Philip Guston, painter of brutality

Paris. Philip Guston (1913, Montreal, Canada – 1980, Woodstock, New York State) remains little-known in France. No wonder: even in the United States, where he is nevertheless linked to abstract expressionism, he does not enjoy the same status as Pollock, Rothko or De Kooning. Worse, from the 1970s, he returned to figuration. The 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery (New York) provoked a virulent reaction: some art critics went so far as to describe him as a “traitor to modernity”. We had to wait a decade and the advent of postmodernity for his work to finally be recognized for its true value.

But already in 1945, in New York, on the occasion of his first exhibition, the painter was accused by Pollock of practicing too traditional painting. This criticism reflects the gap between the beginnings of American abstraction and Guston’s counter-current approach.

In reality, nothing predestined the artist to abstraction. From his youth, his painting was in a figurative – even militant – vein. Barely having completed his artistic training, he became involved in the fight against racism in the South of the United States and exhibited a painting in support of young black people accused of the rape of two young white girls. At the same time, he attended the John Reed Club, a Marxist-inspired circle. So it’s hardly surprising that he would travel to Mexico to see the groundbreaking mural by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This learning will be valuable to him for the mural works carried out as part of the Federal Art Project (1935-1942), a program set up to support artists during the Great Depression. In short, his work is fully in keeping with his time.

The Picasso Museum exhibition presents some works from this period, undoubtedly one of the least significant in Guston’s career. The painter then seems to be inspired by Max Beckmann and De Chirico as well as by Giotto or Piero della Francesca. A strange canvas like Mother and Child (c. 1930) clearly evokes both De Chirico and Picassoian neoclassicism. Elsewhere, in Gladiators (1940), the tangled figures recall the style of Beckmann.

Abstract Expressionism

In 1947, Guston moved to New York and met his American contemporaries – William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still. He then embarked on the path of abstract expressionism: free gestures, bursts of color, absence of subject and narration. His style, influenced by Eastern thought, is less energetic than the jolting rhythm of Pollock, but more dynamic than the colored curtains of Rothko. We even mention about him a “abstract impressionism”. The blue and floating shapes of White Painting II (1952) provide a good illustration of this.

Although Guston did not exert the same influence on the younger generation as De Kooning or Pollock, he nonetheless remains one of the major figures of American abstraction. How then can we explain this reversal that art history, fond of spectacular ruptures, places in 1970? In reality, it is less a rupture than an evolution, the main factor of which lies outside the strictly artistic field. Guston was deeply affected by images of concentration camps, then by the Vietnam War, which ravaged American society and plunged him into a deep depression. On this subject, he declares: “There was the war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man was I, capable of reading magazines while sitting at home, throwing frustrated tantrums about everything, and then going to the studio to match a red to a blue? »

Full of this feeling of powerlessness, Guston produced satirical drawings, ridiculing and virulently denouncing the government of Richard Nixon (1971). But it is above all in his painting, dark and threatening, that this diffuse anxiety is expressed. Often, it represents figures from the Ku Klux Klan, decked out in their famous hoods. (hoods), like coming out of a grotesque and nightmarish masked ball. For the artist, it is about examining Evil at its origins (Riding Around1969).

Even more intriguing are the arbitrary piles of familiar and disproportionate objects – clocks, cigarettes, light bulbs – sometimes accompanied by a giant eye (Landscape Studio1975). Roughly traced, these “things”, these embedded shapes, even embedded in each other, compose chaotic collages which express the artist’s existential unease. In this world of disturbing strangeness, an incongruous object constantly reappears: shoes with studded soles, close to the shape of a horseshoe (The Street1977, [voir ill.]). Do they echo the images of the Nazi extermination camps which shocked the artist? Are they a metonymic representation of the assassins who wore them? Whatever the case, the power of this painting, inseparable from its brutality, relates to the theater of ordinary cruelty.