On Art
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art THE VALUE OF TRANQUILITY BY VIVIEN RAYNOR comic but certainly not trivial detail of the '60s was the effect of the jugendstil on the not-sojung. Much as tousled female...
...To me, Guernica is a very cool stage set...
...Meanwhile, the Depression was heating up the political atmosphere...
...Thus when catastrophe comes, be it a lynching in the South or holocaust in Europe, he is in effect on the barricades as he seeks ways to "allegorize it...
...this is evident merely from the photographs of his face—very striking and unwavering in its expression of intense seriousness...
...Why Guston and a great many others of his generation here and in Europe were so besotted with Piero della Francesca (to no visible effect on their paintings) is a mystery...
...And when the artist under consideration is an Abstract Expressionist, however lapsed, the reading can be tough homework...
...But (to echo the title) Guston is so emblematic of his time and adopted country, this account demands to be read, if only as an historical and social document...
...Candor is a devalued word that today connotes exhibitionism and, sometimes, malice, so one hesitates to apply it to Guston...
...More devastating than his question is Guston's statement that the trouble with modern art is that "it needs too much sympathy...
...There is a neurasthenic, fidgety quality to the way the paint strokes cluster in the middle of the canvases, as if they feared the edges...
...Since Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, how many Guston-like sensibilities have raged far into the night, trying to find "a plastic condition, where the compressed forms and spaces" would express their feelings about one kind of catastrophe or another...
...Small wonder the '60s dragged him out of moral retirement...
...The painter was born in Montreal in 1913, of poor immigrant parents whose lot was not much improved by moving to Los Angeles six years later...
...The transition from representation to abstraction was now taking place as well: Attenuated, flat and stylized figures similar to those of Shahn gave way to still flatter designs suggestive of landscape but patterned with sharp, squarish shapes...
...To contemplate a book about such an artist is to suspect, despite an author as distinguished as Dore Ashton, reputation salvaging...
...Artists, belonging to the profession that had invented bohemianism, succumbed to the neobohemian look, too—De Kooning, for example, with his snowy locks cut in Beatle bangs...
...Ashton's style, normally limpid and stately, is here agitated as it twists and turns in pursuit of Guston's conflicting thoughts...
...Looking back and speculating on Guston's life, Ashton suggests that some temperaments can be defined by the questions they ask...
...For representative and abstract artists alike, it would be easier to walk naked on the street at noon than paint the real object...
...Given his lifelong preoccupation with the meaning and purpose of art, he is not a good person to become...
...The '30s have been so romanticized that even Walker Evans' photographs of a starving peasantry have somehow become charming...
...One hardly knows which of the two arouses more compassion—or, at times, impatience...
...The aims and accomplishments of the truly serious reformers notwithstanding, the decade had the ambience of a fancy dress ball...
...He began to draw at the age of 12 and was enrolled in the Manual Arts School, where Jackson Pollock was a schoolmate...
...Brushstrokes became larger, combining into more definite shapes, and the allusiveness gave way to paintingas-objectness...
...Whether in California, Mexico or New York, Guston was invariably in the thick of things, consumed with the desire to bring modernism and social reform together: It turns out that his recent radicalism has been nurtured for 40 years...
...A discomfiting question, it states the modernist predicament with appalling naivete...
...True, but Guston is not simply his questions: He is the sum of his answers, his all-night talking and walking, his chain-smoking, reading and endless "knowing and not knowing how to enact...
...He departed prematurely once more and began working at odd jobs—including being an extra in the movies She and Svengali...
...Hilton Kramer, reviewing Guston's Marlborough Gallery show of crudelydrawn compositions of objects...
...To some extent Yes, but . . . : A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Viking, 206 pp., $16.95) justifies all these forebodings...
...And while he is not didactic, he has a positively 19th-century Russian view of the importance of art as a moral force...
...Intimations of landscape persisted in the nonobjective canvases of the first half of the '50s, when he had moved back to New York—participating in its "school" and exhibiting regularly in its galleries...
...Expelled for this mischief (Pollock was later reinstated), Guston went on to win a scholarship to the Otis Arts Institute, an equally unsatisfactory training ground for a young man already interested in Cubism...
...Ashton thinks it not unreasonable to see Guston's paintings of the '50s as deriving from Mondrian's plusand-minus seascapes...
...Both boys were troublemakers, demanding a "creative arts project" (could that really have been the term for it in those days...
...and drawing at night...
...Never alone in his search, Guston now shares it with all of society...
...When, in 1970, the work of Philip Guston changed from a rather dour Abstract Expressionism to a kind of political cartooning, it seemed another artist had been smitten...
...Although the similarity is marked when viewed in reproduction, one remembers the originals looking like mirages hovering over a plain...
...Finally, there was the WPA, the acknowledged foundation of America's supremacy as a world art power...
...yet Picasso was, as everyone knows, the master "feeler" of the 20th century, the only modernist painter to pull off an indictment that is also great art...
...It continued with a succession of grants and prizes, including a Prix de Rome in 1948...
...The fact that he was then teaching seminars at the New York Studio School, formed in protest against the absurdity of orthodox art academics, reenforced the impression, and the critics came to some uncharitable conclusions that were all too easy to draw...
...Simply put, it is a matter of feeling alive only when in crisis...
...He did better than most as far as government sponsored commissions went, working on murals up to 1942, including one for the WPA building at the 1939 World's Fair...
...in a place that was, apparently, very jock-oriented...
...A Wyeth barn is no more real than a Barnett Newman stripe, or...
...In the peace of the Midwest his realism—always competent —became less muscular, more romantic and, in general, more reflective of the influence of Chirico...
...The image itself, if further anthropomorphization may be excused, seems to want to be a portrait of something...
...He was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa at the War's outbreak...
...What is more, biographies of living masters are by nature unsatisfying: They can be neither complete nor wholly disinterested...
...Color was never a strong point of Guston's and even when used pure, the overall effect was of atonal mixture...
...That is to say, their paint either added up to an impression of blueness, yellowness, silveriness and so forth, as in the case of Pollock, or was slapped on simply for brightness—as with Adolph Gottlieb and James Brooks...
...Much as tousled female hair, according to Rebecca West, denoted the suffragette 50 years ago, so an abundance of male hair and sideburns marked those reborn as radicals...
...In any event, Guston as a teacher devoted himself to reconciling Piero with Picasso, Braque and Leger, a task that was probably more arduous in those days than it would be now...
...boots, clocks, Ku Klu Klan figures, brimming ashtrays—called him a "Mandarin pretending to be a Stumblebum...
...For this, even the most honorable writers tend to overcompensate with hyperperceptiveness and heavy rationalization...
...Recognition began with the receipt of the Carnegie Award in 1945 for Sentimental Moment, a study of a woman...
...Why is it," he asks rhetorically, "that I can't paint the real object...
...Indeed, with the exception of Robert Motherwell, who became very sensitive to the respective voltages of colors, the Abstract Expressionists were generally concerned with gesture almost to the exclusion of color...
...Guston's work was nicknamed Abstract Impressionism...
...Still, candid he is...
...the more conclusive the crisis the greater the sensation of being...
...Toward the end of the decade, this quality disappeared...
...for that matter, a political convention—the quality "real" has simply gone beyond human reach...
...The fairest children may be conceived out of wedlock, but the finest art happens, as a rule, in tranquility, sometimes boredom...
...At the same time, he was increasingly torn between the ideals of his equally beloved periods in art, the 15th and 20th centuries...
...Nevertheless, the agitation that can be seen in his work is ultimately personal...
...Ashton's sensitivity to her subject is so acute, she almost becomes the painter as she writes about him...
...It is now recounted as a social experience for the creative poor, with magazines of all shades to be read, from the New Yorker to the New Masses, and, for the aspiring painter, exotic journals like Cahiers d'Art bringing news of the European avant garde...
...That, of course, is the opinion of someone who can rarely perceive the political message in a painting...
...Matching his passion for Piero and Chirico is a devotion to writers like Kafka and Dostoevsky, in whose work he sees his own consuming anxiety...
...Yet this painter's best work was done during the relatively dull times of his life, when the universal issues were less visible...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
