PoN: Philip Guston

Like Diebenkorn, Philip Guston is completely absent from Pictures of Nothing. And like Diebenkorn, Guston gave up abstraction for something else.

I confess: I've never liked Philip Guston's representational paintings. I know, I know: This is a serious character flaw and I should be doomed to sitting in a Thomas Hirschhorn installation, but I just don't. (Related story: The NGA has recently installed a bunch of Gustons it received from the Broida collection.)

But I love Guston's abstractions. (This one is MoMA's 1954 Painting.)One of my favorite installations in recent memory was a roomful of Guston abstractions in the recent Michael Auping-curated Philip Guston retrospective. The room, which I saw at MAMFW, was revelatory on a bunch of levels. It established that Guston developed his palette in the 1950s, and that he stayed remarkably true to it for the rest of his career.

The room also started me thinking of Guston as a pre-perceptualist, a forerunner of Bob Irwin's early light-and-space paintings (and what came later, for that matter), Larry Bell's cubes, etc. Guston was, in fact, included in an early Ferus show and Irwin talked about the impact that had on him in Lawrence Weschler's superb Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees:

I remember one time, for instance, seeing this small Philip Guston hanging next to a large James Brooks. Now, the Brooks was a big painting on every scale: it had five major shapes in it -- a black shape, a reed, a green -- big areas, big shapes, with strong, major value changes, hue changes. Next to it was this small painting, with mute pinks and greys and greens, very subtle. It was one of those funny little Guston kind of scrumbly paintings, a very French kind of painting...

[m]y discovery was that from 100 yards away -- this was just one of those little breakthroughs -- that from this distance of 100 yards, I looked over, and that godd*mned Guston... Now, I'm talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don't like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn't just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum... Well, that godd*mned Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall.

And Irwin goes on about the Guston for several more paragraphs. And he's right. Guston's colors seem to hover and blink on the canvas, coming into and out of focus, kind of like London in Monet, or clouds in Turner. (I can't find any good link-to-able examples, alas.)

But mostly Guston's early abstractions remind me of what the California coast is like early on a foggy morning. Which both Guston and Irwin would have known all about.