The paintings of Philip Guston, the pink, cartoonish ones that remind us of comics we used to read (or still read), could have been painted by a young artist today but were, in fact, painted nearly 50 years ago by a man well into his prime. They also, appallingly, deal with issues that are still acutely relevant today. In 1970 when Guston decided to change direction from being a successful abstract expressionist, he shocked the art world. It appears we are still wary. The touring show (that landed at Tate Modern in the Autumn of 2023), had been postponed following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 because the exhibition was considered by the museums to be too insensitive. So what on earth are we shielding ourselves from? Guston’s paintings don’t offend us, instead they help us along in acknowledging the real world. He believed that it was his responsibility to ‘unnumb’ himself to the brutality of the world and ‘to bear witness’ and we can take that step with him.
“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”
In the painting, Dawn, 1970, Guston drew some birds on a wire at the same time as the day was breaking. “It felt good to put something in that was right outside happening”. Whilst figures in hoods drag a jumble of legs, referencing violent crimes from the night before, Guston reminds us that evil can always be present, even on a ‘peachy’ morning. Bravo Mr Goldstein on your change in direction. I wasn’t shocked by your paintings but they did make me feel deeply insecure that humanity fails to change.
Born Phillip Goldstein in 1913 to immigrants from Ukraine, he changed his name to mask his Jewish roots when he moved to New York in the 30’s, after living in Canada and Then LA. He gained significant respect in New York as one of the abstract expressionists (alongside Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Kline et al), representing the United States at the 1960 Venice Biennale and a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1962. If he had continued like that for the next two decades we would not be taking so much notice today. So what happened?
By 1966, Guston had stopped painting and was facing a personal crisis. The war in Vietnam, increased police violence towards protesters and racial discrimination were intensifying the horrors his parents had fled from across the Atlantic, only to find the situation in America heading in a similar direction. As he struggled to find a way of coping with his trauma, he turned his back on the extravagance of abstract painting and started producing minimal line drawings, which later became paintings of simple objects around him: paintbrushes, jars, shoes, lightbulbs, food, and books, over and over again. As he drew he noticed how books looked like stone tablets or legs looked like pillars, changing but filled with different possibilities. Though we are not always certain what some of the recognisable but shifting forms in the paintings are, or even why they are there – a forehead or a sunrise, a book or a tombstone, you decide what and why.
“You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the soul, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread.”
Guston finally revealed the new paintings that we are celebrating today but they were spurned by the art world in the 1970’s. His colleagues were outraged that he could abandon his established practice for something so crude in style. He was resolute that he had found his calling, however, and continued to make paintings of objects, that could be one thing or another, body parts, hooded and sleeping figures (some were self-portraits that had previously eluded him) until he died in 1980. He chose to turn his own back on the art establishment and instead collaborated with poets and writers, with whom he felt he had more in common. If he is looking down from his pink cloud today, he would realise that he had contributed to a seismic shift in the acceptance of what painting could do and that we are applauding him. Although interpretation may morph over time, or between one person and another, he proves that the bigger picture hardly ever changes and we need to face up and be reminded of the evils in our midst.
Philip Guston, Tate Modern, until 25 February 2024