Sunday, December 1, 2019

Fully


From Irving Sandler's Art of the Postmodern Era on Philip Guston:
But the new pictures were "self-portraits...I perceive myself behind the hood...In this new dream of violence I feel...as if I were living with the Klan. What do they do afterwards? Or before? Smoke, drink, sit around their rooms (light bulbs, furniture, wooden floors), patrol empty streets, dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another? Why couldn't some be artists and paint one another?" The Klansmen pictures are funny, but they possess a strong element of self-loathing. Guston's father, a Russian immigrant ragpicker, had committed suicide by hanging when Guston was ten years old―it was the boy who found him― a traumatic experience, which is when he most likely identified with the lynchings perpetrated by the KKK.
Obviously Guston, a Ukrainian-Jewish-American painter born in Canada, would not have gotten the warmest of welcomes from the real Klan. And if his sentimentalized portrait of them above was at all sincere, any amount of close observation would have disabused him of it. But the childhood trauma Sandler alludes to paid off in a later trauma. Guston had been a confirmed and successful abstract artist up until the late 1960s. The sudden need he felt to put real objects and real (if cartoonishly exaggerated) people into his pictures was just wrong by the theories he heard and subscribed to. It was, in a way, a painful break, but also something he needed to do. This difficulty lends an urgency to his work, a compelling one.

2 comments:

susan said...

Once again you've introduced me to an artist whose work I hadn't seen previously. I was curious to see more after reading your tantalizing note and the investigation was a profitable one. This article in particular from the NY Review of Books provided more insight into his history and changes in styles over the course of his life. It seems that painful break with the style that had brought him fame turned out to be yet another example of his genius and was accepted as such later on.

As Guston was friends with some of the Abstract Expressionists I wonder if you've encountered the story that it was the CIA that supported and funded some of them in the 50s and 60s. The artists, like Rothko and Pollock, likely never knew about the plot that brought them international fame, but evidence supports the idea.

Ben said...

Of course the idea that painting had to be 100% abstract and refer to nothing outside of itself was mostly the creation of critics like Clement Greenberg. It had nothing to do with artists like Jackson Pollock (who named some of his pictures after things they were supposed to represent) and less with Willem de Kooning. So it could be argued that while Guston changed directions, he was still following the spirit of his Abstract Expressionist work.

That actually sounds like one of the more benign projects of the CIA. Like they were basically acting as a national culture and tourism board, projecting an image of cultivated taste. And for both better and worse, people who think they're in control of everything usually aren't.