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A Critical Study of Philip Guston

University of California Press

One could write a history of art as a history of temperaments, but it would be as rigid and exclusive as a history of style alone, or of political epochs. Some temperaments, as revealed in works of art, have more or less in common, but art itself shuns commonality: while the scientist may seek the phenomenon that repeats itself, the artist seeks the exception. There are some temperaments that can be defined in terms of the questions they pose. These questions may well have been hovering in the human psyche for centuries, and they recur in the fugue of existence. Such questions are the special province of the arts.

"In the anti-historical position, each artist ishimself."1 In one of his ruminations, Guston confidently maintains the singularity that marks the artists he has enshrined. But, in another, he challenges the notion of "himself" and expatiates on the relationships that bind the family of artists he admires throughout history. He is, as almost all writers on his work have recognized, a man of dialogue. His work is clearly cyclical. His painting tone alternates, now caressing, now strident. His tastes veer from the sublime equilibrium of certain fifteenth-century masters to the dark reveries of the Romantics. Irreconcilables are the staff of his life.

Guston's reflexive dialecticism is well known to those who have

followed him over the years. They have learned to be comfortable with shifts in conversation from one position to another which, in the long dialogue of his life's work, are finally not inconsistent. Others may wonder at the dualities: the calm Elysian aspiration in the early figurative paintings and the abstractions of the early 1950s juxtaposed with the eruptive abstractions of the early 1960s and the works of the 1970s. They might read a balance sheet of remarks by Guston as proof of his ambivalence. But it would be a false reading. The very basis of his art is the holding in balance of seeming antitheses.

Guston has, as he said of his friend Bradley Walker Tomlin, "a tensile-and at times precarious-balance that covers an anguished sense of alternatives."2 He can long for experiences "more remote than I know" and dally in the regions of near-mysticism, and he can return purposively to the simplest experiences, curtly replying to his interlocutors when asked about his work, "What do I do? I eat. I drink from a cup."3 He can exult in the remoteness of Piero della Francesca's oeuvre: "Piero-you don't want to touch it"; he can relish Rembrandt, "all flesh and paint quality." He offers abstract aphorisms such as "doubt is the sharp awareness of the validity of alternatives,"4 but he also answers his own question "What am I working with?" wryly: "It's only colored dirt."5 He tells an interviewer in 1965 that he wants to end with something "that will baffle me for some time,"6 and a few months later tells the same writer, "I am only interested in the weight of the familiar." He makes a public statement that "there is something ridiculous and miserly in the myths we inherit from abstract art-that painting is autonomous, pure and for itself. But painting is 'impure.' It is the adjustments of impurities which forces painting's continuity."7 On the other hand, in a taped interview, he states flatly: "I don't believe in alternatives."8 Yet, alternatives juxtaposed, pondered, worried, turned, and finally neutralized in the finished work, which temporarily dissolves them, are Guston's most familiar companions. They are what he thinks and how he thinks. Like Woyzeck, the creature of B|chner, he can exclaim:

The human being! A lot can happen.-Nice weather, Captain. Such a pretty, solid gray sky. Do you see? One is tempted to drive a log into it and hang oneself thereon, just because of the little hyphen between yes, and yes again-and no. Captain, yes and no? Is the yes to blame for the no, or the no for the yes? Let me think it over.9

Born in 1913, the year of the Armory Show, Guston inherited the

conflicts inherent in modern art. His has been an epoch bedeviled by dialectics. Once Hegelianism had swept the Western world, dialecticism became the habitual mode of thinking. The whole history of modern art could be boxed rather neatly in dialectical sections, and many of its protagonists have consciously adopted the modern method of rhetorical combat. One movement contravened another, one leader gave way to the next, one single purpose deposed another single purpose, and always the anticipated synthesis was held in abeyance. A man of Guston's generation could not avoid the lines of battle, where the rallying cry was always: You must take a position. And it had to be an immediate and definite position before the ground gave way.

But for a man with a sense of the full measure of human experience and an affection for what remains of the past-the works of man's imagination-the position could only be provisional. Guston has consistently maintained an eccentric position-eccentric to the mores of his culture; eccentric to the temporary enthusiasms of the art world; eccentric to, but not alienated from, the given problems of modern art.

Among the numerous dilemmas spawned by the modern tradition are the basic questions: What, after all, is a painting and who is the artist? In the early phases of modern art when Symbolism prevailed, the idea was that a painting, like a poem, was a matter of essences. An image. Something whose value resided in its memorability, its aura, its synthesis of sensations that came together in the mind of the beholder somewhere outside of its actual physical facture. Not a thing, an image.

Such idealism met its dialectical response in realism, which maintained just as positively that a painting was not so much an image or idea as an object. Realists made things, not essences. Whether they were Cubist paintings or abstract paintings, they were to be regarded as concrete entities in a world of things. The clash of the Symbolist and realist views brought a problem peculiar to the twentieth century. In the past it had been taken for granted that analogy was the primary mode of perception in the arts. Recognition sprang from the just analogy, and paint was in the service of memory and sensibility. A few strokes and voil` asparagus-not real asparagus but an analogy for asparagus. However, when painting became autonomous, a thing among other things, the given system of analogies was challenged. If the canvas was a thing in itself, complete, concrete, and not virtual, the dimension of analogy either had to be purged, or adjusted. Some artists simply sidestepped, while others attempted to create a new

kind of analogy, a psychological one that was not immediately apparent. But all were caught in the toils of paradox. The art of painting in the twentieth century has careened wildly between extremes that make the earnest quarrels in the last century between the Ingres and Delacroix camps seem mild by comparison.

At one time or another Guston has met with all the contradictions in the modern tradition. Like most complex artists, he has had several relationships with his time, and those not always exclusive. Yet certain of the inherited problems in his case have found more or less consistent answers, as for instance in the problem of content. Can matter alone carry expressive meaning? He says no. It is not enough to make a mark on a canvas, even if it creates radiant light or rhythmic sequence. Although he experiments constantly, his...