The more I saw of the work that was coming from Guston in the late seventies, the more persuaded I became that he had only seemed to be an abstractionist during his earlier decades, the fifties and early sixties. That instead, like a Marrano, a converso, one of the underground Jews of the Spanish Inquisition, he’d been a secret image maker all along, coerced into abstraction but never grounded there, outwardly observing but also innerly undermining its rituals.
Guston might have been doing nothing more of course than playing out the psychological fugue any artist performs within himself: echoes of old imagery, a recapitulation of career-long themes. But that never really fully accounted for the aerated freedom of the pictures of the seventies, the spring they had to them, the quality of escape from a prior confinement.
I don’t remember how exactly I put it to Guston, but while talking one night in July 1979 some of these thoughts in fact came out. A couple of days later I got a letter from him:
. . . Your sense that the ’50s work and early ’60s was “forced” to “look” “abstract” was the largest part of the comic-absurd subject. I knew it at the time but couldn’t tell anyone . . . The word FINIS really means that things are beginning to be understood. And one’s greatest desire finally is not to be merely liked, etc. but to be understood.
Maybe he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, for Guston could flatter baldly—and he’d not unnaturally pooh-pooh his abstract work while in the depths of the cauldron of the kind of different art he was making at the time. But still it seemed to me that the later work threw what preceded it so much into question that he most likely was admitting to some real amount of intellectual relief.
Certainly most of the fifties and early sixties abstractions Guston painted are seductively beautiful, no question. Camouflage invariably is artful, aiming as it does for a subtlety that has to be greater than disclosure’s. The pictures have an aggregating pulse: mirrored forms, supporting and extending and clumping forms, all redolent of strain and sincerity. De Kooning energizes us with the pictorial curiosity of his abstractions, but Guston sits us down centrally to view the worrying work of moving color and form around.
No camouflage is perfect, though. Even in those classic fifties paintings there remained stubborn hints and shreds of representation as well as personal psychology: a green hood shape here, tendrils that might have been legs, a form suggesting a recoiling head. Was Guston really happy to paint this way? Probably yes and no. Certainly he believed that dilemma and unhappiness were the very subject matters of the paintings; and there always was a kind of flexible lean in Guston’s abstractions—a leaning-back from the recognizable; and later, in the early mid-sixties pictures, a leaning forward into ash pits of depression, big black blocks of it.
But to lean is not the same as to move. The abstractions are meltingly all of a piece, eventually becoming larger and baggier and softer-edged but still very much held in check. Only when Guston finally was freely broken-out from visual orthodoxies (including his own) did images fall out of him that truly seemed to succeed and incorporate each other; that allegorized, redefined, and separated each other. What was a central pulse gave way to images sliding into motion.
Almost any Guston painting done since 1968 illustrates this new mode of metamorphosis. After working for a year on cigar-box-sized paintings of single or double images, Guston burst out large, for instance, in a painting like Edge of Town (1969).
A car is a vehicle that brings you somewhere else. A painting now was that, too, for Guston. This particular car seems to be what’s left of his early sixties black monolith-paintings; and it is only a car, it appears, because a stem, the steering wheel, allows it to be. This steering wheel is brushed in with a little white to give depth (Guston still does care for illusionism a little, like a negligent grace) yet the black spare tire and the rear left wheel-well are left blank, outlines.
The hoods-guys are eye-slitted and fabric-seamed (oppositely, complementarily: Guston’s natural compositional poise). Both of them smoke big gangster cigars and the left-side figure holds his in the Guston/Dürer control position. Bristling up from the seats are nailed sticks, board, a piece of what looks like red iron pipe (the reds in the picture range from salmon to blood and all five are different). In the blue of outdoors the car approaches a bordering section of rose ground, white over red. This used to be the actual arena of color Guston worked in with his early abstractions, but here Guston has headed his car into such ethereal territory only to make trouble. The picture’s bad manners are its very subject. Left on the bottom of the canvas is a bit of white like a movie still torn off, a promise of continuation. And that central red area between the two heads? The seat presumably—but perhaps also the first appearance of the unmasked Guston persona, his will and red-hot determination now, his full head of willful steam.
There were, as well, hieratic pictures such as Ladder (1978).
Gaudy as an old movie-palace proscenium, Musa’s marcelled head rises like the sun, while on the narrowest strip of black (shadow, for all we know) a ladder is raised against nothing. Over its unevenly spaced steps a single two-soled leg has more or less flung itself in imitation of the sun-goddess. The leg somehow has managed to loop itself through the top two rungs, a feat not only pictorialism and perspective demands but Gustonian enigma too: shadows don’t lengthen both ways nor do ladders stand by themselves. We sense that something has gone deeply wrong here. In the threading process some abrasion has occurred, some blood seems to have been shed, shavings of flesh. There is even the hint back there of another shoe, some kind of obscured busyness, possibly disaster. A leg with three kneecaps never was meant to actually stand, much less climb. Guston’s beloved Russian writers, Babel and Gogol and Chekhov, narratively depended on accident or misadventure, and legs for Guston assumed in part the same task: to move the story along.
Or, in the case of Green Rug (1976), stomp it to death. The woolliest, most specified, most manic Gustons always took me the longest to get used to; I dealt more easily with the uninflected, melancholic ones, the ones that looked like they could decoalesce back into abstraction with just a little more scumbling, a little more grisaille. Yet exactly the most “zealous,” over-the-top paintings like Green Rug—funky, shaggy, ugly—may yet turn out to be the most important masterpieces of them all. If any Guston picture ever could be a museum-gift-shop refrigerator magnet, this surely is the one. It is an infinitely concentrateable image.
During the fifties Guston was most personally connected with the more literary of the New York School painters: Motherwell, Rothko, Newman. To look back at the crowning abstract works of these artists—Newman’s Stations of the Cross series, Rothko’s DeMenil chapel in Houston, Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic—is to see them each calling up some extra-visual lubrication to ease his way in producing sensual works with heroic intentions. But in a painting as radical as Green Rug, Guston grows his own references. No less literary than his friends, Guston explored stories of his own making—the seraphic, the pathetic, the scarified, the hilarious, the outrightly iconic—in the guise of french fries and spaghetti legs and wild sproutings of kneecaps. The heroics and spectacles of inwardness were forfeited.
Green Rug was the picture Guston personally chose to serve as the cover for the catalogue of his 1980 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective, and all his heedlessness is here. Physically tall himself (though his head usually was bowed, his shoulders slumped), I’d frequently see Guston instinctively straighten to full height in front of his least “acceptable” canvases—which themselves as often as not were defiantly vertical in layout. It was almost as if Guston, before them, was reminded in some physical way that with these he had truly “drawn away.”
Green Rug is the homage to Piero’s The Flagellation that Guston wanted to accomplish lifelong. Not just because of the whip, but because its elements are so very separated, profoundly removed. Two legs have been commanded to dance, putting down any number of quick, flattened, ankle-turning steps so permanent that they’ve turned not only into dance-studio markings but actual shoes.
The legs themselves are notably horrible. There are no rounded thighs in late Guston, no calves, no ankles, no toes: the legs always are arm-legs, which here seem to have groped their way into the very painting (while one offstage might very well be holding the whip). One of the allegories of this picture might well be that although unseen hands make paintings (with brushes, a soft small kind of whip), legs are what carry us from here to there, from then to now to when. To move narratively in a space that promises no expansion—whose forms literally step over each other—is to invoke, instead, time. The steps on the floor indicate positions of priority and succession.
Pit, 1976 (Australian National Gallery)
For M, 1955 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
Source, 1976 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Web, 1975 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Wharf, 1976 (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth)
Cherries, 1976 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Blue Light, 1975 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
Talking, 1979 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Head and Bottle, 1975 (Private Collection)
Group in Sea, 1979 (Private Collection)
Friend - To M.F., 1978 (Des Moines Art Center, Iowa)
Untitled, 1980 (Private Collection)
Edge of Town, 1969 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Ladder, 1978 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
Green Rug, 1976 (Edward R. Broida Trust)
The Conversion of St. Paul
Monument, 1976 (Tate Gallery, London)
In late Guston, fringes (or many-footed bugs, or legs, or eyelashes, or hair, or tassels, or french fries) reoccur as a regular formal need to add thin lines to a volumetric solid. This “fraying” (here, I guess, it would be flaying) quality of individual escaped threads is something Guston’s sense of the anti-perfect repeatedly stressed. The legs bristle with a few stray spikes of hair. The whip, languid with authority and terribilita, needn’t do much more than hang there, the almost phallic shape of its handle shining above mock-sweetly like a Renaissance putto. In Guston’s first youthful paintings the Klan held the whip, but in this late one the whip holds itself. And as nauseating as the stringy hairy legs are, maybe even more so is the narrowing cone of blackness between the legs. Guston’s fiercer allegories use black a great deal, a black soaked with the india ink of the cartoonist or like Shostakovich’s heavy chords, his parodic dancing through the flames. Titling this picture Green Rug puts a sorry-too-late domesticity over the whole scene that no one will credit. The narrative here is of everything about to blow. The rug shakes with the shuffling of the feet, and we can tell it will not stay on the flooring very long, that the flooring, too, will at some point give way, be beaten down by the footsteps dancing to the whip’s imperative.
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With paintings like these Guston challenged more than only abstraction, I think. He challenged Modernism’s very faith in the idea of art-historical evolution, as well. Evolution, David Sylvester notes, has gone hand in glove with the faith that a work of art
must affirm its existence as an object and that subject matter was incidental to its proper purpose. Its essential slogan was Maurice Denis’s affirmation that a picture, before being a representation of something or other, was a flat surface covered by colors arranged in a certain order. It was what Baudelaire had been saying fifty years earlier when he proclaimed in 1846 that a good picture had a meaning even when you were too far away to identify the subject.
If everything about a work of art can be kerneled in its will-to-form, it follows that every period for an artist is as good as any other, necessary in the filling development that is underway. In this way evolution itself becomes a kind of abstraction. Yet Guston seemed to resist both.
Why? Had the various modes of abstraction failed him, or was it vice versa? Was he after all what his peers grumbled about: a style-shuffler, a mind that just could not be made up? One of the second-generation New York Schoolers, the painter Jon Schueler, wrote in his diaries (posthumously published as The Sound of Sleat):
Phil Guston loved Piero della Francesca, but he wanted his beauty to be of his time, and he was deeply hurt, I understand, when his friends, his brothers, his fellow artists said, You, Phil, with your figurative paintings, with your success, you are a traitor. You are selling out. You are not with us. You are not seeing. The story goes that he changed then. He started all over again. Depending on how you look at it, that was a very brave or a very weak thing to do.
And of course when he stopped painting abstractly, his friends, true believers, gave him a hard time all over again.
The whole anti-evolution/false abstraction issue was one I found difficult to clarify in my own mind, too—until, that is, I’d finished the catalogue essay for the 1980 Guston retrospective in San Francisco. I sent Guston a copy of the manuscript, and the next time I came to visit I found Guston and Musa drawing me aside rather ceremonially almost as soon as I walked in the house. They both remained standing as I took a seat. They almost walked small circles around each other, like people waiting for a train or for a loved one to come out of surgery.
They wanted me to know, Guston said, how thrilled they both were that I had gone ahead and written in my catalogue essay that his name originally had been Philip Goldstein. He’d always felt awful about the name change, he explained to me, and now at long last it was time to admit to it in public. Both he and Musa agreed that he’d only done it in the first place to appease Musa’s parents in advance, to make himself more acceptable to them.
This I’m sure was true as far as it went, though of course there’s always more to such a thing. The practice of Jews changing their names to more Gentile-sounding forms usually is viewed as a sociological response to prejudice and to the pressures of conformity. Guston’s left-over leftist iconoclasm certainly included religion: he recalled Yom Kippur dinners and mock-Seders with the Rothkos that involved shrimp. All the same, with Yiddish habitually and liberally thrown into his speech, he had no problem seeing as well as presenting himself as a doubt-ridden cerebral Jew painter.
To any name-change there is a deeper, more existential level. Watching and listening to Guston that afternoon, it suddenly dawned on me how Guston could have been and also not been a shamming, less-than-committed abstractionist during the fifties. He had spent a lifetime involved in the cycle of maskery and then self-disclosure, I realized. To change a name is both to overvalue and undervalue the I, the specific identity that we hide behind and yet also are known by. Jean Starobinski writes that the mask makes the person behind it feel the Self more intensely—if for no other reason than the pressure of the mask is upon his skin, his Self.
The hood the painter wears in The Studio (1969) is therefore no accident at all. The Ku Klux Klanny hoods originally returned to Guston’s hand with the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, an outrage against violence hearkening back to the Los Angeles pictures he did as a youth—but why they kept appearing in his paintings for years after that, well after his rage had cooled, rose from another source. The hoods became for Guston what the pulcinelli were for Tiepolo: the first of his remarkable casts of touring masks, players, to appear over the next ten years—reminders of Self, extenders of Self. The eye-slits of the hoods in the hood-paintings, although expressively flexible, always are vertical; through them the masked Goldstein trained his eyes on other things than himself. Yet at the same time, without the ingrained tendency to mask (and its advantages), Guston never could have managed to paint the powerfully self-revealing pictures he did over the last ten years of his life.