place in the ethnically diverse borderlands between eastern Poland and western Ukraine, a region long settled by traditional, largely Hasidic, Jewish communities.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isaac-Babel
[9] In the 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ Foucault spells out his adaptation of the genealogical method in his historical studies. First and foremost, he says, genealogy ‘opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’’ (Foucault 1977, 141). That is, genealogy studies the accidents and contingencies that converge at crucial moments, giving rise to new epochs, concepts, and institutions.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#3