Word: guston
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...Fogg revisits the work that shocked the art world in 1970 with an exhibition of Philip Guston's (gasp!) figurative paintings
When I first saw Philip Guston's delightfully cartoonish paintings as a kid-that is, the paintings he made during and after the 1970s, the ones he is most remembered for-I thought, quite succinctly, "Cute!" At the time, it seemed to me that Guston's motley crew of regular characters-pointy, cone-headed creatures with endearing toaster-slit eyes, big cycloptic heads, crudely drawn shoes and other everyday paraphernalia-operated in and seemed privy to a very special world, impervious to the scrutiny of cynical adult types. The muteness of these things held a sort of infinite communicability...
Alas, childhood's innocence was bound to end sometime, and, as a mature visitor to the Fogg's exhibit Philip Guston: A New Alphabet (and new devotee of museum wall-text and peripheral literature), I was taken aback to discover that Guston's coneheads are, in fact, Ku Klux Klan members, that the cycloptic heads (not shown in this exhibition) are representations of a bedridden Guston himself, that the fairy-tale sphinx of "Nile" (1977) is an ailing wife. Symbolic, after all. But, as Guston reminisces in the excellent film documentary of his career, A Life Lived (1980), on view...
...Alphabet demonstrates, Guston struggled throughout the 1960s to reconcile his growing desire for concrete figuration with his already accomplished style of abstract expressionism. As a respected contemporary of such American masters as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he had won numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant and the prestigious Prix de Rome. Still, something was missing; abstraction was increasingly alien and even boring to him. On his gray canvases of the 1960s, amorphous black head-shapes began to appear, laboring to push, as it were, out of the ether behind them. Then...
...Guston himself provided a fascinating metaphor for his mid-career transformation: "I felt like an explorer who almost got to the top of Mt. Everest and somehow stopped just short and remembered and thought, 'Well, perhaps, maybe I forgot some gear,' you know, 'I forgot some equipment.' I took some side paths that looked exciting, full of possibilities. What equipment did I lack? It was a stronger contact with the thickness of things." But abandoning the summit of Mt. Everest in search of new equipment proved a bold move indeed. Completely renouncing non-figurative art at a time when...