Musa Mayer and Anders Bergstrom on Philip Guston

All this reverberates through the paintings of this period, but the source of violence is not only outside the artist, the ‘other.’ So, in this sense ‘Boot’ (1968) is, like ‘The Studio’ (1969), a self-reflective and nuanced commentary on complicity and the roots of violence in ourselves. It was, in large part, his intense desire to engage once again in the larger narratives of the world that pulled my father back into figuration.

AB: It was also around this that he began working through a combat of his own in the studio with drawings—the ‘pure’ drawings one day and the figurative drawings the next. You could say he had his own combat going on in the studio with his work while he was seeing the intense political situation and war and combat in the news.

MM: Yes, in a way, but this internal combat he welcomed. It seemed inevitable to him, which is not to say it was easy. Letting go of that which has been praised without knowing the path ahead must always be difficult, but to him it became crucial. He later said that the capacity to change is the most valuable possession an artist has. I don’t believe he saw the conflict and misery in the world in the same constructive frame, as evolutionary.

AB: The Marlborough 1970 show was a jolt to the art world, but the new work had been ongoing for about two years. Do you know if he had visitors to the studio during this period, before the big unveiling? Were there close friends who gave him any feedback as he was working through this? Or was he, perhaps intentionally, isolating himself as he worked?

MM: Although my father isolated himself in his studio, he was visited between bouts of painting by his closest friends, the poets Clark Coolidge and Bill Berkson, both of whom understood the new work to be breaking through into explicit forms, as a continuity toward which the abstract work of 1960 to 1965 had been pointing.

AB: It was an important moment, for him, the Marlborough show, and the responses he was getting from critics, friends and artists alike. But it wasn’t the first time that he made a change that challenged what people thought he was ‘supposed’ to be doing. Many people were upset when he began making so-called ‘abstract paintings’ in about 1950. I’m sure his friends who had known him as a painter of beautiful easel paintings were surprised. But the reaction to the shift in 1968 was more severe. Do you think this is fair to say that it was more of a seismic shift for him too? Or is it just the way history is now seeing those moments and why? Do you think these are moments of equal strife—or maybe they could be called breakthroughs—for your father?

MM: Pollock and the other painters saw my father as a latecomer to The New York School, and of course, those who had admired his more conventional figurative works of the 1940s were disappointed by his turn toward abstraction. Then his shimmering abstract paintings of the early 1950s gained critical acclaim, which turned negative in response to the darker, more image-ridden gestural abstractions of the early 1960s. I don’t believe that the stylistic changes of 1968 through 1980 were perceived as seismic by my father. In fact, he always resisted the concept of styles as external to his own inner process, becoming impatient when interviewers wanted to discuss his changes in style. The extreme negative reaction to the Marlborough show in 1970 has to be understood in the context of the doctrinaire critical thinking of that time, which prescribed the only acceptable next evolution of abstraction. But to my father, painting was about freedom and change.

Untitled (1971)

AB: Soon after the Marlborough show your father went to Rome, where he continued onward down the path that he’d started, going on to make an amazing body of work known as the Roma series while in Rome and traveling in Italy. It was a very prolific time for him. On his return to Woodstock, he also made the Nixon drawings during that summer of 1971. You are working on curating a show to take place at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles in September 2019 called ‘Resilience: Philip Guston’ in 1971. It is about the works of that year, after the Marlborough show. Can you give us some insight into the exhibition, the title, and how you are planning to organize the exhibition?

MM: The art world’s almost complete rejection of the new paintings shown in 1970 was of course painful for my father. Especially wounded by the reactions of fellow artists, he later compared it with being ‘excommunicated.’ A change of scene was essential, and so immediately after the opening, my parents escaped for a residency at the American Academy in Rome, which had played such an important role in 1948, another time of transition. While there, he reconnected with the timeless beauty of Rome and the Renaissance painters who had first inspired him as a teenager. The distance from the art world in New York was crucial, and in January of 1971 he settled into the studio the Academy provided and painted over 100 oils on paper that we now refer to as the Roma series. Back in Woodstock that summer, he reconnected with his friend Philip Roth, who had reacted to Richard Nixon’s first term as US President with a satire entitled ‘Our Gang’. That summer, my father filled two sketchbooks with over 200 satirical ink drawings. For an artist to keep on working in the immediate aftermath of that level of rejection and misunderstanding requires enormous resilience and self-trust—hence the title of the show. That he was able to keep on working is impressive enough—but that the works of this year, taken as a whole, possess such extraordinary diversity and inventiveness—I find this worthy of focus. The location is meaningful, since Los Angeles was where my father grew up, yet there has been no major Guston exhibition there since 1963, when his retrospective came to LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The design of ‘Resilience’ is straightforward. The 1971 works will be divided in two large spaces. The first gallery will contain a large selection of the Roma paintings, and the second will contain the Nixon drawings. Some larger paintings completed in his Woodstock studio during that fall will also be included.

AB: This will be the third Philip Guston exhibition you’ve curated. The first was of the Nixon drawings, shown at Hauser & Wirth in both New York and London, and the second was ‘Painter’s Forms’ at the gallery in Hong Kong. What will you take away from the first two that will help with ‘Resilience’?

MM: While I’ve managed my father’s estate for almost 40 years and The Guston Foundation since 2013, I’ve always deferred to others in organizing and mounting exhibitions of his art. Yet through the years, through sheer immersion, I’ve become something of an expert in my father’s life and work. Curating the two Nixon drawings shows in 2016 and 2017, and the Hong Kong survey last year has given me confidence, along with the expert help and support of so many Hauser & Wirth staff—especially you! Aside from all the technical details that go into such an exhibition, and the shipping, framing, and conservation that must be done, what I’ve learned from these experiences is to trust my instincts while remaining open to listening to others. Hauser & Wirth continues to teach me that collaboration yields extraordinary results.

AB: Thank you Musa. Yes, trusting your instincts is important and we are looking forward to another great collaboration with ‘Resilience’.

AB: A very good painting from the Roma series is ‘Untitled’ (1971). Two hooded figures and the back of a head in the middle on the horizon, or perhaps on the other side of a wall. The back of the head in the middle of this ‘Untitled’ (1971) painting is an image that comes up several times in his work, most famously in ‘Friend to M.F.’ (1978), but also in other works, like ‘Sheriff and Sheriff (and Suspects)’. How do you think of these images of the back of heads looking into the picture, rather than out at the viewer? Do you think they are the sheriff or the suspect?

MM: In some works from 1970 and 1971 pictured here, they do appear to be sheriffs interrogating their hooded subjects, but in other works, like ‘Friend, to M.F.’, the meaning is clearly different. Morty Feldman had been an intellectual companion and close friend from the early 1950s. His rejection of my father’s late work was deeply wounding. The head looking away in ‘Untitled’ (1971), is an ambiguous character, I think. It’s often the case with imagery in the late works that it transforms and is repurposed, acquiring several resonant meanings.

Combat I (1978)

AB: The theme of combat or tension within the composition was one that was recurring in your father’s work. This is one of the great shield paintings, or combat paintings. These, of course, reference much earlier works like ‘Martial Memory’ (1941), which depicts children playing in the streets with sticks as swords and trash can lids as shields. Isn’t it amazing that he could have made works so many years apart, that are visually so different and yet, there are still the same threads of content that connects them?

MM: Yes, but you could say the same about the recurring hooded figures that had first emerged during the 1930s. This imagery of children engaging in mock battles first appears in a passage in one of my father’s murals, done for the Queensbridge Housing Project in 1939, a detail of which is below. This theme, further developed, repeats during the 1940s as allegory, in works like ‘If This Be Not I’ (1945) and re-emerges transformed in the later work in many variations. Aside from the obvious stylistic differences, what I notice most in the later versions by comparison with the early works is the emergence of a depersonalized or purified form of this allegory of conflict, where all you see are the arms and hands, clubs, and trash can lids.

AB: Unlike some of the other paintings of 1978, like ‘Hinged’ or ‘Aggressor’, where two opposing sides create a tension, this painting seems to be one-sided. It is almost as if it is one side of a battle, coming in from the sky only on the right side. Other 1978 paintings have references to the sky and clouds like ‘The Line’. What do you think might be happening with this composition?

MM: We can only speculate, but I believe these images are personally resonant and yet constantly changing as the artist explores different compositions and combinations. It’s as if my father kept on painting fresh variations until he had exhausted the original impulse that gave rise to the forms in the first place. And even then, after moving on, he often returns to those images, as if they were still haunting him.

AB: The first late figurative paintings from 1968 depict objects that are clearly things, like a book, a clock, a shoe. But by 1978, and certainly later, they are still figurative, but the identity of the things, ‘thingness,’ becomes less obvious. It is no longer a book, a clock, or a shoe. They become strange forms that we can’t exactly identify; we don’t have names for these forms. Do you think these later works are still as autobiographical, or are they now dealing more with even larger universal themes?

MM: I’m not sure. My father resisted interpretations, professing that he, too, was mystified by the strange forms appearing in his work, as these images flowed unbidden from a source within him beyond purposeful intention. To explain his process of creating, he quoted the composer Igor Stravinsky, who said that he had not written his most famous work—that ‘The Rite of Spring’ had written itself through him. I do know, as you suggest, that in these last works, it’s as if my father had gained access to a deeper level of perception, where another landscape of beings and things not of this world could be found. Despite their strangeness, these forms are undeniably real.

A selection of Guston’s pioneering paintings are featured in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Art Basel, from 13 – 16 June 2019.