ADVANCING MASKED
In the editorial of the November 2020 issue, I touched briefly on the Philip Guston (1913-1980) affair that recently shook the art world. Four American and British museums, and major ones at that (the National Gallery in Washington, the Museums of Fine Arts of Houston and Boston, theTate Modern in London), had joined forces to organise a retrospective of the artist’s work, initially scheduled to begin in June 2020, and then in 2021 for health reasons. But at the end of September a joint press release postponed the project for four years, fearing that in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement having agitated the United States for several months, the hooded figures painted by Guston in the early 1970s might be misinterpreted. Hence the many reactions outraged by this announcement, because Guston would be “punished”, whereas he was precisely denouncing racism—he who, as a Jew exiled from Eastern Europe to California, whose family had fled the pogroms, had seen the Ku Klux Klan at work very early on. Nevertheless, it is argued that the hood issue is much more complicated than it seems. It isn’t just a question of anti-racism. If Guston is, in my opinion, one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, it is because he concentrates in his work all the “contradictions” of the century. He began his career as a figurative painter (hooded figures already appear in paintings of the 1930s and in the fresco he did in Morelia, Mexico, with Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner), then he became an abstract painter and, at the very end of the 1960s, an irrepressible desire for images made a comeback: the last decade of the 1970s saw him paint his most famous paintings. There is no doubt that the social uprisings of the 1960s played a major part in this figurative resurgence. In 1970 an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery had crystallized this radical change. It was panned by the New York Times critic Hilton Kramer in a still celebrated article entitled ‘A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum’. Guston, a brilliant exponent of Abstract Expressionism, was somehow blamed for betraying its precepts in these “cartoonesque” paintings. Moreover, Kramer argued that Guston, who had come late to the New York School movement, had behaved more like a “colonizer” than a “pioneer”. The hooded figures in his paintings depict Catholic penitents as seen in Spanish or Mexican processions, and they deride members of the Ku Klux Klan. But Guston never hid the fact that it was also a self-portrait: that of an artist who, filled with images, lived for several years in the clothes of an abstract painter. Of course, he truly “believed” in abstraction—his paintings of the 1950s and 1960s weren’t painted with feet dragging—but there came a time when the world called him back, and the modernist purity of the ivory tower was no longer bearable.
JEWISHNESS
In recent years Gustonian studies have focused a lot on his literary culture and the way it permeated his painting. We know what his relationship was with the young Philip Roth, who made Guston (without naming him, of course) the main character in his novel The Ghost Writer (1979-81). We know that the poems of T. S. Eliot and Clark Coolidge nourished the artist, but above all we know that Guston read the stories of Isaac Babel, a Jew enlisted in the Red Army at the end of the First World War and forced to conceal his identity. We will soon devote an article in artpress to the painter Emanuel Proweller, who also oscillated between figuration and abstraction, and whose life was a novel; before settling in France and painting the paintings that too few people know, he was born a Jew and lived in Poland, spending part of the Second World War in hiding among Germans. Aharon Appelfeld tells quite similar stories about the same period. Many Jews hid their deepest nature in order to survive. It is no secret that after the war and the discovery of the Shoah, American Jews, especially artists, thought a lot about their Jewishness. Guston’s figures are also that, and not just a denunciation of racism or a stance against an artistic ideology. In this world it is believed that a message must state one idea and one idea only if it is to be understood; while it should, on the contrary, elevate the debate. But museums, it seems, don’t escape the great levelling down. However, great painting is never unequivocal. The public is clever enough to understand it if properly explained. No need of a postponement of four years, and a text 4982 signs long is enough. Here is the proof. A calendar coincidence: Robert Storr, already the author of a book devoted to Guston in 1983 at Abbeville Press, published this autumn the reference monograph on the artist (1). In it we learn many things, in particular about the biography (his father was a rubbish collector) and the years of the painter’s training in California. This is the book to have on Guston, along with a few others, such as Night Studio by Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter. According to the latest news, a press release from the AICA (International Association of Art Critics), dated November 11th, which had circulated a protest petition against the decision of the museums, informed potential signatories that in the meantime an agreement had been reached between the Guston Foundation and the museums. As a result, the first leg of the Guston tour would be held in Boston in 2022. So all is going well in the best of all worlds.
(1) Philip Guston, A Life Spent Painting,
Laurence King Publishing, 348 p., £60.