Philip Guston came to attention during the Abstract Expressionist movement in the US in the 50’s. Surrounded by the likes of Pollock, Rothko and Kline. The ironic idea that this new free art was exported around the world to fund a cold war, in my opinion, had some effect on Guston.
He retired away from the NY art scene to Woodstock where he began to piece together what would end up being a large volume of work and the themes, styles and objects he tentatively began to assemble within the paintings would repeat until his death in the summer of 1980.
Importantly the new body of work was figurative, Morty Feldman a good friend said, “now Phil, what did you have to go and do that for”. He likened the response to his new work to feeling like he had joined a cult. He retired further, painting at night with glasses of milk and vodka.
Many of these paintings are large 2 x 3m, they depict a world he created, characters, objects, rooms, makeshift weopons, empty bottles and low hanging light bulbs often with pillow-like Klansmen operating amongst them. The Klansmen are rather pathetic, they snoop about streets and stare from windows, they smoke, drink and hit each other with whips, they are uneasy, vacant, detached and lost.
In her book Night Studio, Guston’s daughter Musa recollects being by his bedside in hospital after a heart attack. A psychiatrist sits and after conversation asks Guston about his childhood (he recalls Klansmen walking up and down his street earlier in the book), Guston’s response was, “If I talk about my demons I’m afraid my angels might fly”.
For me he is the greatest painter of the last 100yrs and quite possibly the greatest painter of all time but I hold back for Rembrandt reasons, his legacy about to be further realized, the themes more pertinent than ever before, it’s a shame what has happened here.
