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Philip Guston drawings in New York
Robert Zaller
A latter-day Goya,
on a ladder to nowhere
ROBERT ZALLER
The remarkable Los Caprichos exhibit of Goya’s work at Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery coincides with an extraordinary exhibition of Philip Guston drawings at the McKee Gallery in New York, whose run has been extended to January 10. Guston— a Canadian native. a high school classmate of Jackson Pollock and a pioneering figure of the New York School of the 1950s— returned to a figurative style at the end of the ’60s and continued in it until his death in 1980. As Guston himself observed, he never truly abandoned the figure even in his most abstract works; but his return to its open expression— in very real terms, a return of the repressed, both for Guston and for the American art of the time— was (in suitably Expressionist terms) a heroic enterprise.
Guston had never ceased to draw, even during his most abstract phase, and it is in his drawings that we most clearly perceive his return to the figure. The first drawings in the show, all in ink, are themselves abstract. While charged with emotion, they convey the purity of Chinese calligraphy— another form that is simultaneously “abstract” and representative. These give way, by 1960, to a deliberately clunky style in which, on closer inspection, objects appear to be embedded: fragments of a landscape in one, domestic objects (an upended shoe sole, a clock) in another. These latter were to play a crucial role in the deliberately restricted iconography of Guston’s subsequent work. Still, it is almost with shock that the first openly representative drawing in the series appears: the Untitled (Book) of 1968, in which an open book, its words signified by charcoal dots, lies on top of what appears to be a much larger, closed volume.
Book is simple to the point of crudity, yet also uncanny. The same economy of means will serve, in the drawings that follow, to suggest city tenements with their blank windows (likewise signified by dots), the tablets of the law, and tombstones. As the traveler in Guston’s late world will realize, each object is simultaneously itself and an indefinite range of others as well. This is not the principle of symbolism— Guston’s iconography is the very antithesis of the symbol— but of metamorphism, in which the stability required for the primary object to suggest a derivative one is replaced by a dynamism in which an entire spectrum of objects is suggested by the same series of strokes. It is, in fact, abstraction turned inside out, in which an apparent multitude of things replace an apparent absence of them. The effect is uncanny, unsettling, but also exhilarating, and, in a slightly terrifying way, jocular.
These are also the qualities of Goya, though the stylistic means differ. There is a radically Cartesian quality to late Guston, in which, as if the world had been leveled by some awful but untraceable catastrophe, it is necessary to repopulate it, object by object— a world not created but recreated, with pain, labor and groping discovery. The journey to be traversed can most summarily be suggested by comparing Guston’s representation of the hand, the artist-deity’s tool. The first Guston hands are paws; later, they are jokingly gloved, as if recycling the old cartoon styles of the 1930s; at the end, in two untitled drawings from 1980, they are elongated and sensitive, but still cramped: The journey is all but over (Guston knew he had only months to live), but still incomplete.
As in Goya’s grotesque pre-Napoleonic visions (for my comments on those, click here), there is also bitter social commentary in Guston’s post-apocalyptic world, whose human figurations are Klan-hooded hoodlums, drowning faces consisting of little but giant eyeballs, or synecdochic arms and legs that seem to live imperiled lives of their own. No Goya apparition is more startling than these figurations. If Goya’s world appears to totter on the point of savage regression, Guston’s seems to have experienced that regression in full (the two world wars of his own lifetime), and to be clambering back on one of the ubiquitous ladders to nowhere that also inhabit the late works, rung by rung, toward whatever can be imagined to remain.
on a ladder to nowhere
ROBERT ZALLER
The remarkable Los Caprichos exhibit of Goya’s work at Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery coincides with an extraordinary exhibition of Philip Guston drawings at the McKee Gallery in New York, whose run has been extended to January 10. Guston— a Canadian native. a high school classmate of Jackson Pollock and a pioneering figure of the New York School of the 1950s— returned to a figurative style at the end of the ’60s and continued in it until his death in 1980. As Guston himself observed, he never truly abandoned the figure even in his most abstract works; but his return to its open expression— in very real terms, a return of the repressed, both for Guston and for the American art of the time— was (in suitably Expressionist terms) a heroic enterprise.
Guston had never ceased to draw, even during his most abstract phase, and it is in his drawings that we most clearly perceive his return to the figure. The first drawings in the show, all in ink, are themselves abstract. While charged with emotion, they convey the purity of Chinese calligraphy— another form that is simultaneously “abstract” and representative. These give way, by 1960, to a deliberately clunky style in which, on closer inspection, objects appear to be embedded: fragments of a landscape in one, domestic objects (an upended shoe sole, a clock) in another. These latter were to play a crucial role in the deliberately restricted iconography of Guston’s subsequent work. Still, it is almost with shock that the first openly representative drawing in the series appears: the Untitled (Book) of 1968, in which an open book, its words signified by charcoal dots, lies on top of what appears to be a much larger, closed volume.
Book is simple to the point of crudity, yet also uncanny. The same economy of means will serve, in the drawings that follow, to suggest city tenements with their blank windows (likewise signified by dots), the tablets of the law, and tombstones. As the traveler in Guston’s late world will realize, each object is simultaneously itself and an indefinite range of others as well. This is not the principle of symbolism— Guston’s iconography is the very antithesis of the symbol— but of metamorphism, in which the stability required for the primary object to suggest a derivative one is replaced by a dynamism in which an entire spectrum of objects is suggested by the same series of strokes. It is, in fact, abstraction turned inside out, in which an apparent multitude of things replace an apparent absence of them. The effect is uncanny, unsettling, but also exhilarating, and, in a slightly terrifying way, jocular.
These are also the qualities of Goya, though the stylistic means differ. There is a radically Cartesian quality to late Guston, in which, as if the world had been leveled by some awful but untraceable catastrophe, it is necessary to repopulate it, object by object— a world not created but recreated, with pain, labor and groping discovery. The journey to be traversed can most summarily be suggested by comparing Guston’s representation of the hand, the artist-deity’s tool. The first Guston hands are paws; later, they are jokingly gloved, as if recycling the old cartoon styles of the 1930s; at the end, in two untitled drawings from 1980, they are elongated and sensitive, but still cramped: The journey is all but over (Guston knew he had only months to live), but still incomplete.
As in Goya’s grotesque pre-Napoleonic visions (for my comments on those, click here), there is also bitter social commentary in Guston’s post-apocalyptic world, whose human figurations are Klan-hooded hoodlums, drowning faces consisting of little but giant eyeballs, or synecdochic arms and legs that seem to live imperiled lives of their own. No Goya apparition is more startling than these figurations. If Goya’s world appears to totter on the point of savage regression, Guston’s seems to have experienced that regression in full (the two world wars of his own lifetime), and to be clambering back on one of the ubiquitous ladders to nowhere that also inhabit the late works, rung by rung, toward whatever can be imagined to remain.
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