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HEAD AND BOTTLE. , 1975. I FIRST SAW HEAD AND BOTTLE more than a decade ago, at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, in a show of paintings done by Philip Guston in the last years of his life, 1969 to 1980. It was work I was immediately at home with. By this time Guston had stripped his vocabulary down to a few sturdy basics—soles of boots, bodies ...
Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. 352 pages. $30. PHILIP GUSTON’S CAREER swung like a dangling lightbulb—from figuration (starting in 1930) to abstraction (around 1948) and back to figuration (from 1968 until his death in 1980).
Philip Guston, Sarasota, FL, 1967. THIS PAST SEPTEMBER, the directors of four institutions—the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—issued an unprecedented statement postponing “Philip Guston Now,” a major traveling retrospective that had been years in the making.
Philip Guston with The Studio, 1969, Woodstock, NY, 1969. Photo: Frank Lloyd. Photo: Frank Lloyd. For Guston and for many artists who have revered these paintings since, his return to figuration—and the clowning Klanners who brought it into being—was an act of defiance against aesthetic doxa; the sophisticated insouciance of the artist’s late works has long served as the epitome of artistic freedom.
FOR MANY YEARS, what bothered me most about Philip Guston’s City Limits, 1969, was that the red brush marks to the bottom right just stop. My eyes would trace the strokes using my mental hog-hair brush, and my enjoyment in imagining making those marks would halt with all the excitement still flowing freely, partnered by intermittent pangs of frustration.
Philip Guston’s latest work—a disparate group of eleven paintings and four drawings—omits the Klansman-like figures prominent in most of his painting since 1970. The leading figure now is a bristly, bean-shaped head with ear and enormous, pupil-less eye. The image suggests a thinking eye, the essential stripped-down painter’s eye.
On the occasion of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s traveling retrospective “PHILIP GUSTON,” Artforum asked art historian DAVID ANFAM to examine the career of a painter whose “untimely” return to storytelling pointed the way “back to the future.”. LIKE MANY A GOOD STORY, Philip Guston’s art starts in earnest with a bang.
These two books sit atop a growing stack of Guston-themed publications. Distributed Art Publishers and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, have published a new edition of Poor Richard, Guston’s Nixon satire from the summer of 1971, pitched to publishers at Philip Roth’s urging, 4 with no takers until the University of Chicago Press finally issued a now-rare 2001 printing.
Guston did something truly radical. He deconstructed his own intelligence and, in the process, revealed a lot about the art world’s pretentiousness. One of the most seductive and delicate handlers of paint to emerge during the ’50s, a decade later he made his work intentionally crude and blunt in order to get to the reality beneath the ...
Next, Guston tamped down the pink by brushing in a region of black, the sketchy remnants of which are visible near the bottom, slightly to the right of the painting’s central axis. He again performed an act of “erasure,” tugging at the edges of that black region with white paint to work up a loose grid of brushstrokes in penal gray.
