DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- East Wing -- Exhibit: In the Tower: Philip Guston:
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- Description of Pictures: In the Tower: Philip Guston
January 15, 2009 – January 3, 2010
Overview: 9 paintings and 8 prints created by American artist Philip Guston between 1948 and 1980 were presented in this installation. Of the works, 14 were drawn from the Gallery's collection, including gifts from Edward R. Broida and Musa Guston, the artist's widow. The installation was supplemented by 3 works on loan from public and private collections. This was the first in a new series of focus exhibitions on developments in art since the 1970s to be shown in the East Building Tower Gallery. Henri Matisse's cutouts, which were long displayed there, were moved to the Concourse prior to the exhibition opening
A 6-minute film about Guston and his work, created by the department of exhibition programs, was shown in the installation.
Organization: The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Harry Cooper, of the department of modern and contemporary art, was curator.
Sponsor: The exhibition was supported by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art. The film was made possible by the HRH Foundation.
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- NGEGUS_090329_07.JPG: Philip Guston:
"It's the unsettling of the image that I want," Philip Guston told a critic in 1955. He might have said the same of his career. Over the course of five decades, Guston painted his way from the mural art of the Depression through mid-century abstract expressionism to a raw new imagery in the sixties.
Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913 and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919. His early years were marked by tragedy and violence. He lost his father to suicide around 1924 and his older brother to an accident about six years later. Local Ku Klux Klan activity politicized the self-taught artist, whose first works depict hooded figures and lynchings in the proto-surrealist style of Giorgio de Chirico. In 1936, he joined his high-school buddy Jackson Pollock in New York City, and for the next ten years he made his way as a New Deal muralist and college art teacher.
Everything changed for Guston around 1950, when this survey begins. In Review, the figurative imagery of his early work gives way to abstraction, as enigmatic forms are washed over with red, a color that would later become his trademark. It was not long before Guston joined Pollock and Willem de Kooning as a leader of the New York art scene, making paintings such as Oasis (1957) that were dubbed "abstract impressionist" for their delicacy. A second change can be seen in works such as Untitled (1964), in which mysterious gray shapes emerge from a hash of black-and-white stokes.
In 1967, Guston retreated to Woodstock, New York. Three years later, he shocked the art world with a Manhattan exhibition that reintroduced the figure (see Courtroom, 1970). Political unrest had triggered a return of his nefarious Klansmen, but now through the lens of the comics. White Guston's career seemed to shift dramatically, his spontaneous, painterly approach and fondness for red remained constant. Amid a flood of criticism, Guston explained: "I got tired of all that Purity -- wanted to tell stories."
The stories can be read in the last three paintings here, which overflow with ambiguous imagery. A pile of legs oddly recalls photographs of concentration-camp victims as well as Robert Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" figure. A wig parted in the middle refers not only to Guston's wife, Musa, who had just suffered a stroke, but to Constantin Brancusi's sculpture "The Kiss." Despite failing health, Guston continued to paint prolifically. He helped install a retrospective of his work in early 1980 and died later that year, just as a new generation of painters was discovering his protean art.
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