SUNDAY, MAY 8, 2022 EZ EE E9loved. (Guston befriended many living poets,
including Boston’s William Corbett, who wrote a
powerful memoir reflecting on the late work.
There are also superb memoirs by the writer Ross
Feld and Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer.)
The exhibition proceeds roughly according to
chronology. But it mixes in some works from
different periods to show how each of Guston’s
phases was subtly connected. The later figures
with Klan-like hoods, for instance, emerged out of
early work that directly confronted racism and the
politics of terror.
The connections have to do with style as well as
content. The swishy, oily brushstrokes in Guston’s
late works build on the soft, feathery touch of his
abstract phase, but they cast off any suggestion of
painterly virtuosity. Guston wanted to arrive at
what Feld called the “satisfiedly ‘dumb’ picture.”
(Hence the allegation by Hilton Kramer that
Guston, when he reverted to figuration, was “a
mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” — one
of the most memorable phrases in art criticism.)
In all three periods, we see Guston’s interest in
piled-up forms, objects and body parts. Guston let
lines become shapes and shapes subjects, without
ever insisting that this shape denoted this single
thing — rather hinting that it might also be
another thing, perhaps any old thing. His intuitive
approach was thrilling.
In a letter to Feld, he once referred to “a
generous law that exists in art” — a law that allows
forms “to spin away, take off, as if they have their
own lives to lead.” The Klan hoods were one
example of this. Guston wanted to protect this law
“from minds that close in and itch (God knows
why) to define it.”
So it’s wrong to press too hard on the notion
that the hood paintings were overt anti-racist
statements. They were much more ambiguous
and interesting than that, and in their dumb
clunkiness, their evil, their idiocy, they implicate
all of us.
Guston was drawn to the idea of debacle and
aftermath. Like Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer,
and like so many of the 20th century’s great
writers and filmmakers (from Samuel Beckett and
Federico Fellini to T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats), he
was alive to the poetry — and comedy — of
fragments, rubble and ruins.
His private alphabet of shapes and motifs have
the appearance of allegories. They s eem to point to
meanings out in the world. But as Guston’s
language became more and more private and
interior, his motifs resembled symbols that have
collapsed in on themselves. They evoke estab-
lished meanings that have been toppled, like an
imperial statue, its arm broken off, its finger
pointing at nothing.
Guston’s p ictures combine large-scale painterly
authority with the concision of underground
comics. His eye, wrote Feld, “was trained unspar-
ingly on objects that seemed to have stunned
reality into a temporary stasis.” They can trigger
the same delight as a cartoon character whacked
on the head by a policeman’s baton. In their
“stuckness,” they can also be full of pathos and
almost unbearably poignant.
Anyone who knows anything about Guston
realizes that he would have loathed the MFA’s
presentation of his work. But in death he has
apparently forfeited his rights.
And so, it seems, have museum-goers. We may
have grown accustomed to exhibitions that simul-
taneously encourage us to see the world through
artists’ eyes and trust us to think our own
thoughts. That’s now old school. Instead, we must
“lean in to the discomfort of anti-racist work” (this
is from Klee’s “Emotional Preparedness” state-
ment) as we strive for “good change,” which is
always “uncomfortable,” never forgetting to take
care of ourselves and prioritize self-love and rest.
(“Rest is productive. Rest is resistance,” Klee
concludes.)
I suppose all this is coming from a good place.
But it’s in a bad place. It doesn’t belong in an art
museum, which should offer sensible warnings
but show faith in the idea that art offers insights
inaccessible even to qualified therapists.
Only on my second walk through the show,
when I made a conscious decision not to read
anything, did I remember how much I love Guston
and his hectic, overbearing, goofy, maudlin, self-
mocking, mute and reliably perverse view of the
world. In a time of cant, where almost every
cultural product is advertising something and
defending preemptively against something else,
Guston’s generous art is liberating.Philip Guston Now Through Sept. 11 at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. mfa.org.rt
found art, patronizingly displayedTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON, COURTESY OF HAUSER & WIRTH/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART/ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON,
COURTESY OF HAUSER & WIRTH/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTONMILDRED LANE KEMPER ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS/ESTATE OF PHILIP GUSTON, COURTESY OF HAUSER & WIRTH/MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: “Couple in Bed” (1977), “Dial” (1956), “If This
Be Not I” (1945), “Web” (1975) and “Aegean” (1978). Philip Guston’s career
divides into three main phases: early figurative work, informed by leftist beliefs
and Mexican muralists; “abstract impressionism”; and a return to figuration.