Visitors to Picasso’s studio were reported to have felt as though they’d been invited to a circus. The inventiveness and play and manipulation in different media created something like five ever busy rings before them. When I mentioned this once to Guston, his response was: “Well, here it’s just strictly clowns.”
Picasso’s figures—his saltimbanques and Benin masks and mistress-models—certainly “are all actors,” writes Guy Davenport, “wearers of masks, mediators, like Picasso himself, between reality and illusion.” The same with Braque, Klee, Roualt, Ensor, Guston. And yet apart from the shuffling of reality and illusion, the theatrical in the hands of these artists may also indirectly clear up some of the confusion and entangling paradox we have about representation and abstraction in visual art.
On stage, representation essentially boils down to two modes: mimicry and exhibitionism. Jonas Barish’s extremely useful book, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, reminds us that
If exhibitionism has tended, generally, to provoke less indignation than mimicry, the reason is plain enough: mimicry involves conscious deception, nearly always (so it is thought) for wicked purposes—for why would one want to depart from truth and nature except to injure others—whereas exhibitionism, merely carries truth to extremes.
But in visual art this formulation somehow has been reversed. With its fidelity to appearances, mimicry is sanctioned, exhibitionism not. The enduring knot of art and religion, a conflation which by now we hold almost subconsciously, may be behind this. Always there have been religious qualms about the exhibited as opposed to the innerly felt, for instance the Protestant antagonism to liturgical pomp. “Did the church,” Barish summarizes, “need to assume visible forms at all, or might it exist solely in the hearts of believers?”
As it so happens, Guston arose—and then escaped—from the heart of one of the most deeply Protestant art-histories ever seen: the Abstract Expressionists. The New York painters made external Works that testified to inner Faith, the gestural not aimed outward but urging a painting to go back down beneath its paint, to mean no more than its deepest soul. Abstract Expressionism sought purity with a certain portion of Puritanism. Painters like Rothko or Newman and Still, with their neo-sublimes, recapitulated Plato and Rousseau in finding that, as Barish says, “truth lies not in concrete particulars nor in what possesses the accent and the beat of life, but in the silent, invisible essences that underlie it” For Puritanism shares with Romanticism (Barish again): “a belief in absolute sincerity which speaks directly from the soul, a pure expressiveness that knows nothing of the presence of others. It takes as its models the guiltless folk of the earth, who ‘know not seems’: the peasant, the savage, the idiot, the child—those in whom the histrionic impulse remains undeveloped.”
Guston on the other hand constitutionally mistrusted all essences. Nor would he be denied a single instance of “the accent and the beat of life.” And his histrionic impulse, once he let it out, developed quickly. But to do so, he had to work directly against his New York School habits. He had to make himself stubbornly inauthentic.
This in itself has led to its own confusions in placing Guston’s challenge, for there is a single prevailing mode of artistic inauthenticity in our time: the Duchampian/ironic school. The first baffled reception to Guston’s painting found shelter there, the art world calling Guston a neo-Pop artist or cartoonist. This he never was. Duchamp, and the Pop artists, and the pastiche-ists like Rauschenberg and Johns all reveled in sorting-out the accepted into patterns of unacceptability: distortion, cool shock, ironic high-spirits. They were after effect as well as élan. But Guston tacked toward celebrating the crap of life not for its own ironic sake but as the ever-present still life that surrounds the embarrassingly, even tragically human. No Duchampian object ever is tragic. Many if not most of Guston’s objects, even the most hilarious, are.
Barish recognizes that artists themselves distrust the histrionic, going as it does against the impulse and dream of “creating something permanent, fixed and exempt from the ravages of time, well-wrought urns and mosaic saints. Inert matter they can force to do their bidding; they can impose their shaping wills on it, stamp it with their signatures. But how to subdue human beings in the same way, who have wills of their own?” Guston himself, for instance, wrote to me in 1977 about his
double sense of an “itching,” febrile need to make a masterpiece * (* On so many days, I feel this to be a truly stupid ambition. But it is there—to be reckoned with.), and equally as strong (and THEN melancholy) realization of this total impossibility. Then follows this numbing sense of the inutile. Ross—what is creating—this forming anyway?!! A treadmill? Try to stay on it—throw off the dross—make the architecture and content impossible to take apart—not even 1/8 of an inch padded. Lean. Yet working with images as I am attempting, makes all so unimaginable, chaotic, as well as baffling. And so unpredictable, which is why that 1/8 of an inch change of forms & spaces transforms the meaning. I know I’m going in circles talking to you this way. (Musa, in the next room, just said “Did I hear a big sigh?”) Well—perhaps one should be satisfied just to stay on the treadmill—to remain on it—maybe that is all that is truly given to us. My god! A lifetime spent—to have a few innocent moments. To baffle oneself-—to come in the studio the next day and feel—I did that? Is this me? To catch oneself off-guard?
“You want a clock? Here’s a clock!” Oh, if it were only as direct and as simple as that!
This last bit referred to a story Guston told about teaching at Boston University. With her classmates, one of his more talented graduate painters was working on a mural for one of the B.U. cafeterias and having a great deal of trouble with a clock she was trying to do: the stylistics of it, the trompe 1’oeil, perhaps even the Guston homage involved in it. She worked and reworked and overworked this clock until Guston, observing, couldn’t stand it anymore. Grabbing a brush, he loaded it, painted a circle, then two hands within it:
“You want a clock? Here’s a clock.”
Guston repeated the story fully aware of its implications. “Here’s a clock” threw a short punch at the self-consciousness of modernism itself. It made a comment on the post-Magrittean correspondence between images and verbal cleverness: OK, this may not be a pipe . . . but this is a clock. It spoke, beyond anything aesthetic, of plain human impatience. Maybe most of all it was turned subtly toward the word want. What you want you may have, it offers, if you give up the false anxieties of painting.
Guston, both fascinated and repelled by Mondrian, liked to say that the almost mystical system of abstract purity Mondrian entertained had to be completely right or else completely wrong. Right or wrong didn’t terribly bother Guston—“completely” did. Even to accept the best Mondrian paintings as valid, this harsh and inhuman totality and maximalism would have to be factored in.
The kind of ambiguity found in de Chirico was more to Guston’s taste. As a depressive, objects asserted a powerful attraction for him. Around the figure of melancholy in Dürer are many untouched objects, each pregnant with meaning undisturbed by use or misuse. Yet Guston also knew that representation could not only be of recognizable things. The unassignable, vaguely star-shaped, spool-like thing that is called Odradek in Kafka’s allegory, The Cares of a Family Man, comes closer to the images Guston populated his pictures with (as well as to the ruins of melancholic allegory Benjamin and Guston so well understood):
One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.
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In the mid-seventies a book by Leo Steinberg, the art historian, proved to be a great inspiration to Guston. Steinberg’s monograph, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, concerned the two frescoes of the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel, The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter. Guston mentioned the book again and again in 1976, and it’s not hard to imagine how attentively and identifyingly Guston must have read Steinberg’s précis of these great and unconventional frescoes’ neglect and later redemption:
. . . The Paolina frescoes were felt to be failures—void of grace, dissonant in composition and color. Of the two paintings, one seemed too strident, the other too rigid, and both equally uninviting and bleak. And then, after centuries, Walter Friedlaender in 1934 would see the pictures as reaching a “scarcely understood pitch of spiritual abstraction.”
Steinberg judges the re-evaluation of the Michelangelo frescoes upon four main supports:
. . . the recognition of old-sage style (translation of the German Alterstill) as a distinct psycho-stylistic phenomenon; second, the definition of “Mannerism” as a willed departure from the ideals of the High Renaissance; third, a re-interpretation of the “abstract” or non-figurative objective in Michelangelo’s paintings; and fourth, a changing conception of the nature of representation as symbolic form.
What I think struck Guston in the Pauline frescoes (apart from the identification he’d naturally have with the pictures’ negative reception and centuries-long neglect and misunderstanding) were two things primarily. The great legs of the horses in the St. Paul fresco seem to me the most likely source, even quotation, for the greatest of all the Guston-leg paintings, Monument (1976), now in the Tate.
And, more important, there was Steinberg’s deduction that Michelangelo’s own face appears at least twice in the Crucifixion fresco, once younger and once as an old man. “He paints himself in!” Guston exclaimed to me. “After all, who the hell was he to get off scot-free?”
Steinberg gets to the very heart of self-portraiture when he writes:
As the fresco in its entirety embodies simultaneities of then and now—the Crucifixion as a historic moment, the meditation upon it and the presage of its commemoration in the Tempietto—so the artist, too, if he is indeed present, may be portrayed in the full span of his moral history.
For Guston, too, some image or other of his own self needed to be in most of his late paintings. Only by that was a certain plasticity of authorship and philosophical comedy maintained, a “moral history.” The Guston self-portrait never is heroic or even pathetic. What it is, is unsparing. Hair wild, face cut and patched after shaving, wild-eyed, gluttonous, a tuberous head. Where another head appears, Musa’s usually, in paintings like Web or Wharf, Guston’s self-presentation is either shrunken by shame or made bloated by guilt. Sometimes it is not even awake, conscious. In the seventies he did a number of pictures of himself and Musa in bed, separately or together, remarkably vertical or horizontal that hearken back directly to drawings by Ensor as well as to a certain allegorical tradition Guston knew all about: Panofsky, in his Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, points out that dramatic representations of Melancholy often show a woman asleep by her distaff combined with a man asleep at a table or even a bed.
But the “spiritual abstraction” that Friedlaender talks of in the Pauline frescos of Michelangelo, that which Steinberg sharpens to “moral history,” was precisely where time and self-depiction intersected for Guston. He saw his own working through time as his work’s only continuity, one beyond style, influence, and even aesthetics. To be the same person painting year after year came to seem to him more impressive and mysterious even than the physical objects that were the paintings themselves and the images thereof. Goldstein/Guston, subtle colors and hairy ankles, all of them emerge unchecked from the same life of art. What could be more wonderful and scandalous, more histrionic than that?
Guston made himself one of the actors in his own play—as every self-portraitist will—because he knew the play, the life of art, was allegory, removed yet unbearably personal at the same time, raucous as well as devastated. And though no one I ever have known has suffered dilemma and doubt more overtly, fluorescently, outsizedly, cossettedly than Guston did, he at some point stopped making his suffering do what it had done previously in his work.
While his friend Mark Rothko’s torments were sublimated into subtle, harmonic beguilements; and his friend Morton Feldman’s into ever more wiry, purer, finally almost silent forms—Guston in his work finally suffered non-absorbingly, more in response to what he could make seeable-to-himself in images than from a reflux of personal pain. In this way he was not that much different from Signorelli or Domenico Tiepolo or Goya or Van Gogh. Some of these images simply stick up like bookmarks out of the book of Guston’s life, with that kind of tracking purpose, but others are almost not to be seen for what they are but instead as a signature of time passing, past, and passable.
Philosophy occasionally describes a division between “thinking of” and “thinking about.” Guston’s late theater of self-portraits, representing and allegorizing himself working through time, perhaps gives us a framework for images in contemporary art that blends a painting of and a painting about in a useful way. Only defined and separated by the time it took to do them and the amount of doing it took to posit them in time, Guston’s many late paintings are like the individual stills of a flip-book or captured frames of a movie. Bound together by the painter’s bravery and freedom within time to show himself, the images themselves liquidly change form and meaning but never birthright. All of them are born in the rich precincts of personal responsibility and raw change.