Philip Guston had a nearly limitless appetite for talk. Once, when I visited him upstate, the first words out of his mouth as he met me on the train platform at Rhinecliff were: “So—about Brancusi . . .” It wasn’t surprising, then, to hear him begin telling me one day over lunch in the Village in 1977 about something he’d been reading a few days before that had excited him greatly.
He’d read an essay by Charles Rosen that had appeared in The New York Review of Books, a piece that concerned Walter Benjamin’s 1928 book, The Origins of German Tragic Drama. This had been Benjamin’s first and only completed longer work, his doctoral thesis (though rejected); and Rosen’s discussion of one of Benjamin’s signature ideas there—the notion of art as ruin—seemed to have enveloped Guston in a blaze of sparks. The enthusiasm, coming from a painter whose father had for a time peddled junk—and who himself for forty years had been picturing garbage cans, middens, old pots, and crumbling walls—was understandable. Yet on that 1977 midday Guston seemed to me unusually wound up. His talk leapfrogged here and there. When we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks I tended to be more conversationally correct, spending some time tugging Guston back to earth a little when his kite seemed headed for a tree. But this idea of art as finished not only in a practical, immediate sense but in an elongatedly temporal sense—as something dead and in its very essence decaying—was something Guston clearly responded to on the deepest level, and there was no stopping him.
Not that many months later Guston would bring up Benjamin again, this time at a public “discussion” the two of us had together at Boston University. Guston was a University Professor there during the seventies, an appointment which involved periodic sessions of studio-teaching (he’d travel north from home and take a hotel room for the week) plus an every-now-and-then public talk. Guston preferred these talks to take the form of dialogues, and in the past he’d held one such with Harold Rosenberg and one other with his B.U. painter-colleague Joseph Ablow.
Guston and I were seated on a stage in the auditorium of the university’s Law School. A table had been set up right in front of an imposing judge’s bench used for moot court, and Guston started off by saying that it looked like the two of us were simply going to have to humbly schmooze, to counteract the pretentious public thing we were doing in such beetling surroundings. So we duly schmoozed. Not fifteen minutes into it, Guston again was back on the Benjamin book, this time recommending as “very very interesting” Benjamin’s analysis of Baroque allegory as outlined in the Rosen essay.
Guston then went on to refer to his own current paintings as allegories, which made me cringe a little. An unusually articulate man, he was hardly someone to use words he didn’t mean—but allegory? So transpositional. So obvious. Besides, modernity had effectively neutered the whole category.
Guston patiently granted that allegory was, yes, all that, unmodern and certainly obvious. But then, with a small mischievous smile, he said: “That’s why I think I like the whole idea.” And more than simply liking it, he reminded me, he also had lately gone ahead and happily used the armature. For what else would I call a painting such as one he’d done a year before, Pit (1976)—a sulfurous sinkhole in Hades abrim with the heads of the grossly (and yet somehow happily) damned—other than an allegory?
I still wasn’t convinced. Neither was Joseph Ablow, who was in the audience that night. Between us we came up with lots of reasons why allegory was merely a curiosity, why Guston’s interest in the subject was somewhat perverse.
Guston was good-naturedly unmoved by all of this. “Well, I still think I’m making allegories.”
Guston never did read Benjamin’s book beyond Rosen’s digest of it. I myself didn’t get around to reading it until after Guston’s death. But once I had read it, Guston’s intuitive alignment with allegory as Benjamin set it out made more sense. Over the round wooden kitchen table in Woodstock, where Guston ate and read his mail and his newspapers and sat alone late at night and drank and brooded (he was a lifelong depressive), hung a framed reproduction of that great diagram of perplexity, Dürer’s Melancholia I. This Dürer, Erwin Panofsky notes, is categorized as a “Melancholia Artificialis,” or Artist’s Melancholy: a self-portrait of the artist, surrounded by the tools and symbols of creative endeavor—book, inkpot, compass, magic square, hourglass, bell, scales, rhomboid, rainbow.
In the dramas of the Baroque era (including those by Calderon and Shakespeare) Walter Benjamin had isolated melancholy as the allegorists’ indispensable tool. Whereas a symbol generally pointed to something else, some kernel that might eventually explode into something limitless (goodness or evil, sublimity or God; something, in any case, transcendentally abstract), melancholy allegory opened nothing. Its vision was trained unsparingly on objects that seemed to have stunned reality into a temporary stasis.
This was exactly what Guston wanted from art, too. In a letter to me he once wrote unromantically: “‘Art’ is not needed; for, like living out our lives—it is putting in some time & activity—staving off the ‘other’—the ultimate form. It is nerve-wracking—the need to fix an image forever—like a Pyramid on the desert. It does not move—I am tired of moving—and where is there to move?”
Yet stasis (and its ultimate form, death) only seems to be an end-stop. In fact it is merely one of the many guises of ever-renewing change. While everyone acknowledges that Guston’s great reversal of course in the late sixties came by way of his painting non-abstractly again, the more dynamic part of his reversal resulted from the fact that in the last fifteen years of his life he had found a way to paint images of things that almost brimmed with transience and time. Painting after painting offers us plain things with the deadpan capacity to hold history: a hood, an overcoat, a bottle, a shoe, a pyramid, a bug, a wheel, a patched-up sphere, a teapot, a suitcase. Sometimes they’re rendered with a stillness that’s tragic, other times with an hilarious crudity—but even the most upsetting or disquieting imagery in late Guston has a shaggy, even goofy friendliness, a lack of ostentation and argument. With the exception maybe of Picasso, no other painter of our time so provided a whole, populated-with-surprises world as did Guston in this decade or so of late output—and he did so with a consistent edge of philosophical humor and self-mockery that even Picasso himself did not equal. Details of objects seem to participate in an allegory of the whole. A book that rests open, fat and exhausted, turns into a scroll. Snail-shapes are crawling reflexivities. Two cigarettes held by the same hand speak to a future that obliterates the pleasure of the moment, the now (since one had to be lit before the other, even if by a split second). Be they heads afloat in the sea or a couple in bed or bugs trudging up a ditch, there was a many-ness and interchangeability here that provided what Benjamin calls “a distant light, shining back from the depths of self-absorption.”
Paint dries, compositions jell, the eye takes most if not all of an overall finished effect instantaneously—so how is it even possible to paint time? The self-portrait is one way, faces themselves being composed of time. Rembrandt’s self-portraiture is history’s most eloquent testimony to this. But in the hands of a melancholy allegorist like Guston, self-portraiture is a stock, too, of particular imagery—and by the end of his life he had managed to make a towering alphabet from this inventory, a signature in which every single letter was a P and a G.