Customer Reviews

Philip Guston: Retrospective

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The Guston restrospective, which I viewed at the SFMOMA in July 2003, was a rich, disturbing, illuminating exhibit. This catalogue of that show reprints a tremendous range (over 130 works) of Guston's work, all of it in fine, nuanced photography of the canvases. The early work includes realistic paintings with war themes, street scenes, and images of urban childhood in the manner of Ben Shahn. Eerily, Guston's hoods and bootsoles already appear. Next, the book's coverage of Guston's abstract phase reveals indebtedness to Mondrian's first abstractions; then Guston finds his own vocabulary in brisk, thick aggregates of rough rectangles on gently boiling backgrounds. Pink and red predominate, as in his later work. As part of both his oevre and Abstract Expresionism, these are among the most successful, aesthetic works of this great period in American art. For offering this total record of his development and contributions, the book provides something of great value.

His brief but famous "Klan" period follows, and then the long final phase--the pink "lima-bean" heads, the skinny, runny-meat legs, the stubble, the huge stunned eyes. The book, like the show, exposes a startling range in these paintings, confirming that Guston's seemingly narrow palette and imagery served his imagination and themes with great breadth and force. Especially powerful are two drawings and a large painting of Nixon. The last work in the catalogue is a Guston-style deli sandwich, a small (18 by 18 inches?) but hugely sensual and humorous work that surprised me at the exhibit. The book also reproduces a number of crude yet painterly black drawings done in few but expressive strokes.

The catalogue includes a useful chronology of Guston's life and work, many many photographs of him in various times and circumstances, and critical/historical exporation of his work via 4 or 5 articles penned by writers who cover varied topics relevant to his career and aims--all illustrated and all drawing on Guston's own statements and articles. His words include some provocative criticisms of the limitations of abstract art, a form which he of course abandoned in the mid 1960's. Abstract art fascinates me, yet Guston's statments gave/give me much to think about.

My sole major criticism of this otherwise terrific book is that it fails to reprint several of the works in the exhibit. Most of the missing work is owned by SFMOMA, which was one of the host museums, so this is a real mystery. Further, the missing works are among the best of the exhibition--and are thus as good as anything included in the book. The single most egregious omission is 1975's "Head and Bottle," a grim, transfixing portrayal of alcoholism. Also gone are a work Guston painted inspired by T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" and an epic and (arguably) hopeful triptych called "Red Sea, The Swell, and Blue Water." These great works all appeared in the exhibit, yet are nowhere in the catalogue. A few others are missing as well, but I'm not familiar enough with Guston's work to identify or even accurately describe them just from my visual memory of this enormous and stirring show, and that is precisely what is so frustrating about the book. Surely one essential purpose of an exhibition catalogue is to honor the total visual experience of its exhibit.

Of course, for each of these missing works, the book reprints several that are just as evocative and harrowing. Thus, as a monograph of Guston this is an excellent choice, one I will always find useful, beautifully produced, and engaging. I'm still very glad I bought it. But as a record of what the exhibit actually offered, as a way of re-experiencing the "Retrospective" of the book's title, the book falls a little short.

The definitive book on Philip Guston with many illustrations from each period of his work. Many excellent essays including one in his own words describing the evolution of each painting.

I bought the book after seeing the exhibition in San Francisco. Fully aware that the color illustratons were disappointing in quality (some paintings show pink ground color when that just isn't so) it is still a book I wouldn't be without. But be aware, color printing really isn't up to the quality found in many art books today.

There are very few books available on Philip Guston's work and this one gives a good overview of his entire career. Guston influenced most of the important artists at work today in some way or other, especially in his late works and the reasons for this influence become obvious when one skims through the pages of this retrospective and discovers what a great artist he was.

Many first-rate illustrations show the depth and scope of his art, with most of his seminal works (abstract as the canvas "Beggar's Joys" from the 1950's, figurative as the masterpiece "the Studio", from 1969) deciphered by a text which is informative as well as insightful.

I thought the book covered a lot of ground with a fantastic sweep of images from his early career to the end of his career. So if you want a book that covers his whole career then this is the book for you.
The essays are really interesting as well, with an analysis of his whole career, with particular reference to his later works.
I really liked the number of later works that are included.

This overall is a great book. It might not be the same quality that I have seen in a few other Thames & Hudson publishings, but it still is a great read and summary of Guston's work. Anyone that loves his work, this is for sure a book worth having.

Thames & Hudson's guide to the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Philip Guston succeeded well beyond my modest expectations. I started reading about the Abstract Expressionists in order to deepen my understanding of the music of Morton Feldman -- his "Give My Regards to Eighth Street" contains several fascinating essays that deal specifically with the parallels between Feldman's 'music with surface' and the introspective, personality-driven art movement. Without some background on some of the primary artists in the movement, especially Feldman's good friend Guston, the essays in "Eighth Street" were falling short. A few general Abstract Expressionist overviews later, and it's time to dig into some of the major players and thinkers.

Guston's painting arc is one of the more difficult to encapsulate, as it features many sharp turns, from figurative/muralist to realist to pure abstraction and, finally, back into a strange, cartoonish figurative style both primitive and yet thoroughly informed by all aspects of art history. With this book, I expected 50 or 60 pages of standard boilerplate history of Guston followed by the meat of the matter (the art plates), but I got a lot more.

The front-matter is broken up in six or seven substantial, varied essays. Michael Shapiro traces Guston's early years and his early history as a mural painter and teacher, and his first uneasy circling around the perimeter of the camp of abstraction.

Michael Auping's "Impure Thoughts: On Guston's Abstractions" carries far more weight than I imagined possible, describing not just Guston's brush technique and feel for color and balance, but also a great deal about the way he carried the whole history of painting (from Piero dell Francesca through to de Chirico and other modernists) in every canvas.

Andrew Graham-Dixon's essay on Guston's neo-figurative era, with its strange, hooded, Klan-like figures and the endless processions of shoes, heads, eyeballs, cigarettes, and skinny legs, captures Guston's essential frustrations of the time, frustrations that resonate strongly with me at this very moment: how can one spend time in a world of beautiful abstraction and self-centered artistic impulse when there are evil people running roughshod over civilzation? Guston's created works as primitive as "if I were the first painter," but at the same informed by his love of history's signposts every turn (his "Pantheon" (1973) reads like a teen metalhead's high school notebook emblazoned with Judas Priest and AC/DC logos). Easily Guston's most reviled era, Graham-Dixon guides the reader through this potentially confusing, alienating element of Guston's oeuvre, bearing witness to Guston's passionate need to be heard not just as a sensualist, but also as a storyteller and social commentator.

Most unexpected was "Pyramid and Shoe," Bill Berkson's essay about Guston's love of the Sunday funnies, linking the artist to George Herriman's "Krazy Kat." A brief anecdote about R. Crumb's apparent love of Guston grotesque cyclops heads and his desire to branch out into painting could have been more fully developed.

Joseph Rishel's "The Culture of Painting: Guston and History" provides us with a study sheet of classicist painters that influenced Guston, among them Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Goya, and de Chirico. The book, helpfully, provides a few illustrations by these artists, especially de Chirico, whose flat, strangely arid landscapes are like a photo-negative of Guston's early compacted spaces, in which children crowd in close quarters in the grips of fight-play.

Dore Ashton reminisces about Guston's love of reading in "Parallel Worlds: Guston as Reader." As with Richel's essay, Ashton provides us with a way back out of Guston's world, discussing the inspiration of such writers and Boris Pasternak, Paul Valery, and Isaac Babel in Guston's paintings and his worldview. Above all, Ashton summarizes some of Guston's primary queries as a reader: the process of being an artist, the purging of falseness from one's artistic attempts, and art that physically affects the viewer. A quote from Babel neatly summarizes Guston's late period: "What I do is to get hold of some trifle, some little anecdote, a piece of market gossip, and turn it into something I cannot tear myself away from. It's alive, it plays. It's round like a pebble on the seashore...its fusion is so strong that even lightning cannot split it."

Finally, a beautiful, densely packed essay by Guston himself leads us into the art plates themselves. The entire piece, barely three pages, is one quotable line of brilliance after another. Here are two of my favorites:

"The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge. Art without a trial disappears at the glance: it is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable.

You cannot settle out of court."

and

"Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing."

In this regard, "Philip Guston Retrospective" is not great art, because it is deeply satisfying. It allows us the impression that we have at least a surface-level understanding of Guston's obsessions and methods. Of course, nothing but our own relentless searching and digging will ever get us to the center of the mystery, and even then, it's unlikely (and not even desired) that we'll reach the center. Like the Piero della Francesca reproductions Guston hung "in the kitchen where you really look at things," great art never gives up all its secrets, and a book about art shouldn't be seen as a skeleton key that unlocks all doors. As said before, "Philip Guston Retrospective" gets my praise not just for all the doors it opens into Guston's work, but also all the doors back out. My first impulse, having been at least partially sated on information about this great artist, is not to seek out more about his life, but rather to read some Valery, Pasternak, and Babel, and go explore Rembrandt, della Francesca, and de Chirico. Thus, the web is expanded.

This retrospective is a great book. The reproductions are beautiful and big, there's lots of great paintings I had not seen before, and there's also plenty of writing about Philip Guston as well. I'll be holding on to this book forever.


--Frank