Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the pessimistic vision of the late Philip Guston

Nearly everyone who was concerned with American abstract expressionism--critics, curators, the artists themselves--agreed on one thing: the movement, like its godparent, surrealism, was all about freedom. In Jackson Pollock's drips lay written the unfettered play of the mind, the swift "existential" decisions of the hand. Because it incarnated liberty, some thought, abstract expressionism transcended style. This cherished notion was very much a part of its time, a fixture of the '50s, like James Dean, the beats or the vogue for Camusian outsiders. In later years, it was more honored in the breach than in the observance; nobody can go on reinventing himself forever, and some of the longer-lived survivors like Clyfford Still kept painting the same picture over and over again, while uttering jeremiads against conformity.

One artist in particular, though, did change--and was not thanked for it. He was Philip Guston, whose retrospective of 106 works spanning 50 years from 1930 to 1980 is now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York City.

What Guston did was turn into a figurative painter in his late middle age. This need not have looked bad in itself: the human figure, in various states of smearing and dissection, had long been visible in the work of his friend Willem de Kooning. But the paintings Guston began to make in the late '60s, and first showed in 1970, looked so unlike his established work that they seemed a willful and even crass about-face. Instead of the Gustons the art world knew--abstract paintings with vaporous, knitted surfaces of pearl gray and subtle pinks, like fragments of Monet lily ponds with hints of Turner's clouds and sea fogs--they were, of all unlikely things, political images: fat Ku Kluxers riding around in cars, nooses, stubbled faces in claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms. For several years before that, not much had been seen of Guston's work; he was thought to have run out of steam, and so his new work was treated as a gesture of desperation, an aesthete's efforts to look like a stumblebum. If anyone had suggested in those days that the figurative Gustons would exert a pervasive influence on American art ten years later, the idea would have seemed incredible.

Yet it may have turned out that way. In the intervening decade, there has been a riotous growth of deliberately clumsy, punkish figurative painting in America: paintings that ignore decorum or precision in the interest of a cunningly rude, expressionist-based diction. Quite clearly, Guston is godfather to this manner, and for this reason his work excites more interest among painters under 35 than that of any of his contemporaries. He would never have gained this following had he stayed abstract, and it is sadly ironic that he died last year, at age 66, shortly after the current retrospective opened in San Francisco, but too soon to enjoy the enthusiasm it is stirring in New York.

Need one add that there is no naivete in Guston's figurative work that is not deliberate, and no clumsiness that is not feigned? Between the early and the late '70s the scope of his vision and the resonance of his images deepened steadily; those phalanxes of knobby knees and boots like Uccello horseshoes, those bloodshot cyclopean eyes and gut piles of pink carcasses acquired, despite their comic-strip mannerisms of drawing, a degree of pessimism that verged on the tragic. Guston's Head and Bottle, 1975, with its profile of a face (a self-portrait?) violently compressed into an eye and a chin prickled with a bum's gray stubble, is absurd in a sense; but the conviction with which Guston carries it off is worrisome and angry, full of a Celine-like misery.

Toward the end of his life, Guston was painting the world as a charnel house of gross dreams and irreconcilable conflicts: no satisfaction anywhere, except in the creamy, impasted paint, which remained as lavish as in his abstract paintings. The essential Guston is all there in a work like Entrance, 1979. It is about intrusion and helplessness, the mind's impotence to fend off its demons. A door opens, and in rolls a mass of Guston's standard images--the trampling, dismembered limbs, nasty enough even without the bugs that advance with them across the floor. Then one realizes that the thing is a sly parody of a triumphal procession; its remote ancestors are the Mantegna Triumph of Caesar cartoons at Hampton Court, and, behind them, the tradition of the Roman battle sarcophagus.

Klutzy and learned, embarrassing and quizzical, eloquently obsessed with inarticulacy--such was Guston's art. "Human consciousness moves," he remarked in the mid-'60s, "but it is not a leap: it is one inch. One inch is a small jump, but that jump is everything. You go way out, and then you have to come back--to see if you can move that inch." As the paintings prove, he could.

--By Robert Hughes

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