Philip Guston - Return To Representational Art

Return To Representational Art

In 1967 Guston moved to Woodstock. He was increasingly frustrated with abstraction and began painting representationally again, but in a rather personal, cartoonish manner. The first exhibition of these new figurative paintings was held in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. It received scathing reviews from most of the art establishment (notably from the New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer who, in an article entitled "A Mandarin pretending to be a Stumblebum" ridiculed Guston's new style). One of the few who instantly understood the importance of those paintings was the painter Willem de Kooning who, at the time, said to Guston that they were "about freedom" (cited in Musa Mayer's biography of her father, Night Studio).

As a result of the poor reception of his new figurative paintings, Guston isolated himself even more in Woodstock, far from the art world which had so utterly misunderstood his art (see the initial reaction of Robert Hughes, critic for Time Magazine, who later was to change his views, in a scathing review entitled "Ku Klux Komix", and Hilton Kramer's NY Times review). His contract with the Marlborough gallery was not renewed and, after a short period without any dealer, he joined the recently opened David McKee Gallery (he had known McKee at Marlborough) to which he remained faithful until the end of his life.

In 1960, at the peak of his activity as an abstractionist, Guston said: "There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden." From 1968 onwards he made these words his motto. In this body of work he created a lexicon of images such as Klansmen, lightbulbs, shoes, cigarettes, and clocks. In late 2009, the McKee gallery in NYC, Guston's historic dealer, mounted a show revealing that lexicon in 49 small oils on panel painted between 1969 and 1972 that had never been publicly displayed as a whole. Guston is best known for these late existential and lugubrious paintings, which at the time of his death had reached a wide audience, and found great popular acceptance. Guston died in 1980 in Woodstock, New York.