By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, Reporter: Philip Guston's beginnings as an artist were sad and spartan. He was born into a struggling family of Russian immigrants. And when he was 10 years old, Guston found his father's body after he'd hanged himself.
Michael Auping, Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: At that time, Guston retreated in a way from society and even from the family. And there was a large closet in the family house and Guston would go there and he would draw.
Sprague: Michael Auping, the chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, says Guston's self-taught roots gave rise to his five decade career, which is now on display at the Modern in the first-ever complete retrospective of the artist's work. A contemporary and friend of Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, Guston is perhaps best known for his cartoonish paintings of the 1970's. But Michael Shapiro, who directs the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, says the Modern's retrospective delves deeper.
Michael Shapiro, High Museum of Art, Atlanta: I think what this exhibition does is enables us to see the scope of the whole story, and provides really the entire drama of his career. As a professor once told me, people don't change, they develop, so if you want to know about Philip Guston's development, you really have to begin in the 30's and 40's.
Sprague: Guston began pursuing his art career full time around 1930 after he and classmate Jackson Pollack were expelled from their California high school. Like many young artists of the depression-era, Guston embraced social realism, painting small canvases and giant murals that exalted progressive politics. But Michael Auping says World War II changed that. Confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, Guston believed he had to go a step beyond figurative painting to convey his emotions.
Auping: It's almost like, the issue of the Holocaust, he didn't feel like he really could depict that in an illustrational way, he had to do it in an abstract way.
Sprague: One of Guston's first purely abstract paintings is called "The Tormentors." It's from 1948 and is based on his earlier painting, "Porch No. 2," which was inspired by a photograph of children from the Holocaust. "The Tormentors" is basically the same scene as "Porch," but nothing in it is recognizable.
Auping: You're seeing fragments of shoes that are the shoes and the soles of shoes of children in "Porch," but these things have been pulled apart and placed in slightly different positions so that without their context, they appear abstract, but when you see the paintings close together like this, you can see that "The Tormentors" is an echo of "Porch."
Sprague: The next two decades marked a second phase of Guston's career. They were spent almost entirely producing abstract expressionist paintings, many of them large scale in vivid reds and pinks.
Auping: This is a room, I think, that everyone will love.
Sprague: The biggest room at the Modern's exhibition features nine of these works, which were widely embraced by art critics and collectors.
Auping: And what you see in the evolution of this room is some very beautiful fields of color that begin to coalesce almost like large blood clots in the center of the picture and you begin to see things that you'd swear are figurative, but you can't exactly describe where the figure is in the painting.
Sprague: Unlike other abstract expressionists, such as his old friend Jackson Pollack, Guston didn't believe anything was purely abstract. He tried to combine figuration, or the painting of things, with abstraction, or the painting of ideas. This proved frustrating because the public sometimes just saw the decorative value of his work.
Bill Berkson, Friend of Philip Guston: Collectors would be coming into his gallery saying, "Haven't you got any more of those pink paintings?" and he didn't want to hear that. He wanted to move on.
Sprague: Bill Berkson was a poet, critic, and friend of Guston's. He remembers Guston leaving New York City in the mid-1960's for the solitude of Woodstock, New York, where he shrugged off abstract expressionism. Instead, he began drawing recognizable forms again: shoes, buildings, masks. And in 1970, Guston unveiled his new work and the third phase of his career, to widespread criticism. Professor Randall Griffin teaches modern art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Randall Griffin, Art Professor, Southern Methodist University: For many viewers who see Guston, when they go to the Modern, for the first time, they're going to find his work repulsive, disturbing, too crude-looking for their taste.
Sprague: The art world was partly offended by Guston's divorce from abstract expressionism. But critics also responded to what replaced it. Many of Guston's canvases featured cartoonish figures wearing white hoods, like the Ku Klux Klan, doing every day tasks such as driving or smoking. These figures had appeared in the drawings of Guston's youth, when the Klan was a powerful political force in Los Angeles. But in 1970, audiences were aghast. Again, Michael Auping.
Auping: They didn't understand. Were they political paintings? Did he believe in the Ku Klux Klan? Did he hate the KKK? Were they some form of bizarre Pop art? What were they?
Sprague: Auping believes Guston was making a broader statement that people should take off the masks they wear in their daily lives and confront their own evils. And soon, Guston was painting himself in place of the masked figures. They are intimate, self-critical works, yet they still seem cartoonish. Again, Bill Berkson.
Berkson: He never painted so many paintings as he did once he got into this mode of his last 10 or 12 years. With this imagery, he seemed so excited to find out what he could paint next.
Sprague: Guston continued to paint right up until his death in 1980. But because he was so honest, and pursued his own creative impulse regardless of the financial cost, he is often called "the painter's painter" today. Michael Auping says in the four years he worked on organizing the retrospective, not a week passed without a phone call or email from a working artist inquiring about the show. And while SMU's Randall Griffin says Guston's paintings are sometimes hard to understand, he also says they'll grow on you.
Griffin: The reason Guston's work will live on in my mind is because it has this edge to it. It's not something facile. There's a kind of rawness. But he's very deliberate. He's sophisticated. So you have the wonderful mix of this kind of crudeness and wonderful sophistication in his work.
Sprague: The Philip Guston retrospective continues at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through June 8th. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
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