Philip Guston Now

The first thing to be said is, quite simply, we won. You’ll remember that Philip Guston Now was scheduled to open in June 2020 at the National Gallery in Washington, commencing a tour that would take the retrospective to Houston, London, and Boston. In the wake of the pandemic, those in charge of the National Gallery—notably its director, Kaywin Feldman, and one of its board members, Darren Walker—decided, not to delay the show until the pandemic pause was over, but to postpone it “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted”—which was prognosticated to be the year 2024.

In short, Guston’s use, in paintings he was making circa 1970, of hooded figures reminiscent of Ku Klux Klansmen was considered too incendiary, too hard to stomach for the general public. Somehow a way had to be found to re-represent Guston in such a way that no one would be offended—and above all, that no one would be offended at the institution, the artist be damned. It was never exactly clear why exactly four years was determined as the time it took to achieve this unlikely goal.

This remarkable loss of nerve on the part of one of our great public institutions did not go unnoticed. On September 30, 2020, the Rail published a letter, eventually signed by some 2600 artists, critics, historians, and art lovers in general, taking to task the National Gallery and the other museums involved in the exhibition for their fear of controversy and lack of faith in their public, and demanding “that Philip Guston Now be restored to the museums’ schedules, and that their staffs prepare themselves to engage with a public that might well be curious about why a painter—ever self-critical and a standard-bearer for freedom—was compelled to use such imagery.”

Those of us who spoke up then won in two senses: First, although Williams, Walker, and their colleagues never admitted their mistake, they agreed that Philip Guston Now did not need to wait until 2024 to meet the curious eyes of the public. The show opened in May 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, whence it traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, before now reaching the National Gallery; it will be shown at Tate Modern, October 5, 2023–February 25, 2024. But we were also right in that, here in Washington, Guston’s art has once again proved itself capable of communicating its own profound concerns to anyone willing to look thoughtfully and see feelingly.

I have to say that this was not so clear in the somewhat smaller version of the show that was presented in Boston, where Guston’s early social realist work was overemphasized, and his abstract work of the 1950s through mid-’60s was downplayed, presumably in a defensive move to use its more straightforward, unambiguous imagery to establish his leftist, anti-racist credentials. But the work Guston began making in 1968 was not a return to the style or ideas he’d harbored as a young man, despite the recurrence of certain symbols that are nonetheless used very differently. Just as far as Guston’s mature abstraction is from his earlier figuration, his late figuration is light-years beyond both. And the wall labels in Boston, which seemed to imply that Guston had no other abiding concerns than racism and antisemitism, left his specifically artistic concerns unspoken. The same went for his intense engagement with modern literature and with the political turmoil of his times.

In Washington, by contrast, the broader context was deftly and concisely indicated; the complexity of Guston’s thinking was in evidence not only in the paintings themselves but in the accompanying didactic materials. What comes through, again and again, is the intensity of Guston’s self-questioning: his recurrent wish to have “dismantled everything and started from scratch,” his incessant sense of internal conflict, his conviction (pun intended) that in his art, the canvas is—not, as his old friend Harold Rosenberg had said, an arena in which the individual artist has the freedom but also the obligation to act, but rather a different kind of space, one in which Guston felt divided against himself, a space of judgment: “a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge.” The hood, sign of the Klansman’s criminality, is also the capirote of the penitent, familiar to Guston from several works by one of his favorite painters, Francisco Goya—for instance the Procession of Flagellants (Procesión de disciplinantes), in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

Guston’s late work insists on aesthetic ambivalence and aesthetic ambiguity, but never in a way that lets the artist off the hook. And the same goes for the viewer who’s willing to take the paintings seriously. Rare are the painters with such a seductive touch as his, and yet to lull himself or the painting’s beholder into a pleasant dream state was always the opposite of his goal. He never effaced his own artfulness, but contradicted it at every turn. The result is an incomparable evocation of the drama of existence and testimony of a simmering fury against our exposure to calamity, violence, and futility.

In broad outline, much of what I’ve said should have been evident to anyone who’s looked closely at Guston’s work. What’s important is that the clarity of the presentation in Washington means that, unlike what happened in Boston, the exhibition did not get in the way of the art and its bottomless complexity. Here it was possible to do what Maurice Merleau-Ponty advised: “One should go to the Museum the way painters go there, in the joy of dialogue, and not as we amateurs go, with our spurious reverence.” The fear that Feldman and her colleagues nearly gave into was the fear that the great public who attend the National Gallery in some obscure hope of initiation into art might be incapable of such a dialogue. The exhibition, once mounted, suggests otherwise.

And the show was also a good opportunity for those who know Guston’s oeuvre to get a look at some relatively unfamiliar works. While I was a little disappointed not to see one of the Guston paintings I love best, Frame (1976), which shows what appears to be a framed picture of a red sea (a sea of blood?) floating atop dark blue waves under a pitch-dark sky, I was fascinated to discover a later painting—in fact one of Guston’s last canvases—that seems to answer it: Reverse (1979), a strangely pale depiction of the back of a stretched canvas leaning against a wall under one of Guston’s typical stark hanging light bulbs (which does not, however, succeed in illuminating the blackish floor on which the painting-within-the-painting sits.) Both paintings wonder about the artist’s own urge to make work in the absence of an answering context—in a world swept away on the waters of death or simply waiting patiently in the studio from which, as Guston once said, everyone has walked away, and from which at last the artist has departed too. (We should remember, then, that having won may turn out to be not worth very much.) What’s left—in the absence of either image or witness—is simply the testimony: This has been.