In the Midst of Things

The 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 and possibility within themselves; above all, they didn't seem symbolic, didn't seem to have the onus of a "deeper meaning." They were just things-things with an emphatic, almost gleeful physicality about them, suggested by thick, confident brushstrokes, black cartoon outlines and often fleshy colors.

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 at the back of A New Alphabet, his turn away from abstract expressionism in the 1970s toward a new sort of figuration was motivated precisely by a desire to get back to "the real," to things as they are, "just things."

As A New 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, in 1970, he unveiled a complete change. Inspired by the banal, ordinary objects in his apartment and studio, Guston began to paint shoes, books, easels, clocks and the like with a confident, almost crude, naivet, reveling in the physical nature of things, of paint and of the act of painting. The ensemble of 27 small paintings in A New Alphabet that together recreate a wall of Guston's Woodstock, N.Y. home circa 1970 neatly represents the range and form of Guston's new vocabulary. Indeed, each painting-of a blank canvas, a nail or coffee mug-constitutes a lexical building block of his radical new language-a language of objects. These are representational units that recur obsessively, in different combinations, in his larger works of later years.

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 non-figurative art was considered the only right thing to do earned Guston brutal criticism, and his pivotal 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery was almost universally reviled. Co-curator Harry Cooper writes, "Philip Guston's exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970 was the art world's last true, unpackaged sensation." Dramatic statements aside, it truly was something of a sensation, and a life-altering event-as Guston recounted in 1980, even long-time friends stopped speaking to him in the aftermath of the fateful show. "The general feeling was, 'Aww Phil, what did you have to go and do that for?'," he recalls evenly.

The vehement disapproval was occasioned not only by the "repulsive" figurative nature of these new paintings, but their frank politics as well. In addition to a deep appreciation for the everyday object, Guston was also profoundly aware of political and social upheaval, wars, famines, epidemics-not simply in his own time but throughout history-and introduced into his unique pictorialism figurative representations of, among other things, the Ku Klux Klan. As a Jewish-born man who changed his name from Goldstein in his twenties and who experienced first-hand the brutality and violence of the Klan, Guston felt acutely the very concrete, often grisly, realities of existence. In paintings such as 1969's "Meeting" and "Riding Round" and 1970's "Three," KKK figures collude in sinister, masked secrecy. In "Riding Round" and "Three," they point, smoke cigars and drive a massive black car; smoke-pipes protrude from industrial buildings in the background, ominously reminiscent of Auschwitz's human ovens. But Guston pokes fun at these self-absorbed, self-indulgent figures too: "fascinated by the idea of evil," as he puts it, he finally exorcises the terror of the KKK by appropriating their hoods, by making them seem ridiculous, childish-and yes, even likeable.

Indicative of unpleasant histories, Guston's coneheads are, in the end, more than pointed satire-or, put in another way, they are less, much less. At heart, they, like his representations of shoes and easels, are pure physical objects that offer the happy promise of a bare, unmediated language of communication. They prove, perhaps, that a child's intuitive gaze may not be too far off the mark after all.

Philip Guston: A New Alphabet is showing at the Fogg through Feb. 4, 2001.