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Philip Guston: some thoughts:
sparked by a traveling retrospective and a recent memoir
of the painter, the author proposes some new frames of
reference for thinking about Guston's art - currently
at London's Royal Academy - Cover Story
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A Fantasy
In my ideal world, there would exist somewhere a Philip
Guston Museum, in which a generous selection of Guston's
paintings and drawings would be permanently on view. Let
me quickly add that I don't feel this way about every artist
whose work I admire. I'm perfectly content to wait out the
decades between Joan Mitchell or Willem de Kooning retrospectives,
for instance, satisfying myself with single works in museums
and the occasional gallery show. When it comes to Guston,
however, I feel a constant, almost physical hunger for his
paintings, particularly the late ones, and rejoice in each
chance I have to see some of them. This need is so keen
that even as I am immersed in looking at a Guston canvas,
I find it impossible to forget that the opportunity is fleeting,
that all too soon the show will close or the museum will
rehang its collection, and I will once again be forced to
live in a Gustonless world.
In such a Guston Museum, visitors could return repeatedly
to the artist's 1970s paintings, those seemingly inexhaustible
visual commentaries on the human condition. They could also
contemplate the exemplary way in which Guston developed
and changed over the decades. There is an ethical aspect
to his career and art that has been all too rare in recent
art history, and I think this is one of the sources of his
ability to fascinate viewers like me. In addition, beyond
the rich visual, emotional and philosophical content of
the work itself, a Guston Museum would help illuminate much
art made in the years since Guston's death, for he has been
one of the main influences on American painting, both abstract
and figurative, in the last quarter century.
Given the rarity with which major American artists get
their own museums, I don't expect my fantasy Guston Museum
to actually materialize (though one prescient collector,
Edward R. Broida, owns enough Gustons to launch such an
institution practically by himself), but seeing the traveling
Guston retrospective at tile Metropolitan Museum of Art
last fall and winter made me yearn for it all the more.
This is the first full-scale Guston survey in this country
since the artist's death in 1980 (less than a month before
Guston died, a big exhibition of his work began a national
tour; in 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted
a show of Guston's drawings that spanned his career). The
earliest works in the show date from 1930, when the precocious
17-year-old was cribbing effortlessly from Picasso and de
Chirico, and the last from 1980, when, slowed by a heart
attack the year before (a second attack would prove fatal
on June 7, 1980), the artist turned to acrylic and ink to
add a few final episodes to his darkly comic chronicle.
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