Philip Guston: An Everlasting Contemporary Artist
Vignesh Somjit
Instructor’s Introduction
In this essay, Vignesh Somjit responds to an exhibition he visited at the beginning of my WR151 course on contemporary art in Boston. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during the summer of 2022, Philip Guston Now prompted Vignesh to reflect on the present-day social relevance of Guston’s complex paintings from the late 1960s. Here, the author shows us how the late painter’s embrace of ambiguity and contradiction provides a platform for thinking critically about our personal and collective responsibilities to the world around us. This essay builds layers of meaning through careful description and connecting different paintings and pivotal moments in the artist’s career.
There are several ways students and faculty can use this essay. One idea is to examine the author’s analysis of the exhibit sources (Guston’s paintings). In my course, students continually practice writing about art, and this starts with in-person observations in front of the artworks and exhibitions they choose to visit. By recording what he noticed in the MFA, including the placement and recurrence of violent and disturbing iconography like hooded figures and dismembered limbs, Vignesh developed a series of questions he wanted to explore in his research. In the essay, he transforms his early observations into analysis that combines his own specific description with historical and social context. This allows his writerly voice and arguments to shine, and allows readers, even those unable to see the paintings, to readily imagine the paintings and their larger impact. As an exercise, instructors might ask students to identify moments when the author describes the visual material and consider how description connects with interpretation, and by extension, functions to advance the author’s arguments.
Vignesh also uses overall cohesion and productive topic sentences to move readers across historical moments and build a cohesive narrative that responds to the question of how and why Guston’s late 1960s paintings resonate today. The author’s efficient historical setup makes it easy for readers to grasp the stylistic and expressive shifts in the painter’s practice. By the end of the essay, Vignesh’s focused narrative prepares readers to not only better grasp Guston’s legacy, but also to consider chilling questions related to persistent systemic racism, violence, and our own enmeshment with history.
Caitlin Dalton
From the Writer
In my paper “Philip Guston: An Everlasting Contemporary Artist,” I seek to answer how paintings produced by the renowned artist Philip Guston in the backdrop of a polarized American nation in the 1960s continue to resonate with us today. I argue that Guston’s shift in stylistic and ideological choices enabled him to produce artwork that is ambiguous yet nuanced, allowing the wider public to form their own interpretations of the paintings while still appreciating their subtle intricacies. In particular, I adopt a historical perspective in constructing my argument, and use both the historical context of the paintings as well as Guston’s career trajectory to inform my thesis. I conclude that his artwork continues to resonate with viewers today because it encourages us to actively reflect on our humanity.
Philip Guston: An Everlasting Contemporary Artist
During the 1960s, the United States was plagued by spiraling social strife caused by raging race riots and the growing catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Seeing the violence and chaos unfold outside his secluded Woodstock studio, abstract artist Philip Guston grew increasingly dissatisfied with his isolation from the social realities of the time: “I was feeling split… The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. 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.”1 Addressing this frustration, Guston decided to free himself from the restraints of Abstract Expressionism and engage with the crisis his country was undergoing. In doing so, he unveiled a series of figurative paintings featuring cartoonish hooded figures committing various atrocities at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970. Though initially rejected by his contemporaries as “simple-minded,”2 the paintings are now earning international acclaim, more than half a century later. Currently, a selection of the Marlborough paintings is displayed in Philip Guston Now, a major exhibition touring the United States and the United Kingdom. How can artwork that was produced in response to American society in the 1960s continue to resonate with viewers today? Part of the answer lies in Guston’s use of caricature, which made his figurative paintings broadly accessible, particularly to those outside of the art establishment. Beyond his stylistic approach, the crux of why Guston remains contemporary to present-day society is due to his intricate embrace of ambiguity and social complexity, which enabled him to create nuanced paintings that reveal persisting social realities.
The Marlborough paintings were not the first time that Guston had engaged with political issues. In the early 1930s, Guston was inspired by the Mexican mural movement and its emphasis on art as a vehicle for social change. Consequently, the artist protested the 1931 Scottsboro Boys Case by painting a panel for the John Reed Club, a Marxist organization that encouraged artists to produce art with a social message. Along with many others, Guston continued to engage his political convictions through mural painting during the early 1930s. This style is best captured by his zealous mural The Struggle Against War and Terrorism (1935), located in Morelia, Mexico (figure 1). Hailed as “one of the biggest, most effective frescoes in all Mexico”3 by the art critic Jules Langsner, it centers a devious hooded priest hurling a cross and Bible at a woman who is tied up and hung on a beam below him. At the top right corner, other hooded figures are challenged by two hands forcefully gripping a hammer and a sickle. By simultaneously symbolizing the Medieval Inquisition and the contemporary violent confrontations between Fascists and Communists, Guston’s mural encapsulates a historical legacy of political violence, cruelty, and oppression.
The aftermath of the second World War brought about a drastic change in Guston’s stylistic choices. Troubled by the lasting impact of the atrocities committed during the war, Guston and many of his peers sought comfort in a new genre: Abstract Expressionism. As seen in Painting (1954), the idiom was characterized by spontaneous brush strokes and bursts of colors forming nonobjective forms that represented the artist’s psyche (figure 2). Consequently, the new movement freed Guston from, to quote Harold Rosenburg, “the social-consciousness dogma of the thirties.”4 However, as the period of economic growth and social prosperity in American society came to a halt in the late 1960s, Guston grew discontented with the seeming “ban on social-consciousness”5 that was associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement. To liberate his practice from such indifference to reality, Guston returned to figuration in 1968. Compared to the frescoes that Guston painted earlier in his career, the new figurative paintings illustrated a significantly different approach to political commentary. As Andrew Graham-Dixon explains in his essay “A Maker of Worlds: The Later Paintings of Philip Guston,” the artist had become wary of “overtly political art” as it threatened to substitute the emptiness of abstract art with “just another form of emptiness.”6 Instead, as Robert Storr claims in the book Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, “the way forward was really a matter of going back to reclaim the enthusiasms of his youth.”7 Indeed, Guston tapped into his childhood passion for making cartoons to create the work that marked his return to figurative painting.
In City Limits (1969), three comical hooded figures are stuffed in their toy-like car with mismatched wheels as they cruise through an unpolished, pinkish cityscape (figure 3). The bumbling characters in their rudimentary land seem, to quote Graham-Dixon, “no more threatening than plumped pillows.”8 In a painting produced a year later, however, Guston effectuates a jarring shift in ambience. Scrawny disembodied legs pile up in the corner of the frame of Bad Times (1970), as the once non-threatening and unintelligent hooded figures shoot down several people from their car (figure 4). In the 1970 article “Liberation from Detachment,” Harold Rosenburg claims that such satirical style enables Guston “to give a simple account of the simple-mindedness of violence.”9 Indeed, the savagery portrayed in Bad Times is eerily reminiscent of the police brutality at Kent State University in 1970, where four unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War were – for no apparent reason – gunned down by the National Guard.10 Viewed in the context of the Kent State massacre, the juxtaposition of the seemingly innocuous hoods committing mass murder further illustrates the unpredictable sources of inhumanity.
Additionally, it is clear that Guston prioritized the narrative element of these paintings over their artistic intricacy. For example, in Bad Times the grayish car is unfinished and fades into the background – as if not to draw away attention from the disembodied legs that are disproportionately bigger than the car. Analyzing this vulgar nature of the new paintings, Graham-Dixon argues that “[Guston] wanted to create pictures that would speak as vividly as possible to as many people as possible, and that no one would require a doctorate in art theory to appreciate it.”11 In other words, Guston made his artwork timeless by freeing himself from what he saw as the elitist nature of Abstract Expressionism. While the mid-twentieth century formalist art theories that championed abstract form would fall out of favor and be dismantled by poststructuralist critique, Guston’s painterly narration of social realities continues to remain relevant. His work reveals a persisting “acute social conscience,” a quality that curators Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi claim is an essential feature of contemporary art in the twenty-first century.12 In this way, his late 1960s and early 1970s work shares much in common with artists today who grapple with the social and political upheaval that surrounds us.
Guston was aware, however, that fully committing to his caricatures would run the risk of returning to “overtly political” artwork.13 Thus, as Graham-Dixon argues, Guston made sure to “maintain a cordon sanitaire between his work as a caricaturist … and the art for which he wished to be remembered.”14 That is, the artist found his artwork to be the most effective when making a commentary from a distance – which he achieved by incorporating a layer of ambiguity into his paintings.
This added component of complexity can be seen through the recurring Klan iconography present in the new paintings. In contrast to when the hoods were first used, in Drawings for Conspirators (1930, figure 5), the figures at the Marlborough exhibition did not directly represent Klan members. Guston said as much in 1979 while discussing the iconography: “In the new series of hoods, my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me … what would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot.”15 A shift in the visual depiction of the hoods accompanied this change in their function. Compared to his earlier works such as Drawings for Conspirators, where the figures represent Klan members with judicious realism, the newer hoods are rendered with a level of crudeness that makes them virtually indistinguishable from “plumped pillows.” Further elaborating on his creative process, Guston has said that he “felt like a movie director [and] wanted to tell stories.”16 Therefore, in a literal sense, the hoods play the role of villains in Guston’s movie. Figuratively, however, they are multifaceted motifs with several interpretations.
In many frames, the hooded figures assume the role of gangsters. In Dawn (1970), the sun sets in the background while two blood-stained hoods cruise along the deserted city looking for trouble (figure 6). The cluster of legs that protrude from their car resemble those of the victims in Bad Times. Interestingly, the hoods not only assume the role of gangsters but also of creatives, as seen in The Studio (1969, figure 7). What could this, as Storr eloquently put, “deeply troubling conflation of polar opposites” possibly represent?17 Just as a good movie has numerous storylines that run parallel to one another, Guston’s artwork has various interpretations. To quote Graham-Dixon, “enigmatic works of art… tend to be rather more durable than those which readily succumb to definitive explanation.”18
Guston produced his figurative paintings as his country underwent a period of social strife, particularly marked by the violent riots protesting police brutality and the heightened disaster of the Vietnam War. As the atrocities unfolded around him, Guston grew increasingly frustrated with American Abstraction, believing that the movement had turned a blind eye to the widespread sufferings. This growing dissatisfaction was apparent when the artist furiously wrote in 1970: “American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be.”19 In this context, the artwork’s depiction of the hoods as both criminals and creatives indicate the art world’s complicity with social atrocities. The Studio suggests this culpability, where beneath a lifted curtain, a hooded artist is caught working on a self-portrait. The comically enormous red hand, along with the splattered blood stains across the hood, signifies the role abstract artists played in perpetuating violence in society by overlooking it. Additionally, the hood painting, a self-portrait, symbolizes the kind of artistic self-absorption that Guston grew to loathe.
Guston’s social critique did not exclude himself or those who shared his political beliefs. The red-handed blood-splattered hooded figure in The Studio can also be interpreted as an embodiment of the artist’s own guilt. After all, it was the left-wing Democratic Party, under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, that escalated the conflict in Vietnam. Importantly, as Storr argues, the “groundwork for [Guston’s] disillusionment” with the Left was laid several decades before.20 After spending the early 1930s creating pro-communist paintings such as The Struggle Against War and Terrorism (1935), the artist had unfortunately found himself “on the wrong side of history with all the best intentions,” when Joseph Stalin’s communist Soviet Union collaborated with Adolf Hitler’s fascist Germany in 1939.21 In this way, Guston’s unpredictable world – where seemingly unintelligent bandits commit mass murders, only to return home and paint – is symbolic of the deceit that plagues the real world.
The Klan iconography is only one of the many examples of Guston’s use of ambiguous motifs in his newer figurative work. For example, the mangled limbs in Monument (1976, figure 8), obscure the meaning behind the recurring skeletal legs. In the previously discussed paintings Bad Times and Dawn, where the limbs were accompanied by hooded antagonists, the motif provoked thoughts of the helpless casualties of police brutality or warfare. The title and content of Monument, however, suggest a much more personal significance behind the imagery. Indeed, the recurrence of the angular legs could also represent the artist coping with the trauma of losing his beloved brother, who died after his legs were mangled in a freak car accident.
Due to such recurring ambiguous motifs, the paintings do not readily succumb to a particular explanation while consistently inviting the audience to reflect on the themes of violence and culpability. By centering his later figurative paintings around their own narrative, Guston prevents the interpretation of his artwork from being bound to the late sixties’ social strife present in American society. As Graham-Dixon argues, Guston creates “a parallel world remote from and yet capable of commentating on the real one.”22 In this way, the artist makes his artwork universal: enabling the viewers to connect the paintings with their own experiences of inhumanity. Importantly, this universality allows the paintings, to borrow an idea from art historian Richard Meyer, “[to] become newly relevant to later works and social-historical contexts” over time.23 Indeed, Guston’s figurative work is frighteningly representative of the brutality that persists in the world. For example, the skeletal legs in Bad Times now disturbingly resemble George Floyd’s murder in 2020, where he was pinned flat to the ground and strangled to death by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Additionally, the toy-like squarish vehicles that the hoodlums use to cruise the deserted cities in City Limits and Dawn now seem to mock the armored police vehicles that patrolled the protestors during the aftermath of Floyd’s murder (figure 9). Lastly, the hooded hooligans carrying out ordinary activities such as smoking and conversing against the background of the terrorized city in Open Window II (1969) invites viewers to reflect on their culpability as passive individuals proceeding with their day-to-day activities as the world brims with chaos (figure 10). As long as such themes of brutality and accountability persist in society, Guston’s paintings will remain as relevant as they were in the past.
Reflecting on the artistic dilemma that placed him at an impasse with his abstract work in the late sixties, Guston retrospectively reflected in 1977: “I thought there must be some way I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying … I wanted to be complete again as I was when I was a kid.”24 The answer to his crisis – the road to creative fulfillment – was to create a parallel world that combined myth and reality: a fictitious world that could produce acute criticism of American society in the late sixties. Unfortunately, the terrorizing police and treacherous politicians that plagued the country in the past continue to torment the present. Consequently, Guston’s narrative work satirizing the themes of violence, deceit, and unaccountability remains everlasting – provoking its audience to consider their response to the persistence of inhumanity.
1Philip Guston quoted in Robert Storr, Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2020), 110.
2Robert Hughes, “Art: Ku Klux Komix,” Time, November 9, 1970, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/ article/0,33009,943281,00.html.
3Jules Langsner quoted in Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 283.
4Harold Rosenberg, “Liberation from Detachment,” in The De-Definition of Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 140.
5Rosenburg, “Liberation from Detachment,” 140.
6Andrew Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds: The Later Paintings of Philip Guston,” in Philip Guston Retrospective, ed. Michael Auping (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 56.
7Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 113.
8Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 53.
9Retrieved from Harold Rosenberg, “Liberation from Detachment,” in The De-Definition of Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 132.
10Richard Perloff, “Four Students Were Killed in Ohio. America Was Never the Same,” New York Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/kent-state-shooting-protest.html.
11Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 61.
12Kyung An and Jessica Cerasi, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2017), 19.
13In the 1970s, Philip Guston vented his political frustrations through a series of satirical drawings of Richard Nixon. These illustrations were posthumously published under the title Poor Richard and give an idea of what “fully committing” to his caricatures looked like.
14Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 57.
15Philip Guston quoted in Robert Slifkin, Out of Time (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 109.
16Philip Guston quoted in Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 113.
17Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 122.
18Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 57.
19Philip Guston quoted in Graham Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 54.
20Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 132.
21Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 132.
22Graham-Dixon, “A Maker of Worlds,” 60.
23Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), 17.
24Philip Guston quoted in Storr, A Life Spent Painting, 110.
List of Figures
Unable to reproduce images due to copyright.
Figure 1: Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish, The Struggle Against War and Terrorism, 1935. Fresco (reduced-scale reproduction). Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts.
Figure 2: Philip Guston, Painting, 1954. Oil on canvas, 63 ¼ x 60 ⅛ in. (161 x 153 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/78383.
Figure 3: Philip Guston, City Limits, 1969. Oil on canvas, 77 x 103 in. (195 x 262 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79541.
Figure 4: Philip Guston, Bad Times, 1970. Oil on canvas, 72 x 114 in. (183 x 290 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting by Robert Storr, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2020, page 126.
Figure 5: Philip Guston, Drawings for Conspirators, 1930. Graphite, ink, colored pencil, and crayon on paper, 22 ½ x 14 ½ in. (57 x 37 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: Philip Guston Retrospective by Michael Auping, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003, plate 1.
Figure 6: Philip Guston, Dawn, 1970. Oil on canvas, 67 ¼ x 108 in (171 x 274 cm). Private collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: Out of Time by Robert Slifkin, California: University of California Press, 2013, plate 16.
Figure 7: Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969. Oil on canvas, 48 x 42 in. (122 x 107 cm). Private collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: https://www.vip-hauserwirth.com/works/gusto79035-2/.
Figure 8: Philip Guston, Monument, 1976. Oil on canvas, 80 x 110 in. (203 x 279 cm). Tate
Modern. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guston-monument-t05870.
Figure 9: Ricardo Arduengo, “Miami police officer patrols protestors in armored vehicle,”
National Public Radio, June 1, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/866472832/violence
escalates-as-protests-over-george-floyd-death-continue. Direct link to image.
Figure 10: Philip Guston, Open Window II, 1969. Oil on panel, 32 x 40 in. (81 x 102 cm). Private
collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Image from: https://www.vip-hauserwirth.com/works/gusto109950/.
Bibliography
An, Kyung and Jessica Cerasi. Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? New York: Thames and Hudson, 2017.
Graham-Dixon, Andrew. “A Maker of Worlds: The Later Paintings of Philip Guston.” In Philip Guston Retrospective, edited by Michael Auping, 53-63. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Hughes, Robert. “Art: Ku Klux Komix.” Time, November 9, 1970, https://content.time.com/time /subscriber/article/0,33009,943281,00.html.
Meyer, Richard. What Was Contemporary Art? Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
Perloff, Richard. “Four Students Were Killed in Ohio. America Was Never the Same.” New York Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/kent-state-shooting protest.html.
Rosenburg, Harold. “Liberation from Detachment.” In The De-Definition of Art, 132-140. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Slifkin, Robert. Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013.
Vignesh Somjit is a rising junior from Bangalore, India majoring in Economics and Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. He would like to thank his WR151 professor, Dr. Caitlin Dalton, for her unique approach to teaching and for her constant support throughout the process of writing the essay.