Guston’s life has been well documented by intelligent and devoted biographers such as Dore Ashton and his own daughter Musa Mayer. But the life itself, its highs and lows, always had a strong tendency to italicize itself. Expecting since his boyhood to be a great artist, Guston acted with the self-assurance of that expectation; when he wrote about himself in letters or essays—or when late in life he pictured himself unsparingly in paint—it was in that trippingly open, nearly guileless way that accompanies the overflow of entitlement.
This kind of presumption doesn’t go over well with peers, however, and other artists and critics treated Guston with ambivalence throughout his life. He was much grumbled about: opportunism, fakery, self-promotion, grandiosity. He complained too much, he exulted too much, he slipped in and out of solidarities. Clement Greenberg, for one, scornfully viewed him as the arch Romantic figure of the New York School, and on those terms dismissed him utterly. And, in truth, always just out of step enough to be relegated to the edges of any particular camp, Guston was easily subject to excommunication. He came relatively late to abstraction, in 1950; and even then, when painting abstractly, he’d write in an essay, “I do not see why a loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.” Or this: “There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually define its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is ‘impure.’ It is the adjustment of ‘impurities’ which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.” Then, finally, when he completely removed himself from abstraction’s conventions, he was reviled by the downtown faithful and became more than a little problematical to the general art public as well.
He was born in Montreal in 1913. His parents, Leib and Rachel Goldstein, had come to Canada from Odessa around 1905, and Philip would be their seventh and last child. Leib, now called Louis (or, among the family, Wolf), a blacksmith in Russia, labored as a mechanic for the Canadian National Railroad. He did not always work, however, and ultimately the cold and the cramp of Montreal’s Jewish quarter seemed too unpromising to the Goldsteins: they decamped for Southern California in 1919. Yet in California Louis’s life was not lightened by the sun. He hawked junk and scrap metal but did not do well, and in a few years’ time he killed himself by hanging, with young Philip discovering the body.
The trauma of losing a parent to suicide (to say nothing of witnessing the horror face to face) is something that could easily close up a child’s desire for seeing the unexpected ever after. In Guston it seemed to work in reverse, like an immunization: his hunger to see what he wasn’t expecting only increased. His canny mother, noting his zeal and facility for drawing, agreed to let him enroll in a correspondence course with the Cleveland School of Cartooning, and he’d then spend the better part of days on the floor of a closet, drawing. Sometimes he’d idly render the light bulb and fixture chain of the closet itself—bulbs and pull-chains becoming particularly recurrent images in Guston’s work years later.
Other than attendance at L.A.’s Manual Arts High School (where he’d meet and befriend Paul Jackson Pollock, who later dropped his first name) and taking advantage of a 1930 scholarship to the Otis Art Institute (where he met Musa McKim, whom he’d later marry, but himself lasting there a bare three months), Guston was essentially self-taught. He held odd jobs—driving a truck, being a movie extra—but his passion was to soak in what culture California at the time could provide. He joined an art salon that revolved around the Stanley Rose Bookshop and Gallery in Hollywood, where his work would be part of a group exhibition in 1931. And he had the opportunity to see the work of the modern European masters in the collection of Walter and Louise Arensberg, his first crucial exposure to de Chirico’s work, for instance.
In Los Angeles at the time (as indeed almost everywhere else in urban America) high culture came as something neighborly to leftist politics. And leftist political art at the time lent itself to wall-sized overstatement. In 1932 Guston would go with Pollock to nearby Pomona College in Claremont to see leftist-painter-Stalinist hero Jose Clemente Orozco at work on a mural. Two years later, with friends Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, he actually journeyed to Mexico where, with Kadish, he did a huge mural (still standing) in Maximilian’s Summer Palace in Morelia, Mexico, “The Struggle against War and Fascism.” Kadish again would collaborate with him on another mural back home, at the City of Hope Tuberculosis Sanitarium of the ILGWU, in Duarte, California (also still standing).
It would be this apprentice mural work that finally allowed Guston to leave Los Angeles for good and move to New York in 1936. He signed on with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project, where he was surrounded by the most vital American painters of the day, all employed on public art: Burgoyne Diller, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, James Brooks. It’s perhaps of note that these painters, each required by the Project to work large, to cover building facades and subway station walls, were exactly those artists who, when the Project finally ended, would bring a significant concentration to their own smaller works: a kind of artistic tzimtzum, a Kabbalistic contraction. The clear subject matter of murals was not so easy to shrink to discrete parts on a single canvas. This prompted the dilemma of showing just this but not that—and in their reluctance to do so, the swerve toward abstraction in all these painters was perhaps subconsciously inevitable.
Of them all, though, Guston seemed to hold back the longest. It seems more than merely coincidental that as soon as a year after Guston saw the groundbreaking Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1940, he was willing to leave New York completely, for the first time, taking a job as artist in residence at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Other than Kandinksy and Malevich and Mondrian, there was little “pure” abstraction extant in European modernism. Picasso and Braque and Léger and Derain (a painter Guston grew more and more impressed with over the span of his life) certainly retained figurative foundations. Almost rhythmically Guston would attach and detach to and from the art center of New York, seismically sensitive to its orthodoxies and to his own ambivalence about abstraction.
The rest of Guston’s artistic biography is well charted: Midwestern teaching jobs, the production of dreamily figurative and poignant paintings that won awards, a move back to New York (actually to upstate Woodstock, where he became close to Bradley Walker Tomlin), and then the gradual and painful-seeming move into abstraction. This accompanied a move back to the city, to West l0th Street, and a full immersion in the world of the Eighth Street Club. Close contacts were established with Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. The right galleries of the time followed: Peridot, Egan, Janis. He was included in the 1956 exhibition “12 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, then two years later the Modern’s survey “The New American Painting,” which traveled throughout Europe in 1958–1959. He was one of four artists chosen to represent the United States at the 1960 Venice Biennale. He received a full retrospective exhibition at the new Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1962, a show that went on from there to Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and Los Angeles. Four years later there was a show of new paintings at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Guston was a difficult man. Omnivorous, narcissistic, brilliant, sometimes verbally fluent to the point of glibness and flattery, horridly lonely, someone for whom nothing was enough and too much at the same swamping moment. A classic manic-depressive, he feared the world’s daily demands yet was keen for the homely comic plainness of reality. But despite his demands and his demons, I think we’re still obliged to give credit to the unease, even the flooding despair, that by his own testimony Guston felt about these two museum shows of that period. Self-doubting at best, self-disgusted at worse, he felt, viewing his own recent work collected like this, that he had painted himself into a dead end.
Thus, at full tide of reputation as well as self-dissatisfaction, came the startling abdication. After the Jewish Museum show and after packing up in 1967 and relocating permanently to Woodstock, Guston once and for all let abstraction and New York go together. In Woodstock he drew in pen and ink, then slowly began to paint small panels of everyday objects, as well as hooded figures. Ultimately, as his confidence in these new/old investigations grew, he began to paint large canvases in the new mode. These he finally unveiled in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery, New York.
Storms raged around him instantly. Old downtown friends felt betrayed. Critics, when not outrightly mocking, were for the most part clueless. Guston took off for Italy for awhile, then returned to all but complete isolation in Woodstock. In the decade to come the momentum of his residual reputation as an abstractionist would carry him into honorary doctorates and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a professorship at Boston University—but all of these gestures at least half-honored Guston’s past, not his present. The present instead was these raw, discomforting, puzzling, and liberated works he was making up in Woodstock.