Iconography, II

Some scattered, straggling thoughts; prompted by the post of last week...

The initial cold reception that greeted Guston's later work wasn't solely because of the artist's abrupt change in style. The content of the paintings likewise baffled and alarmed a number of his viewers. The recurrent motifs of disembodied feet, shoes and legs; the caricatured bulbous head with its giant peering blooshot eye, the bare lightbulbs dangling from the studio ceiling, etc. – some sort of limited, redundant and often esoteric inventory of the artist’s life, many assumed. But what of the hooded figures – Klansmen, obviously – that repeatedly populate many of the images? Hooded figures loitering about or driving around town in a car, almost always smoking cigarettes. A cryptic and controversial motif, appearing in painting after painting. A good many people found it troubling, since the images offered no clear explanation, no key for its own decoding.

Little surprise that the explanation lay in Guston’s own life. Philip Guston (née Goldstein) had been born in Montreal in 1913, the son of Ukranian Jewish immigrants, but mostly grew up in Los Angeles. This was the years following the release of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, in which nationwide membership in the Ku Klux Klan was at its highest. Guston remembered as a child seeing the Klan hold parades in the streets of Los Angeles; as well as hearing the rumors and reports of their assaults on targeted individuals and communities, their role in strike-breaking and attacks on unionists. Guston may have heard his parents talk about the pogroms that had been carried out back in their native Odessa, and at a young age came to associate the knights of the Klan with Cossacks, seeing them as an American version thereof.

At the age of eighteen, Guston had already taken up painting and had joined an L.A. chapter of the John Reed Club. At one point, Guston and some of his fellow Club members decided to create an exhibition of murals devoted to the subject of racism in America, inspired by the recent scandal surrounding the trail of the Scottsboro Boys. Guston decided to do a painting that depicted a Klan lynching, producing a number of sketches for the work in the process. When the show opened, it was promptly raided by an group of angry men (led, apparently, by members of the local American Legion) who defaced and destroyed many of the works; one reputedly using a handgun on Guston’s painting, shooting it through with several bulletholes.


* * * *

Guston’s work in the earliest stage of his career had been quite different from the Abstract Expressionist style he would explore in the years following WWII. In those early years, his work was highly figurative in orientation, often classically-referenced, intermixed with modernist influences by way of Picasso’s “neo-classicist” period and the work of Fernand Léger. During the Great Depression, Guston had – like many of his contemporaries – received some piecemeal employment for public projects through the Works Progress Administration. Much of his duties involved preparatory sketches and designs for projects that were never realized, but it was one of Guston’s murals – “Maintaining America’s Skills” – that graced the façade of the WPA Community Building at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

In 1946, a painting of Guston’s would also be included in the aborted 1946 State Department international exhibition "Advancing American Art." Intended as a Cold War PR exercise on behalf of the Truman administration, the exhibition was promptly recalled and the work sold off in the wake of a public outcry which had been stirred up in the press. Much of the controversy had been provoked by William Randolph Heart, who had rallied his publishing resources to launch a smear campaign against the show. The modernist tilt of the exhibition was labeled as an embarrassing misrepresentation of the nation's artist culture and a scandalous misuse of tax dollars.

Iconography

The recently-launched Philip Guston Catalogue Raisonné project has a tumblr, which appears to be a documentation of works gathered for the pending publication. Uploaded acrhronolically, with images of wildly varied sizing and quality, it proves a fragmentary account of what was perhaps the wonkiest (or at least most baffling) careers in 20th-century American art.

In Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, the artist's daughter recalls the reception of Guston's late-career shift:

Not all of his friends understood. [Morton] Feldman's failure to react favorably to the new work hurt my father deeply. Their friendship never really recovered, although Morty was always on Philip's mind and in his heart; in 1977 he painted 'Friend -- to M.F.' It is a poignant image, as [art critic] Robert Storr observes, of their 'mutually regretted estrangement'; Morty's head is half turned away from the viewer.

'Why did you have to go and ruin everything?' one painter said angrily at the Marlborough opening. My mother wrote in her diary, 'P. says Lee Krasner hadn't spoken to him at the gallery; had told someone that the work was "embarrassing."'

Reportedly, one of the work's few advocates at the time was critic Harold Rosenberg, who recognized that the cartoonish jumbles of imagery not only involved a personal inventory, but was also a political response to the times. Writing in The New Yorker, Rosenberg argued, "Guston's new crudeness has, however, an important expressive function: it enables him to give a simple account of the simple-mindedness of violence."