Fall 2022 - The Figure

Philip Guston Now, a retrospective featuring more than 110 paintings and drawings, will be on view from
October 23, 2022, through January 16, 2023, in the Brown Foundation, Inc., Galleries of the Audrey Jones Beck Building.
Philip Guston:
Living in a
World Museum
BY ALISON DE LIMA GREENE
THE ISABEL BROWN WILSON CURATOR, MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Over a career that spanned five decades, Philip Guston
consistently explored different modes of representation, at
times emulating the high polish of Renaissance art, at times
subsuming his subjects in a dense web of brushstrokes, and
at times describing the world around him with the anarchic
spirit of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics. Coming of age
in Los Angeles, Guston (1913–1980) eschewed traditional
fine-arts training, and by the early 1930s his political stance
had been honed by news of the Scottsboro trials, brutal
encounters with the Los Angeles Police Department’s
notorious Red Squad, and Klan rallies. His first ambitious
paintings—including a monumental mural created with
Reuben Kadish in Morelia during the winter of 1934—
drew on these experiences to confront racism and religious
intolerance.
Throughout the 1930s Guston was also honing his own
identity. His parents were among the wave of Jewish emigrants
who fled the pogroms that swept Central Europe at the turn
of the 20th century, landing first in Montreal before making
their way to Southern California in 1922. The family was
broken apart by the suicide of Guston’s father, Leib Goldstein,
the following year and by the accidental death of Guston’s
brother Nat a decade later. In 1936 the aspiring artist cast off
his birth name, changing Phillip Goldstein to Philip Guston, and
left for New York, where he began a new life with the painter
and poet Musa McKim.
New York introduced Guston to a vital community of artists.
Jackson Pollock, a friend from high school, first made him
welcome, and Guston found employment through the Federal
Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. He undertook
a number of public commissions, including Work and Play
for the Queensbridge Houses Community Center (1939–41);
his painting Gladiators (1940, opposite) reprised a segment
from that mural. Compressing the composition to its most
essential features, Guston adroitly balanced his love of such
paintings as Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (c. 1435–
60) with his assimilation of Stuart Davis’s suave Modernism.
The painting can also be understood as a metaphor for the
larger conflict that was rapidly consuming Europe: four boys
are locked in a tight Mobius strip of grasping hands, thrusts,
and blows—their faces concealed, their weapons scavenged
from the streets.
Guston spent much of the 1940s teaching in Midwestern
universities. Haunted by news of the Holocaust, he grappled
with how to resolve his commitment to meaningful subject
matter while also responding to new currents in American
painting. After a 1948–49 sabbatical at the American
Academy in Rome, he returned to New York and shifted
into abstraction, explaining, “I wanted to come to a canvas
and see what would happen if I put on paint.” However, the
nonobjective, painterly compositions that placed him at the
center of the Abstract Expressionist vanguard in the early
1950s gave way to paintings imbued with hints of more
concrete subject matter. For example, Painter (1959, see
page 28) is characterized by the lush palette and gestural
layering typical of his abstractions. At the center of the composition,
a triangular scaffold suggests the outline of an easel,
or even a Klansman’s silhouette harking back to Guston’s
first paintings, while the red form at center top echoes the
hood of one of his 1940s gladiators.
P R O F I L E
27
24 1/2 × 28 1/8”