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Philip Guston
739 Plays10 months ago
In this episode, we explore the work and life of Philip Guston, after having visited his exhibition at Tate Modern. Talk about plot twists! Guston's life and exhibitions, even this last travelling one, caused tremendous controversy. But above all, it's his ability to question himself and follow his own ideas that really impressed us.
Music: Sarturn
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Mission
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Exhibitionistas podcast. This is a podcast where we examine artists through their solo exhibitions. My name is Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and someone who enjoys seeing and talking about art. And Joanna Pierneves, my co-host, is an art curator and a critic. This episode will discuss Philip Gustin. This is an exhibition that took place at the Tate Modern.
00:00:38
Speaker
and it's an exhibition with a bit of controversy around it.
Philip Guston Exhibition Controversy
00:00:42
Speaker
It was supposed to come out in 2020 but was postponed for four years and then it was brought back forward and there's been a lot of back and forth and ink spilled quite frankly about the hows and whys of that postponement. So we'll dip into that quite a bit and you'll see that I am not the expert of the duo as I talk about Philip Guston as being an impressionist rather than
00:01:08
Speaker
an expressionist at various times, but you'll forgive me for that. And Joanna kindly corrects me, so that's all okay. Joanna brings up Alice Neil and the banality of evil, which comes through this episode. And Barbie makes an appearance, which is great. Yeah, I really hope that you enjoy it and let us know what you think.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Exhibitionistas podcast. We visit exhibitions so that you have to, so that you can't resist, but to go and see an exhibition. We explore the work of an artist through their solo shows. I'm Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer.
00:01:53
Speaker
And I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, a contemporary art curator and writer. So we decided to do this podcast because as someone who works in contemporary art, I find that we lack certain platforms of discussion. So I listened to a lot of podcasts about contemporary fiction, standup comedy, even film and politics, but very few about art, which aren't jargony or too superficial.
00:02:20
Speaker
or too celebrity oriented. So that's why I am exhibitionist number two. I'm very happy to be here with you. Hardly, hardly a number two. Yeah. So I mean, and I just want to say too that it's like, you know, I think with this podcast too, is someone who is not a professional, you know, a professional art curator or professionally in the art world, but just someone who really enjoys it a
Guston's Artistic Journey & Influences
00:02:44
Speaker
lot.
00:02:44
Speaker
I think it's just nice to have a place that's a little lighter on pretense perhaps that might crop up occasionally in the art world, some place that's just really joyful and fun to meet and talk about art. So Emily, without further ado, do you want to introduce the artists that we're talking about today?
00:03:07
Speaker
Sure yeah absolutely so today we're going to talk about Philip Gustin he has a retrospective at the Tate Modern which is open from, well it opened on the fifth of October it runs until the twenty fifth of February so if you're in London there's still lots of time hopefully by the time this airs to go and see the exhibition.
00:03:26
Speaker
Can I just add something, Emily? Can I just say that this is, hopefully it will reach, you know, other people. We are based in London. So obviously we talk mostly about exhibitions in London, but you don't have to go to the exhibitions if you don't live in London or if you don't have time, because this is really a pretext. You talk about compelling arts and artists and their body of work. So obviously if you can go to the exhibition
00:03:53
Speaker
please do. That's why we do this, because going to exhibitions is such an experience that you have to talk about afterwards.
00:04:02
Speaker
So yeah, Emily, back to you. Yeah, no, very good point. Yeah, it's certainly not a requirement or prerequisite to see this exhibition before. So Philip Gustin lived, to my mind, what I would think of the classic artist existence. I mean, he smoked, he drank, he was mostly self-taught, he was prolific, he was a bit of an outsider.
00:04:24
Speaker
He produced work that was loved and that was absolutely hated. He was one of these guys that sequestered himself with his art for long periods of time and couldn't be interrupted, but he was also absolutely essential to the super vibrant scene at the Cedar Bar with the likes of Pollock and de Kooning and Rothko that all made up the New York school. By the way, Jackson Pollock, who he went to high school with. Yeah. Which, you know, sometimes in life,
00:04:56
Speaker
It was meant to be. Exactly. It was meant to be. So I did a bunch of reading on him, which was a real pleasure. But the main sources that I drew from were Night Studio and Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter, Ms. and Mayer.
Guston's Use of Imagery & Artistic Phases
00:05:12
Speaker
It's Hauser and Wirth Publishers. This was so brilliant. I loved it. Like even if you
00:05:19
Speaker
don't necessarily want to read more about Philip Guston. It's a brilliant memoir, like the relationship between father and daughter and, you know, kind of a peek into the life of someone who was certainly a genius. I saw a few videos. I went on YouTube and I read Ross Feldman's book about Paolo, about Guston. And
00:05:41
Speaker
Musa Maya, I became much more interested in her than in film casting because cute as a button, that woman, she's so cute. She's just the cutest person on earth.
00:05:54
Speaker
with like, you know, cute intelligence. And she's because you say she he's the typical artist, but for me as a professional, he's the cliche male artist. Yeah, for sure. He really did not play a big role in his family and let Musa I eat the muse.
00:06:13
Speaker
do the difficult work in the family. I don't know, you read the biography, I didn't. And Musa was a writer, so his wife, and then the daughter started writing. So yes, please read the book because she's an excellent thinker and writer about a daughter coming to terms with that kind of figure from that time.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah, living in the shadow of that kind of greatness. And you're right, he was not happy when she was born. He thought it was really going to be a drag on his artistic output and concentration. I mean, he loved her wildly, which was clear in other ways, but he was not sort of a
00:06:50
Speaker
the attentive doting father who is full of unconditional acceptance that we all wish we would have had. But yeah, a really beautiful book. And she was so insightful in her writing. It was a really moving, really moving piece of work on its own. And then Dor Ashton wrote A Critical Study of Philip Gustin. It was published by the University of California Press.
00:07:14
Speaker
And then there's a great short documentary that you can get on Amazon called Philip Gustin, A Life Lived.
Guston's Abstract Expressionism Shift
00:07:20
Speaker
It's one hour. It's right at the end of Gustin's life. It was actually published or released rather just after his death. And that was done by Michael Blackwood.
00:07:33
Speaker
So great resources out there. So I'm going to start with a quick potted history of Guston. So his parents emigrated to Montreal from Odessa to flee the pogroms that killed and targeted Jewish people. He was born in 1913 in Montreal as Philip Goldstein. He changed his name later on. He was the youngest of seven kids. They moved to LA when he was six.
00:08:00
Speaker
When he was 10, he found the body of his father who had committed suicide, and he also lost an older brother to an accident in his teens. So some pretty primary tragedies and traumas there that he said certainly influenced him and his work throughout his life.
00:08:21
Speaker
His mother supported his art by sending him to a comic correspondent school, and she enrolled him in the manual arts high school later on, which is where he met Pollock. He didn't complete either. His mother was so supportive of him and his talent.
00:08:37
Speaker
that she would lie to visitors when they came around, that he wasn't home when really he was locked up in his closet with one bare light bulb, which is an image that comes through a lot of his work, just working on his drawing. And that was something that was, you know, sort of endorsed by the rest of the family to just let Philip do his thing. He went to comic correspondence school. I think he went to the Cleveland cartoon
00:09:04
Speaker
cartoon school of Cleveland, something like that. He was relearning how to, which I think is important because at the end of his life, he does go back to that particular kind of drawing and imagery.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it might, yeah, you're right. It might have been the Cleveland, the Cleveland school, but it was, I mean, he did, it's like, I think it's the kind of thing where it's like, here, draw a bunny and then send it back was the, was the image that I got of it. And he only did, he tried to research it very quickly. And I didn't find anything because now it's the Cleveland Institute of Art. I don't know if it's the same thing, but if you look into it, there's lots of, um,
00:09:47
Speaker
people who either taught there or cartoonists or comics authors that are related to that online. So I think that's an important reference because later on, it will make sense. Absolutely, absolutely. He went to the Otis Art Institute and again didn't finish, but that's where he met his wife, who was also a painter at the time and later a poet, Musa Makim.
00:10:16
Speaker
Throughout his life, he was a mural painter. He was an abstract impressionist. He was a figure maker. He just like the breadth of his work is pretty phenomenal. And we'll talk about that in the exhibition. It looks like seeing the exhibition of at least three different, four different artists. And then he died of a heart attack in Woodstock in New York in 1980.
00:10:45
Speaker
I love that you say that he's an abstract impressionist because he was actually, art historian comes in with the heaviness, but he was an abstract expressionist because his work was so atmospheric. Some people deemed his work to be more of an abstract form of impressionism than expressionism. So it was kind of a play. I don't remember which was the art critic who said that,
00:11:14
Speaker
It was kind of a play with words, and it was sometimes called the Monet of Abstract Expressionists, if I'm not mistaken. Got it, got it. Okay, so do you want to tell us a little bit about this exhibition? Maybe just start with, there was a bit of controversy around this exhibition. Do you want to?
00:11:37
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about that. There was. Yes, there was, Emily. There was a lot of controversy around it. So this was a traveling exhibition that started at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then went on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and finally in the US would finish its travels at the National Gallery in DC. However, George Floyd's death propelled a four-year postponement of the show
00:12:06
Speaker
that was to open in 2020 and you can ask what's the connection between this horrendous thing that happened and Philip Guston's work. Well this is because Guston as we'll see created in the last decade of his life
00:12:23
Speaker
paintings with figures wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods as a form of satire and philosophical quest about evil and exclusion. It actually wasn't just at the end of his life. He was painting cake cake figures in the 30s as well at the very beginning of his career in a different way. He gave it a very different treatment, but it's certainly something that ran right through the length of his body.
Guston's Societal Critiques & Legacy
00:12:48
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And the exhibition, by the way, showcases that really beautifully. You really see how aware he was. You get a sense that he was aware of his past, of his Jewishness and the problems that entailed in Europe for his father as well, because his father couldn't live in Canada. He was oppressed. They went to California and he became a scrapper in California. He would sell
00:13:14
Speaker
old junk and collect junk. And he ended up committing suicide, which obviously is not uncommon for people fleeing the Third Reich. He did inherit a consciousness. Sorry, he wasn't fleeing the program, right? Yeah, he was fleeing the Russians. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Emily. And yeah, so you can see that he inherited a lot of transgenerational trauma, but also a consciousness.
00:13:43
Speaker
of terrible things happening to communities, for two different communities of people who suffered exclusion.
00:13:50
Speaker
to say the least. So of course when the exhibition was postponed people thought this was a condescending attitude and so there was a letter of protest against the postponement of the exhibition signed by many Black artists such as Pope Elle who passed away recently and who has an exhibition at South London Gallery at the moment, Julie Merritu, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, you know these major artists came in defense of Philip Guston's
00:14:20
Speaker
exhibition and so the postponement was unpostponed so it was shortened and the exhibition finally travelled until it came to us at the end of last year. Which is I think as well ironic because Philip Guston was not Philip Guston as you said very rightly he was Philip Goldstein. Also the KKK
00:14:44
Speaker
was not and still isn't very nice and inclusive to Jewish people. I know, they targeted, yeah. Absolutely targeted. I read this book earlier in the year about the KKK and kind of how it was popularized and it was looked at through this guy who kind of really garnered support for it in the Midwest. Apparently
00:15:09
Speaker
I think it was Indiana, was sort of the capital, like had the biggest KKK membership, as it were, than any state, which is kind of unusual. I mean, I'm from the Midwest, you know, I had no idea. So it was really fascinating to look at the rise. But I mean, the the targeting of Jewish people was intense as well. But the Jewish population is a lot smaller than black population in America.
00:15:36
Speaker
And, you know, it's, yeah, didn't, didn't get, but I mean, Guston was seeing this in the thirties in California. You know, I mean, he was seeing the KKK alive and well, and it certainly made a deep impact on, on him and his work. So how was this exhibition organized? It is somewhat of a chronologic exhibition.
00:15:57
Speaker
But it strikingly starts with one of Guston's last paintings called The Legend, or Legend. It sets the tone, right? So Guston's work and painting is much about his worries and values as it is about his failures and breakdowns. And in this painting he's in bed surrounded by objects which remind us of his childhood.
00:16:19
Speaker
his dad's occupation as a scrapper and, you know, his obsessions such as food, reading, small humble objects. And adjacent to this room is another one with Guston's paintings, incredibly made when he was 17. Yeah. And they were, they are quite technically impressive, you know, also very, you know, picking up here in their references to Surrealism. He loved the Kiriko, for example,
00:16:46
Speaker
but he's not grown into his own artistry for sure. And then the whole exhibition is separated in two, which is kind of a weird thing because the second bit of the exhibition is about the last 10 years of his life. And the first half of the exhibition is the whole path that leads in some ways
00:17:09
Speaker
to these last 10 years because let's say it and I want to know what you think of it but for sure Guston was someone who loved painting and hated art I think it's fair to say that he was not comfortable
00:17:23
Speaker
with the whole structure around the system, the people, the way art was talked about and the dogmatic. There was some dogmatism around abstractionism. And he was never comfortable with that because he was also very politically aware. So he was very critical of himself.
00:17:50
Speaker
and also of arts and its function in society. Totally, yeah. I mean, I think that goes to his outsider thing. I mean, he resisted that formal kind of training that would give you that kind of dogma of, you know, this is what artist is, this is what art is, this is what artists do.
Guston's Personal Conflicts & Artistic Evolution
00:18:09
Speaker
you know, even when he had success and was living in, you know, for a time, he was living part time in New York City, part time in Woodstock. And in New York City, he talks about how he really disliked having to go to all of these galleries all the time and see all the people and
00:18:29
Speaker
have all the conversations. And when he finally retreated to Woodstock, he could just do what he wanted to do, which was be in his studio and make his art. And so, I mean, he just didn't play the game in the same way that a lot of artists do and sometimes need to do to kind of get it together. He really doubled down on his own instincts and his own
00:18:58
Speaker
relationship I think with the art he wanted to make. It's very strange isn't it because I think there's a whole myth around him just to explain to our listeners when he so he was a muralist for a while he went to Mexico painted a very important mural
00:19:14
Speaker
that still exists today. And it was, again, very political, it depicted war, it referenced, because of course, by then, you know, he was aware of the Second World War, and he was, again, felt that that war particularly targeted his community and his family's community. You say he's an outsider, but I think I need to break a little bit, because he did, you know, hang out with the cooning, he hung out with lots of important
00:19:43
Speaker
people, that whole intelligentsia, who were a group of men, who basically, you know, he was included in that big exhibition called 11 American Painters. I mean, it was only 11. He was there.
00:19:56
Speaker
So he was pretty much a part of that group and he started, he moved completely to abstraction. And what was really interesting is that his abstraction, I don't know how you felt about it. It wasn't overly represented in the exhibition and it felt reluctant. For me, it was something trying to emerge from the center of the painting. So everything's concentrated at the center. You can see his famous signature pink
00:20:24
Speaker
and red so apparently that pink comes from cadmium red medium and titanium white and you could see the whites you can see the pinks you can see the reds you can see lots of colors that come back later lavender you know all those beautiful colors he's such a colorist i mean for sure it feels like he was working on his color spectrum and i understand why he was called the abstract an abstract impressionist
00:20:50
Speaker
because there is something that is not quite there. I mean, very specifically, the Greenberg, and so Clement Greenberg was this very important art critic who kind of like established what painting was. Not only was it the most important form of art, so drawing had no place.
00:21:10
Speaker
there. And we know that Guston started withdrawing quite a lot. I work withdrawing, as you know. So for me, that's really important. And I saw someone who was a drafts person wanting to emerge, but couldn't because there was no platform for that time. And so the painting was an autonomous space. And you painted painting, you know, the painting was about itself. It was an absolutely free, autonomous space.
00:21:39
Speaker
And in some ways, and that was rather exciting, but also a very reductive definition of abstraction, but exciting to think you're building a fifth dimension. So you're building something. There's a very famous cartoon, actually, of Alderain Hart, an amazing abstract painter, where he did a lot of cartoons about
00:21:57
Speaker
abstraction and modern art and you can see a visitor looking at an abstract painting I hope I remember this correctly saying what is this and what is this doing it's not representing anything and then the painting comes out to him if I remember correctly and says and what are you doing and what are you about
00:22:18
Speaker
And so for the first time, the spectator is looking at something in their own bodies, in their own space, looking at another space and not using representation to stand in for something or to represent something, to re-present something. It's not a window onto the world. It is a space.
00:22:39
Speaker
So that was quite really exciting. Yeah. And I got to say, I've never really thought of it that way. I've never. Yeah, that's really that's really interesting. I mean, I've never thought of the way that it was approached and what it was trying to do and how that was different. I've just always really enjoyed enjoyed the, you know, the kind of enjoyed it, which I guess was the point, you know, was as you described, it was it was for me to evoke
00:23:06
Speaker
whatever it was evoking for me, rather than here's an image and I'd like to tell this story that's very narrative. It's saying, go ahead, what does it feel like to be in front of this thing? And those later ones especially, you could see him trying to make an image.
00:23:25
Speaker
and then containing it, you know? I mean, there's kind of the late ones where it's like those heads so you can kind of see sort of the outline of human heads or a couple that look sort of like buildings, cities, scapes, you know? I mean, so yeah, so you could see that there was part of him that was enjoying the exploration, but there was another part of him that was just as eager to get back to kind of what was inside him, which was image making.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the first half of the exhibition, there's these beautiful drawing paintings, these linear shapes, because the thing is that he was so masterful in what he ended up doing. His line is absolutely incredible.
00:24:13
Speaker
So tell us a little bit about that because in the show it's kind of like you have little references of like huge breakdowns of Philip Guston and then you're like oh okay he had another breakdown and then you hop off to the next room and then the following room is like oh he moved away from home because he had another breakdown and it never really is quite explored you know what it is that breakdown is it connected to
00:24:37
Speaker
his status or the reception of his work? Is it personal? He was a very self-contained guy, very ambitious and very driven by himself. I realize he's part of this New York scene, but there weren't that many people that just extracted themselves from New York and did something else. He was also muralist when people were starting in New York, so he was in the Midwest and
00:25:04
Speaker
had a professorship in Iowa and then in Missouri. And so he was sort of away from the crowd for a long period. So kind of a bit of an outsider in that sense. So even though he had this sort of strong personal will and drive, he still really cared about what people thought about his work. He certainly had probably his biggest breakdown after the Marlboro show. I mean, he was a depressive guy. He talked about, you know, he suffered from depression.
00:25:31
Speaker
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think there is, you know, there was sometimes the, the, the kind of breaks were because of receptions to his work. Sometimes it was just he was a depressive guy, he drank a lot, he smoked a lot, he apparently was a great cook.
00:25:51
Speaker
But, you know, he wasn't feeding himself maybe the best, you know, lots of, you know, traditional. He's a very meaty guy, let's say. Male diet, yeah, of the 1950s and 60s and 70s. He had insomnia. Moose's book is called Night Studio because he was often in his studio at night, working on lights. That explains the last room and some paintings at the end that's so black.
Guston's Impact on Contemporary Art
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah. So like layers and layers of thick black paint.
00:26:19
Speaker
what black paint mixed with greens and such weird paintings. Yeah. Yeah. So he would take things to put him to sleep and then things to wake him up. You know, there's some of the drug taking going on, it seemed as well, which probably doesn't help a depressive state and a fragile mental health for anyone, quite frankly. But
00:26:42
Speaker
This is a good time to talk about that next period of paintings that he went into. So he went from very abstract work. One thing in the reading that really struck me was all of these artists were sort of part of this Sidney Janis gallery in New York.
00:26:58
Speaker
In 1962, when pop art hit the scene and Sidney Janis started carrying pop artists of the time, so Andy Warhol and Lichtenstein, is that right? Am I getting the name right? So the guys who did the Campbell's Soup and sort of the comic strip images.
00:27:17
Speaker
they all left, all the impressionists left that gallery in protest. They were like, we are not that and we don't want that association. So going to your point about how that New York school was a very, very big thing in terms of setting the standard of what they thought was acceptable and what art is and
00:27:38
Speaker
what it isn't and and then he goes he goes to making lines again and these small framed images that are as you say an arc of black across a canvas or something which are miraculous I have to say it's really
00:27:54
Speaker
It's incredible. And I think that is one of the things that is so incredible, that the line is so alive, like it looks like something that is living, which is something that he said he was always going for. He wants something that, you know, when he's working in a studio and he goes away and he comes back, he wants to be surprised by like, oh, wow.
00:28:15
Speaker
That happened. That happened. That's incredible. And you feel that in his work. So he went and he did those incredible kind of basic images. And then he went to do the work that ended up going into the Marlboro Show in 1970.
00:28:35
Speaker
And that was when he went back to his comic kind of underpinnings, where he had all of these images of KKK people, you know, hooded figures. He calls them the hood. I think he calls them the hoods.
00:28:50
Speaker
and they're driving in a car, smoking a cigarette, there's a hooded figure that is a painter painting an image, painting a self-portrait, so painting another hooded figure, they're drinking, they're hanging out, they're being casual. And I think so much of what he was doing there was looking at everyday evil. And also the style of the paintings
00:29:18
Speaker
was so strange because it comes from that background of abstract expressionism. So very painterly, very filled with that material, that paint material, very big. They're real painting. Well, not really, not that small paintings aren't real paintings, but you mean like they're painting. Yeah. Exactly. So he takes on the same sizes almost of his previous paintings.
00:29:47
Speaker
But then he just paints these figures that are cartoonish and that are doing horrible things, you know, things that Americans probably don't want to look at. And this comes back to the postponement because I think in Europe, it's a bit harder to understand what's going on in America. I was in D.C. for three months doing research at the Smithsonian and white people are a minority, not a minority, but there's less white people than other ethnicities in D.C., for example, which was I learned when I went there.
00:30:15
Speaker
And it's a whole different relationship to the violence of racism in America. It's much more discussed, to be very honest. I think it's in that way, there's much more. It's taken up by institutions and now it's spread to all the communities and ethnicities that weren't ever contemplated by, and even with Guston, they were subjects, they were not
00:30:42
Speaker
you know, peers in some ways. Things have changed a lot in the United States and when you go, you know, especially in DC, we went to conferences and the person doing the conference recognised that this was the land of whatever Native American community had lived there. So that's something that completely, you know, blew
Guston's Relationships & Social Dynamics
00:31:02
Speaker
my mind. We're not doing this in Europe at all. I hear a lot about like
00:31:05
Speaker
Oh, can we stop it with the apologies and the, you know, and DC is a city of extremes as well. I mean, it's, you know, historically one of the more segregated cities. But interestingly, in one of the interviews with Ms. Amer, she was saying that she talked to the art director, whoever is the head of duration at the National Gallery in DC.
00:31:27
Speaker
And the person in that position said that when they came on board on the job, there were 47 curators. None of them were Black. So in DC. It's incredible. And all of the staff who make the gallery run, most of them were non-white. So the initial letter for the postponement came from the National Gallery.
00:31:54
Speaker
And it came from this group of people that were white, essentially. I mean, maybe there were some non-white folks in there, but there weren't black curators in that group of people. There's a lot of good things happening off of the back of tragic occurrences in the past few years. It's good to see that that is finally taking place, certainly not as fast as we'd like. But this exhibition, I think, also brought up some of those really good questions
00:32:23
Speaker
The Guston is working on this exhibition. He releases the exhibition at the Marlboro Gallery in 1970 and people hate it. Like they hate it so much.
00:32:38
Speaker
I mean, you know, back to, you know, you think of eight years previous, Gustin was quitting the Sydney Janis Gallery because pop art was, pop art had an exhibition there. And now he's doing something that, I mean, it's not pop art, but it's figurative and it's cheeky and it's Renaissance influence in it, even with some of the horizons and things like that. But, but it is
00:33:05
Speaker
cartoonish. Yeah, you kind of wonder what was going on in his mind at the time. And you kind of wonder when this came about. And when he started realizing that this is what he wanted to do.
00:33:18
Speaker
parenthesis from the art historian, I have a real problem with the mystification of artists, especially male-white artists, and the mystification of Philip Guston, because the problem is that when you have this kind of context and this kind of controversy, then you kind of aggrandize the artist. And I felt a little bit a prisoner of that when I went into the exhibition, because I didn't love the exhibition as much as I thought I would.
00:33:45
Speaker
And I went in there like militantly like, yes, let's go to the garden. And it was with someone who was really not enthralled by it.
00:33:52
Speaker
you know, Liechtenstein, Alice Neil, you know, Pop Arts, Andy Warhol, he didn't single-handedly bring back, you know, figuration to the art world. Let's just put it out there and stop with the mystifications. Is that a narrative? Is that a narrative? Okay. Especially if you see the videos and you hear there's a film called Questions for Philip Gass and something like that with Roberta Smith. He's a very important art critic.
00:34:17
Speaker
telling him, you know, and talking about him as if, you know, he's brought back, you know, representation to the art world, and he kind of think, Oh, come on. Yes, yes, he did. I mean, he was very courageous, because I think from the perspective of masculinity, I think that's amazing what he did. And maybe it should be framed like that. I mean, he was in that very patriarchal group of artists, amazing art, I love, you know, big part of it, I it's the impact of those paintings is
00:34:47
Speaker
not to be frowned upon. It's beautiful, you know, out of Klein, out of the kerning. And in the kerning was actually also painting figures, by the way. It was a huge influence. And because there were so many, the context in the United States at the time was of a country that had had terrible painting until very recently. Then they welcomed Marcel Duchamp over there, who by the way, was rejected in Paris, went to America,
00:35:12
Speaker
welcomed the star artist of Europe of what everything American art wanted to be. And there was this effervescence at the time. There were lots of art critics, lots of art criticism in newspapers, lots of magazines. And people were listening to art critics. It was a very strange time. No one pays attention to them anymore. No one knows who they are anymore. But at the time, there were people who were mentioned by musicians,
00:35:40
Speaker
He was very good friends with Morton Feldman, the musician, the minimalist musician. I mean, there were intersections between art languages. It was a big deal. There was a big, big power around these people, around these artists. And I think in terms of that context, wow, Philip Guston. Wow. He was alone afterwards. Everyone ditched him.
00:36:05
Speaker
everyone. And I think he said he does a there's an interview with him where he says, I said to John Cage, you know, you lock yourself in your studio. And then
00:36:17
Speaker
one friend stops coming another friend stops coming another friend stops coming and then none of your friends come and that's when it starts and he was courageous like that he was really there was something about him that you know his ghosts were more important than friends or you know the the living people surrounding him and that that is that is incredible i think we need to reframe a little bit you know the context of uh you know he's not saving art or saving figurative art
00:36:45
Speaker
he is actually extracting himself from a group and being unique and developing his own language that he probably should have developed way earlier and making these incredible paintings that the Americans, I mean, that's a question for you, you know, Emily, I think must have been very hard to look at at the time, because they were, the criticism was also like, why are we looking at this? It's fine, we've solved it. We solved the KKK.
00:37:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I think in 1970, it was still visible in the rearview mirror. I mean, the KKK and its legacy, and there's always that instinct to run away from things when it's still reasonably fresh. The US has never been great about having a discussion about race and what it means, which is
00:37:34
Speaker
I mean, we have it, it gets violent at various points in history. The fact that an artist is bringing this to this kind of forum and format, I can imagine the establishment was really displeased.
00:37:50
Speaker
really displeased and I mean I think it was misunderstood too that it was being casual about the KKK when the a different reading of it is is that evil in the everyday that it's it isn't you it isn't me I mean racism is alive and well whether you're putting up and burning across or you are driving around in your car smoking a cigarette it's there and it's a it's a through line
00:38:16
Speaker
And I think that's what he was trying to say with it, and I think it was just a difficult message at the time.
Guston's Societal Commentary & Art Discourse
00:38:22
Speaker
Why do you think people accuse them of being casual about the KKK? Because they look kind of cute.
00:38:28
Speaker
Right? I mean, like the images are kind of, they're kind of endearing. They're kind of endearing. I mean, they're pink. They're red and the titanium white are pulling a lot of the weight of those paintings. It's incredible. He uses those long vertical lines for the eyes and that long vertical line is kind of repeated in lots of different areas in the paintings.
00:38:58
Speaker
But yeah, they're kind of cute. They're kind of cuddly. They're kind of endearing. You kind of look at them and think like, oh, you know, it's not a horrible menacing image of something that is horrible and menacing. But again, I think that was the point of it is that you could be looking evil in the eye and think, oh, nice, you know, I mean, which is which is absolutely true. That's what's so fantastic about it. It's because especially I think people mentioned the painting. I can't quite get the title. Maybe you remember.
00:39:28
Speaker
that painting where you have, like you say, hooded figures in a car, just smoking cigarettes, you know, driving casually, a bit disorganized, but chaotic in the out of out in town. And then there's a corpse in the back, there's the body. And then you think, is this
00:39:47
Speaker
casual or is this more violent to speak of another amazing Jewish emigre, you know, Hannah Arendt, who said like the banal that talked about the banality of evil, that's a problem. It's when it's now people love to, you know, the youngsters like to say normalize, you know, it is normalized.
00:40:07
Speaker
And I think that's the issue, isn't it? He's talking about normalization and the banality of evil in such a poignant way with that pink that just numbs you because it's just so sickening.
00:40:20
Speaker
And at the same time, so attractive. He really knows how to convey an atmosphere with color. It's just so impactful. It's almost a Barbie pink. It's cute. Yeah, it's almost a Barbie pink. It's almost a Barbie pink, but a bit dirty with some lines of blue and gray. It's a dirty Barbie pink. It's such a powerful thing. He goes,
00:40:48
Speaker
very far with that, doesn't he? When he says that he saw himself, he wanted to see himself as the hooded figure and he wanted to understand what it would be like to live as an evil creature.
00:41:06
Speaker
He wanted to perform that evil in some ways. And it's a very performative kind of image that he did there. Also, he was fascinated by Crazy Cat. He loved Crazy Cat. Very famous comics or cartoon.
00:41:21
Speaker
I mean, kind of, is it famous? I don't know. I mean, if you, I hadn't, I wasn't aware of it. At the time it was famous. When he was a kid, when he was a kid, I had to look it up. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, he struggled with his relationship to the turmoil in the world generally. I mean, wars, Vietnam, Korea, you know, World War II, obviously, civil
00:41:44
Speaker
right and what was happening to the Black community in America. And he, you know, he has this quote saying, it's a famous quote of his, what kind of man am I sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated theory about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.
00:42:03
Speaker
So, I mean, he clearly struggled with what is the role of the artist in society and in hopefully trying to right some of the wrongs that are happening in front of his eyes. And this, you know, this is, I think, part of his response. And what was the role of art? I think he's like, what can art do? I think.
00:42:23
Speaker
It was his main worry, like, I am here. And especially when he said adjusting a retrouble, obviously, he's also talking about, you know, the movement he was part of before. But I think this is a question that we are asking ourselves now. It's such a timely exhibition, because
00:42:39
Speaker
Whether you, I mean, you in your job that we won't disclose him or we will, if you want, maybe have more of a feeling of kind of touching, you know, politics and policy and, you know, and having an impact. But when you're in your studio as an artist, male artists nowadays are kind of thinking, is this my time? Should I be doing this? Should I be, you know, white people, you know, are thinking, you know, should I be taking the platform?
00:43:05
Speaker
you know as it was given to me and how do I take a platform you know understanding that it's given to me in a much more in a freer and accessible way more than to other people you know we are asking ourselves a lot of questions so I think it's a really timely exhibition but it is also to me I felt it was so courageous and so impactful what he did
00:43:28
Speaker
And the other paintings, I could see that he also went back to his depression. So the paintings after that, so he quits, Marlborough, Marlborough quit him. I don't quite know how that happened, but I can imagine that Marlborough was probably not very happy with the outcome of the exhibition. And he went into a very strange keys, I think, gallery.
00:43:47
Speaker
There was in an area that was not fashionable. He worked with someone completely different. He kept going away from New York. You can see that he's struggling with his personal life.
00:44:03
Speaker
He painted his wife quite a lot who, if anything, lived in his shadow. Apparently, she was a very quiet person. She was a very intelligent person. But socially, she presented as someone who was kind of in, you know, in the back, you know, trying to keep things together.
00:44:19
Speaker
hold things together, like your typical female male dynamic, let's say. She took the mantle on. If anybody has seen Maestro recently, I mean there's definitely a through line, the wife of Leonard Bernstein and Musa. Philip Gustin's wife was called Musa as well, so his daughter and his wife have the same name, confusingly. So his wife Musa definitely takes that kind of mantle on,
00:44:49
Speaker
of being the supportive wife while being phenomenally talented herself. She painted a mural alongside his when they were doing the mural paintings for the Works Progress Administration. And she was a poet as well, which she incorporates some of her poetry in his late work. But there is an anecdote where, you know, if they had people over at their house in Woodstock and, you know, it would be after dinner and everybody would be in the living room kind of smoking and drinking and talking.
00:45:18
Speaker
And he would try to charm her out of the kitchen and she would just say, no, I've got the dishes to do and I have that, you know. So she would kind of be there in the background, but she was, I get the sense, just a very shy, private person and didn't enjoy.
00:45:35
Speaker
that kind of thing, perhaps as well, just on a personal level. Because he was a social animal. He was a very social person. Because with all this outsider thing going on, and I do want to say something about this idea of the outside, but with all this outsider thing going on, he was a charmer. He was a very supportive man.
00:45:54
Speaker
He had this way to him, like this kind of fragile, big, kind of like not completely well put together birds, lost birds. But then he started talking and it was so fascinating what he had to say. He could grab you through food, through smoking, through walking around in New York with you. He loved going to small restaurants, small unassuming restaurants. And he would take critics to the restaurant where he was well known. He was almost kind of like,
00:46:22
Speaker
As someone, Rosfeldon says that at a certain point when he goes to connect to get to visit him, he goes to the butchers and he said, I almost had the feeling that the butcher wasn't going to invite him to come to meet himself. They were so close, there was such a symbiotic relationship with the butcher.
00:46:40
Speaker
And he loved talking to all kinds of people. He was interested in people and, you know, to the point of like, you know, just a parenthesis about the women, you know, this is the same thing with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. I mean, you know, she was an incredible painter.
00:46:53
Speaker
And no one ever spoke about her. She had no place in society. Alice Neil, who had an amazing exhibition at the Barbican last year, was such an incredible painter. She was, I honestly, that exhibition just shook me. Was she the wife of someone as well? No, Alice Neil is very interesting because to make a parallel with Philip Guston, she was an incredible activist. She was a communist. She was part of loads of movements and she painted portraits, figurative work.
00:47:24
Speaker
in a very specific Alice Neal style that's almost indescribable. She paints directly onto the canvas. It's quite impressive. And she's interested in people. So she had a chaotic personal love life. She had a child with a Cuban man who took the daughter, after losing a daughter to Diphtheria, the father took the child as a better to Cuba and she never saw her again. I mean, she did see her in her older years, in her adult years.
00:47:53
Speaker
is a better ended up by committing suicide. She was very troubled by the fact that her mother, you know, there wasn't a relationship with her mother. And then Alice Neal had two boys, and they lived in a very peculiar house filled with paintings, not a lot of space for boys to develop. And they and there's an amazing documentary actually about Alice Neal in her life. And she was relentless. She lived from benefits all her life. Until
00:48:20
Speaker
last years where she finally got the appreciation she deserved and the paintings are absolutely incredible because she does this beautiful thing which is to make you look at a person with their own kind of beauty. She ditches conventional beauty and there's no conventions and everyone is beautiful. That's the only way I can describe it. It made me think of a makeup artist who said because
00:48:48
Speaker
As a makeup artist, biggest joy of my life is that I get to work on everyone's faces and at a certain point conventional beauty just fades away and I find the beauty in everyone and that's what Alice Neal did. So in terms of like in comparison, you could see that Alice Neal was not a depressive person. She tried to commit suicide when she lost her daughter. But after that, she just was a force of nature. She was completely dedicated to her craft.
00:49:13
Speaker
And I think mental health plays such a huge role in who you are and who you are as an artist. Van Gogh comes to mind, for example. It doesn't affect the art, but to Hannah Gatsby's point, you know, she talks about that in her stand-up comedy. Maybe Van Gogh would have produced more, been a happier artist if he had had the help he
00:49:33
Speaker
could have had. And Guston, you can see that the moments where he's doing well, he's painting. And he also has painting as a catalyst to paint and to paint his troubles. So after this 1970s show, when he is just wracked with this rejection from the community that he's been a part of in the New York art community. Except the Cooning.
00:49:57
Speaker
We have to say that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and Gustin was like, what do they think we all are a baseball team? We're not all doing the same thing. You know, so I kind of liked that. But, but two thirds of his lifetime output happened in the last 10 years of his life.
00:50:16
Speaker
So between 1970 and 1980. I mean, and he was prolific throughout his life, right? But I heard this in an interview with, with Imousa Meir, his daughter, and... Okay, that's the, the half-half thing. Okay, that explains it. He dug deep into that rejection. That was a real propeller for output. And maybe it was just that... Incredible.
00:50:39
Speaker
Turmoil he felt you know and the depression he felt and it all came out but his his late works as they are described you know kind of after the KKK images and the you know sort of the last shows of his life you know are filled with these depressive
00:50:58
Speaker
kind of images. So you would see himself depicted as a cyclops, this really adorable cyclops. I've not seen a cyclops that isn't adorable, but kind of this image of him lying on his back with cigarette butts all over and drinks bottles everywhere and he's in his studio. So there's a lot of self-reference there. And then he starts using some of his wife's poetry in his work and in depicting her
00:51:28
Speaker
kind of the from the forehead up this there's this sort of half moon image of her forehead and her hair that you see throughout a lot of that work. I have to say, men cutting women, men cutting women's bodies really troubles me. I was not I was a bit
00:51:44
Speaker
I don't know, I was a bit troubled by Musa, you know, I kept thinking of her and I kept thinking of those, those paintings with her forehead as a hill, as a sort of a landscaping kind of thing. And also her mind. I think he was worried about her mind. He was worried about her probably because she also has a, she had a horrible health scare and he finally had to, she had a stroke, didn't she? And I read somewhere that he, he said, well, you know, I went back home. The one was there.
00:52:14
Speaker
had to do my chores, I had to do all the house tasks. Which interestingly is the first thing he mentions. And then he talks about the worry, the horrible worry. I mean, he must have felt completely abandoned. And knowing that he lost his dad and he found his dad by suicide, everything comes back. And I find that so interesting. When you look at a lot of artists, you can see where they go back. You know, life's a circle.
00:52:44
Speaker
but you do the whole circle, you do the whole journey. So you go back, but you don't end up at the same place. So of course cartoons, of course comics, but you can see his worry with his wife as a parallel with, I'm sure, you know, whatever went on in his life when he was a child in regards to his dad and also then his mom being a widow, you can kind of see, you know, all that hurt and all that pain. But I wanted to say something about,
00:53:11
Speaker
outside because you're quite right to point that out. He said something after that 70s show and into that big prolific period of the 10 years of his life. He spoke with Rosfeld and he actually wrote positive reviews about his work and they became friendly. Ross was a poet, but he also was an art critic and they became friendly. He was much younger.
00:53:36
Speaker
And, and he says, well, I'm reading Walter Benjamin and I'm really taken by his description of a library. And I think that's what I'm doing. And of course, Felden was like, what? That's so, for lack of a better word, tacky. You know, that doesn't exist in art anymore.
00:53:54
Speaker
there's symbolism. So symbolism is when an image, something stands for something else. And then allegories is just a system of something that is not in the image, right? Yeah, allegorical. Yeah, allegory. Yeah. So he's, you know, so he told Guston, what do you say? I didn't think that's what you do. And Guston very stubbornly said, Yes, it is. I'm really taken by it. And also,
00:54:22
Speaker
Walter Benjamin talks about the painting as a ruin, and that is really what takes me, because that's how I see paintings. My paintings are flawed. The painting says ruined, you said? As a ruin. As a ruin. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, not as ruined, but as flawed, yes. He says, well, it was forbidden to him to bring anything from the real world to the painting, right? He was creating a fifth dimension with his paintings.
00:54:49
Speaker
because it was abstract and it shouldn't reference anything outside what already you know he was called impressionist so he was already kind of referencing something that people saw that in him that he had that need but then he says well i am bringing something that is heterogeneous let's say to painting i'm bringing something of the world into the painting and the painting is always impure is always going to have something from the outer world from out there
00:55:18
Speaker
And that's really interesting because not only is he talking about politics, but he's also talking about aesthetics. He's saying, I'm bringing cartoons back, baby. You know, I am bringing, and I know a lot of artists who are so excited by his work, especially the little paintings, because I talked about big dimensions, but there's a big wall with smaller, much smaller paintings that are out of this world cute. At the same time, funny,
00:55:47
Speaker
They are exciting. They are so interesting in their plasticity because they bring that kind of drawing. You know, for me, as someone who works for drawing, and I work a lot with people who actually work with comics and who take them to the exhibition space and to bring that into art, not like as a sort of a slick way, like Liechtenstein did, but like really in the messiness of it and the small narratives of Crazy Cat of those
00:56:16
Speaker
aggressive violence comics and cartoons. The same story repeats itself over and over again. I think that's what he's saying as well. There's no purity. We live in a world where there's no hierarchies and everything we look at feeds our brain and is imprinted on us and everything is part of it. So if we think about, so we might need to wrap up, I think,
00:56:44
Speaker
I think we need to wrap up this time. It's such a pleasure, but we have to at some point. So if you could have an artwork of his that you could live with in your house, which one would you choose? Oh, I would choose the painter, definitely. So that's the painting you described. Is it the painter or the studio? I think it's the painter. I think it's the painter, yeah. Where he paints himself. It wasn't in the Morbrough exhibition, if I'm not mistaken, and it was
00:57:13
Speaker
It's a painter in front of his hooded figure, so the painted is a KKK person figure, and painting a self-portrait as a KKK, so as a hooded figure as well. And I thought that was so striking. It is something to denounce violence as if you were external to it. It is something else to say we
00:57:37
Speaker
we are somewhat participating in this, whether we are doing it willingly or not. But it goes even deeper than that. And I think I haven't understood yet what he's trying to say, because as a Jewish person, he could have placed himself as the victim.
00:57:50
Speaker
And he placed himself as the most horrendous predator you could think of. I'm still thinking about that and what that means. I remember the Dalai Lama, another controversy around the Dalai Lama recently, but he did say some good stuff. And he said, like, we all have Hitler in us. And he also said that when kids are violent, someone asked him once, you know, children are violent or aggressive towards each other. What do we do? He said, well, they have to act out the violence because we have, all of us have that in us.
00:58:17
Speaker
but you as the grown-up have to say that that's not good, that you're the one who's setting up the values. So that means we're born with that. I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out and I love that painting because it's huge and it mocks the tradition of painting as well. At the same time it reveals it, it's very ambivalent and I love ambivalence, I love complexity and
00:58:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the one. I would have it in the sort of a back room though. I would want to be looking at it every day, perhaps. I don't know. Maybe I would. I know. Who knows?
00:58:50
Speaker
It's a big idea to sort of put in the living room over the fireplace. So I think that mine is the line, which is sort of the main image used for the exhibition. So there's clouds at the top. There is a giant hand exactly coming down. And its two fingers are holding a pencil that is drawing a giant line across sort of a big landscape.
00:59:18
Speaker
And the reason I like it so much is, and I'm gonna tweak your quote a little bit. This is a quote from John Cage that Philip Gustin liked a lot. And it was, when you start working, everybody is in your studio. The past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all your own ideas, all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving one by one, and then you're left completely alone.
00:59:54
Speaker
Thank you for correcting that. That is an idea that is so drawn through his painting. There's so much that is self-referential in the work that he did. You're not seeing landscapes, you're not seeing vegetation. It all just comes from somewhere deep inside of him.
01:00:13
Speaker
And then, if you're lucky, even you leave. And, you know...
01:00:21
Speaker
When you see him talking about his own work, particularly in the Michael Blackwood documentary, he talks about all of the destruction. So he ruins a lot of his own paintings. If he doesn't think it feels alive enough, if it doesn't feel like a living thing that is there on the canvas, then he just gets rid of it.
01:00:44
Speaker
And I found that notion just really, really exciting. And when I look at that painting of the line, I can imagine that that is, you know, on his best day in the studio, that's what's happening is just there. That's what it feels like. It's what it feels like is there's a third hand there that is, you know, that you are communing with. And I think that's
01:01:07
Speaker
I mean, that sort of metaphysical idea is really exciting. And yeah, I think that that piece of work really embodies it. And I mean, I think I don't have a wall big enough, of course, so I'd have to buy a different house, but that is the one I'd go for. Why not? Exactly. Well, amazing choice. Yeah, that's a really good choice. Because I also see it as a sort of the weight of being an artist, because as soon as you draw a line,
01:01:37
Speaker
your marking, and that's it, it's done, set in stone. I mean, of course not, because as you said, he destroyed a lot of his paintings. But there's something about marking that is so incredible. And I see it also, I'm really preaching to my choir here, but I also see it as a, you know, drawing, because it's a stick, you know, it's not a brush. And that's how he started. And a lot of people say that when he was hiding in his closet, there was this lamp, and that lamp is
01:02:06
Speaker
very often in his paintings. Yeah, the light bulb there, the bare light bulb. And that was in his studio as well. So yeah, that's a key figure. Yeah. Yeah.
01:02:19
Speaker
So yeah, well, this was fun. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you. No, this was great. So that's Philip Gustin. And thank you, Joanna. This has been lovely. Thank you, listeners, for listening. And next time, we'll see you with another show and another artist. Take care. Thank you. Bye.