Philip Guston’s extensive career, spanning from the 1930s to 1980, evolved through a number of stylistic transformations. Guston began working as a figurative painter in the 1930s, but his artistic inspiration subsequently stimulated a reconsideration of his work, turning towards abstraction in the late 1940s as part of the abstract expressionist movement. And in the 1960s, marking the final phase of his career, Guston returned to figurative painting.[1] Yet throughout each decade, Guston’s work remained bound in historical narratives and contemporary socio-political events;[2] the Vietnam War and the violent hate-crimes of the Ku Klux Klan held visible influence on Guston’s work. With these inspirational forces, Guston focused simultaneously on personal reactions—his own responses to the greater issues of our culture. Guston responded to the ordinariness of daily life, combining elements of individual consciousness with the collective unconscious punctuated with hints of historical narrative. He rejected “intellectual self-consciousness” to paint the most ordinary of objects, his creativity fostered by an inherent impulse to create and represent commonalities.[3] This embraced sense of freedom, apparent in Guston’s paintings, results in a developed, unmitigated success; Guston embraces struggling through resistance as his “free-associat[ion] technique allows subject-matter to unfold naturally.”[4]
Guston translates this sense of freedom to his handling of medium, as well, embracing the potential of oil paint. In the introductory passage to his interview with Guston, Mark Stevens commends Gustons ability to combine “a seductive touch with a rough awkwardness of line and shape” in his “brutal and visceral” imagery.[5] This juxtaposition of inner innocence with hints of violent harshness call to mind a childhood curiosity, representing what they know and see with underlying layers of unrecognized and unresolved inner desires—whether violent or sexual—suggesting a heightened sense of unease.
The two selected painting featured in Child’s Play exhibit contrasting themes using a comparable stylistic technique. As It Goes (1978) and Flatlands (1970) both come from Guston’s abandonment of his previous style that his audience came to expect. As It Goes exemplifies Guston’s independence from his previous identity as an abstract artist; Guston established a newly reclusive lifestyle and his aesthetic style became more simplified, focusing on the rawness of objects. In As It Goes Guston applies thick, opaque paint to give weight to each object. The watch, eyeglasses, paintbrush, and ambiguous circular objects in the background appear tangible, and the effect of Guston’s brushwork remains consistent across the canvas. The humor in this painting, however, comes through in Guston’s demonstration of understood perspective. Harry Cooper, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., favorably likens this stylistic decision to propensities of “a child who has just learned perspective…register[ing] thickness with comical diligence by revealing just enough of the side of each object to show depth.”[6] Revealing similar themes of object-ness, Flatlands, despite certain imaginative elements, assumes a more political tone. Guston floats objects which carry childlike connotations in an ambiguous space; a nailed piece of wood sits below a rising sun which is mimicked in shape by a clock (reading 4:00) plunged into the ground in front of a brick wall being pointed at by a hovering finger. The playful quality of this painting, however, ends as viewers home in on the pair of severed legs sprawled in front of two hooded heads that evoke Ku Klux Klansmen.[7] The flattened out composition of this painting, as well as the pink palette that simultaneous “suggests both blood and pastel playfulness,” offer a personal interpretation to the incongruities between social prejudice and cultural reactions.
Philip Guston, As It Goes, 1978
Oil on canvas
Philip Guston, Flatlands, 1970
Oil on canvas
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[1] The New Republic, 26
[2] Art in America, 88
[3] The New Republic, 25
[4] October Magazine, 105
[5] The New Republic, 25
[6] October Magazine, 103
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