Karen Lang, Lena Fritsch

Ashmolean Museum Publications

• 9781910807408

• PB

• Size: 6.25 in x 8.75 in
  Pages: 56

• Illustrations: 35 color, 2 b&w

Philip Guston (1913 - 1980) was a painter, printmaker, muralist, draftsman. He created a 'discomfort zone.' One has a direct visceral reaction to his hooded figure with cigar, to Nixon's nose, to his "Street Scene", to his "Bombardment." He believed "the right to disobedience was a political as well as an artistic right -- whatever the cost to personal glory or understanding by the public," writes Karen Lang, co-author of this publication.

In 56 packed pages, the focus here is on drawing and the literature that informed Guston's passionate life and work -- evidence that "art should bear witness" -- how with ink, paint and crayons he fought against anti-Semitism, racism, white supremacy, totalitarianism in post-World War 11 America; and how it changed with the times -- through the social unrest of the '60's, the Nixon era -- art which had at first been figurative, then became abstract, then his particular form of figuration. No mere political commentator. The later works in particular have influenced generations of artists and the public with their jumbles of shoes, bottles, bare bulbs, bloodshot eyeballs, and cigar-smoking Klansmen. (A blockbuster traveling Guston show during the final period of the Trump presidency was postponed due to both Covid and the controversial nature of his art. The updated schedule is at the end of this information sheet.)

The show that did happen was at Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum. Co-curators Karen Lang and Lena Fritch focus on Guston's responses to art by Goya, Tiepolo and others -- their interpretations of events, often not unlike our own. Guston found visual modes and the metaphors that lived within his subjects. Examples; His riveting "Punchinello Drawing" is paired with de Chirico as both artists penetrate the real vs. the enigmatic. With "St Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow" (Masaccio) is Guston's hooded figure (done when the artist was only 17). Sometimes, wrote Lang, "meanings are open-ended" -- the painting vocabulary raw but always direct.

Guston drew incessantly from age 12. Philip Goldstein had changed his name in 1935 when he moved to New York because of anti-Semitism. After producing award-winning murals in a 'realist' style for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s and early 1940s, the artist embraced Abstract Expressionism. Following a number of different stylistic changes, the 1960s' upheavals made him question the relevance of gestural abstraction, and his drawing explored the new figuration for which he is best known. In response to the Vietnam War, the work intensified to address universal issues.

Guston's overall productive output was driven by a desire to unify the story and the plastic structure of his art in response to changing political and social landscapes. Thus, he had careened from early Social Realist figuration to Abstract Expressionism and finally to the darkly humorous Neo-Expressionism that earned him the enmity of his contemporaries and the passionate embrace of younger artists. No mere political commentator, the work has a sense of unease rooted in an awareness of his own and society’s complicity in evil.

Schedule for"Philip Guston Now": the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 1-September 11, 2022; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 23, 2022-January 15, 2023, National Gallery of Art, February 26-August 27, 2023, and Tate Modern, October 3, 2023-February 4, 2024

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