i went to see the philip guston, not an artist i'm especially familiar with so i went out of curiosity more than anything. what i didn't expect was to find his work so extraordinarily naked and moving.
there’s a clear division between the pre and post war work, not uncommon in american painters of the time and not surprising given the newly problematic nature of depicting the human body after the war. some of the early drawings reminded me of henry moores drawings of the blitz. there’s some marvellous ones of basic navy training where he’s managed to both show real events and imbue them with a sense of mystery, there’s one of naval recruits doing a clothes inflation drill where they both look like young bemused soldiers but have something of boticelli's illustrations of the damned in the inferno. but innocent with their very young faces turned skywards as they float in some strange confusing hell. the study of european art is very evident. there’s a largish canvas of children on a raft-like structure amidst a city. its simultaneously like bosch's ship of fools and the raft of the medusa, their medieval masks slip slightly and there’s the same confused innocence on their faces. they look cast adrift in a city, but not floating, not able to actual cast their moorings.
his figures aren’t allegorical but rather capable of holding some kind of bodily meaning, its a very european type of art, elements of dix and grosch but without the disgust. and it all changes, there’s a break and then there’s post war. and then there’s no bodies at all, or rather no painting of bodies - perhaps because of a surfeit of seeing them.
i've long thought that abstract expressionism is not just a reaction (or a development as teleological art history would have us think) to european art, with its socially conscious figuration of toiling workers and cities of suffering people, but also to do with the sheer horror of the second world war for soldiers, and most artists of the age were soldiers too. there’s also a reaction, perhaps unknowingly, against national socialist art - its heroic figures of soi disant heroes from an invented nordic past. but when guston does abstract expressionism it looks like their were some figures there and they have been painted out, scrubbed, it somehow looks like the fact of the body is too painful for him.
its here i think that the cartoonishness makes sense. for an artist who owed so much to european high art - acknowledged in the final piece of the exhibition called pantheon (where he paints his easel and light surrounded by the names de chirico, giotto, tiepolo, piero, massacio - an excellent pantheon), and for whom the body is in the classical sense a source of meaning there’s an americana in cartoon. its anti 'Art'. its colloquial and without a readable history. it doesn't reference just says.
its almost like he’s unlearning the drawing tradition, the lines are as loose as the covers on his strangely not-sinister clansmen. the bodies hidden, its not the muscular greek based model of fascist or socialist art, there’s no heroism there. a heroism that as a jewish artist who had fought in the war must have been hard to see as some terrible sick joke. there’s also this terrible reinvention of his own body, pretty soon in his renewed figuration its his and almost only his body that becomes represented. first he’s covered like the klansmen - is this some implicit acknowledgement of that capacity inside all of us? himself? and then increasingly as a mass of externalised entrails and organs. often he is only an eye and a hand (what more of the body would a painter need?). he's a giant head with one horrific eye, he’s a foetal sleeper clutching a corn cob-like wife and his paint brushes in equal measure. it should be ghastly, this palate of unmixed red paints, but it isn't.
there’s forays out of this self depiction. a series on nixon has him as a giant cock-nosed cripple wearing an american flag and looming over a landscape like goya's colossus, there seems to be a return to the european academy in the later smaller paintings; a bowl of cherries like chardins pomegranates. but more than that there’s the repetition of shapes and forms. a light bulb looking like a noose appears everywhere. an easel with a blank canvas. shoes. piles of shoes like a holocaust museum. seas of heads, forms stacked like bodies or like the entrails on monsters, a personal vocabulary of shapes formed out of some sleep of reason.
and its this i find so touching, so extraordinary about the work, someone who's tried so hard to find a personal vocabulary that’s actually comprehensible to the viewer while offering no compromise or accommodation. its so of the self and courageous and unusual.
Posted by flambingo at April 8, 2004 02:54 PM | TrackBack
