Thirty-three years after his controversial show at The Marlborough Galleries in New York, and 23 years after his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Philip Guston is no longer scorned as a traitor to abstract expressionist ideals and an embarrassment to art world gravitas. Many artists today, free from the formalist dogma of the 50's and 60's, acclaim him as a hero. According to the eye of the beholder, he is an exemplar of creative integrity; a precursor of 80's Neo-Expressionism, Bad Painting and perhaps postmodernism; a searching intellect whose virtuosity and versatility make him a kind of American Picasso; or a romantic and historic figure from the storied pre-Pop past.

It's all good. Many who visit the current touring retrospective will come away inspired, excited -- and confused. Artist and man, Guston is larger than life, a character straight from the 19th-century Russian novels he loved: complex, passionate, witty, irascible, sensitive, tortured, unpredictable.

The title for this article is appropriately contradictory and Gustonian. "Mystery and Melancholy" refers to Guston's lifelong affinity for Giorgio di Chrico's metaphysical cityscapes, with their endless arcades, Victorian statues, silently puffing locomotives, long shadows, mournful mannequins, Cubist towers, and stopped clocks. "Stumblebum" invokes Hilton Kramer's famous 1970 "New York Times" review, "A Mandarin Pretending To Be A Stumblebum." This short piece can in no way, of course, do him justice; it is a foredoomed attempt to pay homage, undertaken with the appropriate ironic exhilaration and despairing determination.

Mystery

"I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell Stories."

"…unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all -- nor is it even possible."

Essentially self-taught after his expulsion from high school at fifteen, Guston was extraordinarily fortunate in his friendships -- there are too many art world luminaries to mention -- and discerning in his enthusiasms. A voracious reader, he was a brilliant and charismatic conversationalist, holding forth on art, literature and Truth into the wee hours of the morning with artist, poet and writer friends. (Musa Mayer, his daughter, recalls feeling "gorged with the thick pudding of talk that had been so richly studded with images and voices and ideas.") His artistic pantheon claimed Piero, Durer, Rembrandt, Goya and Tiepolo as well as Chirico, Picasso, Leger, Beckmann, Mondrian, "Krazy Kat" cartoonist Herriman, "Bud Fisher of "Mutt and Jeff," and Walt Disney, father of Mickey Mouse. His literary and philosophic pantheon included Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rilke, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Buber, Sartre, and Spinoza.

The paintings and drawings reflect this mostly high-minded eclecticism, with Guston continually assimilating new influences, experimenting, seeking a greater expressivity. To my eye there are five phases: three major styles with transitional periods between. The first style, the social realism of the 30's, melding politics and Cubism: boys playing war in the streets, hooded Klan members preparing nooses. The second style, the pure abstractions of the early 50s: shimmering gray, pink and red mistscapes (dubbed brushy Mondrian or "abstract lyricism" by critics), with thousands of small horizontal and vertical brushstrokes clustering like threatened pelagic fishes. The third style, the late, sinister-cartoon style, derived from Guston's memories of his youthful cartooning; his Goyesque imagination and ready outrage; and his desire to depict his dreams and fantasies, even portraying himself and others grotesquely and comically, as his favorite director Fellini did in his films.

Melancholy

"…when you paint, you have to deal with what you don't know."

"I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image or symbol should be celebrated as a freedom. It is this loss we suffer, this pathos that motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart."

With all these changes in style, what can one conclude about the artist? What's the unity behind the multiplicity? Who's the man behind the masks? In Picasso we feel the force of his personality, the power of his prehensile vision, analytic, subjective, and above all, physical. In Guston, there is another combination: a sometimes crippling sensitivity linked with an indomitable ambition to make great art.

The novelist Philip Roth, "Philip the Writer" in a humorous story Guston wrote about their friendship, described his crony "Philip the Painter" as "wounded." Musa Mayer likens her father's all-night chats with friends to the Russian men's custom of "drinking vodka, brooding, reciting grievances," Razdirat' dushu, to "tear out" or "bare one's soul," (And of course Guston's kvetching with Roth would have produced such literate philippics.) Some of this anxiety is attributable to Guston's personal history. His parents, Rachel and Leib Goldstein, fled Russia to escape the pogroms but found life in America hard. His blacksmith father, despondent at having found only work as a junkman, committed suicide, and the ten-year-old artist discovered his hanged body.

But some of his melancholy was the spirit of the age. Angst or some variant thereof was considered part of the territory in the impossible profession of the modern artist from the Romantics on, until the triumph of new Pop artist paradigm in the 1960's. (Guston quit the Janis Gallery in 1962 over its support of Pop.) Balzac's creation Frenhofer, whose agonized effort to paint a model obliterated all but her foot, was claimed by Cezanne, pointing to himself. Giacometti during his difficult transition out of Surrealism carved human figures down to the size of toothpicks, almost to nothingness; he carried them in a matchbox in his pocket. Late in life the ailing Guston protested his doctor's admonitions: "I'm supposed to lose weight, stop booze, and have no anxieties about life and art. Imagine! I didn't bother explaining to him that my whole life is based on anxiety -- where else does art come from, I ask you?" (Gustatory excess aside, the Austrian expressionist Alfred Kubin had a similar exchange --"Kein angst?!"-- with his doctor a generation before.) The romantic existentialism that Guston typifies carries a high psychic price: continual doubt about everything, including the self. Ours is an absurd universe of golems (clay figures temporarily given life through occult magic) and odradeks (Kafka's cheerful makeshift creatures made up of odds and ends), with no inherent meaning, arbitrary But absurdity breeds comedy as well. Guston joked in a Kafkaesque vein that anyone would choose to see, not a man flying and free, rather a man with two hundred pounds of cement strapped to him hovering two inches off the ground.

Max Beckmann wrote: "Oh, this infinite space! We must constantly fill up the foreground with junk so that we do not have to look at its frightening depth. What would we poor people do, if we could not always come up with some idea, like country, love, art and religion, with which we can again and again cover up that dark hole." Guston was certainly aware of the relatively unimportant role of art in the grand scheme of things, but clung to his "sacred foolishness" as "his only salvation," as Kafka clung to his writing desk, assailing the void with the weapon of art.

Stumblebum

"The idea of evil fascinated me… I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot?"

"So when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything -- and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue. I thought there must be some was I could do something about it. I knew ahead of me a road was laying. A very crude, inchoate road. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid….Wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt."

The unleashed uncouth imagination of Guston's late style projects him into cartoonish Klansmen, comical cyclops heads impassively contemplating their own bad habits and demises, even the mute objects that surround us in daily life. Chirico's oneiric still lives contained these charged objects -- pictures, pastry trays, drafting triangles, fruits, maps, pictures, statues, mannequins -- and revealed them as actors in an obscure and timeless drama shot through with anguish. What Guston added was his own entropic existentialism: nothing is permanent, all is temporary, and contingent -- but also charged with an evanescent beauty. Like Rembrandt, he loved the imperfect and ephemeral. Like Johns he pictured the patient waiting of objects. Guston who drove around Woodstock with Roth enjoying the neglected and castoff detritus of America, its "crapola," found in it a rich vein of comic pathos.

Abstract Expressionism depicted a timeless inner world in which the creator's gestures conjured up universes. The hierarchical representational tradition of subjects and backgrounds, dating from the Renaissance, vanished into either a vortex of paint (Pollock) or a transcendent glowing presence (Rothko). (Guston's works from the period are intermediate, combining the clouds of marks into a field of pulsing energy.) There is no center, only an all-over field of painterly activity. Guston's late works, however, return narrative and characters to the foreground, now depicting a nonhierarchical universe where people and things are equivalent. The disembodied mutely gazing heads (from John the Baptist? Orpheus? from Gericault's studies of executed criminals? from Beckett?), the Klansmen artists indifferently wielding paintbrushes and knouts, the rugs, shoes, pictures, books, ladders, clocks, roller blinds, paint tubes, cigarettes, planks, buildings, trash can lids, and inglorious hairy Disneypede legs tripping over each other-all have emerged from and follow their own paths back to the clay (Guston referred to oil paint as "only colored dirt"). Robert Storr described the late, dark paintings of apocalyptic wastelands thus:

…contrast, heavy and airless. Emphatically earthbound, they instill claustrophobia … barren embankments that press forward like landslides against the picture plane, encroaching upon the viewers' space while seeming to forbid any escape for the figures that languish half-embedded in them. …the primary dramatic tension … is this overwhelming metaphorical weight against which struggle the restless creatures of the artist's imagination, while the primary formal tension is between the physical weight of paint and the anxious activity of the artist's brushwork.

The late work is a synthesis of Guston's early philosophical and political concerns with his mid-career painterly abstraction. There is no choice between abstraction and figuration, style and content; here they merge, despite questions of currency (the polemics of art theorists and art market). Subject matter and purely visual concerns complement and enhance each other, as in the best art of all ages and cultures.

Willem de Kooning famously told Guston in 1970 that his real subject was freedom. Given the bad odor our American shibboleth has taken on lately -- "freedom" is used to sell everything from toilet paper to questionable wars -- a better alternative might be honesty. When Hilton Kramer scoffed at Guston's failure in pretending to be "innocent" or "childlike" he missed that point. Like Picasso's, Guston's was a hard-earned freshness, a sought wholeness, not planned, not plotted.

Hawthorne's story "Earth's Holocaust" describes a gigantic bonfire of vanities on a vast Western plain undertaken by crowds of people "overburdened with an accumulation of wornout trumpery." Coats of arms, decorations and heraldry go first, followed by wine and spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, tobacco, finery, love letters, diplomas, drugs, libraries, artillery, weapons, military standards, swords, axes, guillotines, gallows, marriage certificates, money, ledgers, accounts, books, manuscripts, pamphlets, crosses, surplices, miters, croziers, baptismal fonts, Bibles, "all the weight of dead men's thought, which has hitherto pressed so heavily on the living intellect." A few traditionalists in the crowd murmur protest to no avail, but are finally consoled by a personage of "fearfully dark" complexion, who counsels patience: "It will be the old world yet." What has not perished in the flames is the human heart, "the little yet boundless sphere" that created all the evils.

About DeWitt Cheng

Talk art at the The Water Cooler