PHILIP GUSTON

The strange forms that inhabit the 12 paintings in this exhibition of Philip Guston’s late works are intensely personal and packed with imagery that haunted the artist throughout his painting life. Yet they also speak to us in a metaphysical language that resists analysis, but that we grasp deeply, intuitively.

When asked, Guston would resist interpretating the iconic symbols that appeared in his paintings. He would respond that he, too, was mystified by these inexplicable forms, these singularities. ‘If I speak of having a subject to paint,’ he wrote, ‘I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place.’

Guston loved the mundane, the poetry of ordinary objects that transform and reappear, taking on multiple meanings. As he worked, previously unknown parts of himself began to take shape. In ‘Painter's Forms’ (1972), the artist, in profile, coughs up his talisman objects (shoe, bottle, boot, easel, cigarette) into the actual world. It is a painting about the act of painting.

The evocative ‘Relic’ (1974) calls to mind the foot of some ancient statue whose body has been lost to the ravages of time. Guston was fascinated by ruins and especially by disembodied parts of colossal Roman statues.

Four years later, in ‘Feet on Rug’ (1978), the disembodied feet of ruins have been transmuted into actors in a surreal allegory. Are they, too, evidence of loss, of times past?

It was during the Second World War that Guston first painted masked children playing war games, with sticks for lances and trash can lids as shields. These mock battles surfaced repeatedly during the war years of the 1940s, reappearing in allegorical form in his late works. These paintings refence not only the ceaseless struggle and conflict of the world, but also are evidence of the artist’s fascination with complex battle scenes in art, especially Paulo Uccello’s great ‘Battle of San Romano.’

Even before the late figurative work emerged, when his paintings were still seen as abstract, Guston had invited and cultivated this dynamic gathering of forces: ‘I remember being very strongly aware of forms acting on each other. Putting pressure on each other, shrinking each other, blowing each other up, or pushing each other. I mean, affecting each other, as if the forms were active participants in some kind of plastic drama that was going on.’

‘I wanted to see early frescoes of Last Judgments and end-of-the-world paintings. Particularly Romanesque paintings and Sienese fresco painters who paint huge, marvelous frescoes of the damned, all the tortures in hell, and so on. Heaven is always very dull, just a lot of people lined up. Like trumpets, they’re all lined up. There’s not much to look at. But when they’re going to hell the painter really goes to town. All kinds of marvelous stuff. That’s when they really enjoyed painting. I feel we live in comparable times. Oh yeah, and I want to paint that. I don’t want to copy, but I feel that’s the big subject matter. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Well, I’ve begun. I’ve begun with this story.’

‘Agean’ (1978) is one of Guston’s largest and strangest works. The battle takes place against an implacable blue sky. In mid-air, oddly formed arms and hands advance with shields. There is a feeling both of unease and stasis, as if these non-human limbs are locked in their aggressive posture. The title may refer to the Aegean Sea, the site of many battles, ancient and modern. In ‘Untitled’ (1979) locked in perpetual struggle, the trash-can lid shields have merged into a single richly painted iconic form, energized and hovering midair over a lime green sea.