The Brooklyn Rail

Questions for a Lithograph by Philip Guston

It helps to know what is behind—for some reason I just typed “beyond”—a painting. What is behind the paint is usually canvas, and behind the canvas is usually a strainer or stretcher, the former consisting of four pieces of wood joined in a rectangle, often with a crossbar or two, and the latter expandable at its joints with the help of wooden keys that get tapped into slots. Even with crossbars, there is a chance the framework will shift out of true, so it’s a good idea to back the corners with triangular braces before you stretch the canvas.

Here are five or more such objects in various states of assembly. The one that rises above the others may be finished: it offers a graphic representation of a seascape with windblown rain over choppy, curling waves. Naturally, we cannot see the stretcher behind it, but we do get a look at another part of the infrastructure, the tacking margin, which is where the canvas gets pulled over the edges of the stretcher and nailed down. There are four absurdly large nails along this left edge, with the one at the top holding down that extra bit of canvas at the corner. (It’s like when you make a bed with a flat sheet and run into a folding problem at the corners.) This corner is none too neat and looks like an upside-down cone or a hood with a single eyehole, which is the way the artist liked to draw them. No hospital corners for him.

To the left of this painting and a bit lower is a strainer. We see it from the back along with one of those triangular braces, the biggest of all. We know the canvas has not yet been added because we can see through this framework to a smaller triangle behind it pointing the other way, and there are yet more strainers behind these, a virtual assembly line ready and waiting, even if the artist is nearing the end of his road. Moving to the right of the image, we find another strainer turned against the wall, its grained wood drawn in loving detail. It must have received its canvas because we do not see anything behind it. The four stray marks that we do see may represent slubs in the fabric. A couple of keys peek out from where the horizontal crossbar meets the vertical bar at right, indicating that this is actually a stretcher not a strainer.

But enough of that. There is a bigger legibility problem: all these stretchers or strainers, stacked and staggered against the wall, do not rest on the floor but rather sink impossibly into it, as if getting partly lost on the far side of a horizon. This floor, so strongly defined by shadows that press out to the wall, may not be a floor at all. Perhaps it is another sea, one filled with black ripples and eddies. The source of these shadowy ripples or rippling shadows is the crate at the very center of the image with its cargo of shoes. Upended, crooked, hugely curled on their pedestal, the shoes come as a relief after all those right angles and diagonals surrounding them.

What connects the central complex of crate and shoes to the paintings-in-progress? What is the logic of this conjunction? Well, a crate is also made of wood, and this one seems just as homemade as all the stretchers and strainers, held together as it is with more nails than you can shake a stick at. There are yet more nails on the shoes (or rather boots: if they were shoes these would be stitches). These nails are bigger than they need to be, suggesting hobnails, except that hobnails usually cover the sole to provide traction on uneven terrain or in muddy trenches (as in Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots (1887) at the Baltimore Museum of Art). These boots look like the kind of work shoes you might wear around a studio. (Remember that moment in the footage of Jackson Pollock painting outside the barn where he shakes a bottle cap out of a paint-spattered low-rise boot before pulling it on?)

Clearly, there is a theme of construction that runs through the image, an interest in how things are held together, be they boots or crates or paintings. Or is the lowest common denominator a formal desire on the part of the artist, an almost percussive need to draw lots of dots and dashes and lines (for that is really all there is here), bigger and smaller, darker and lighter, longer and shorter, thinner and fatter, straighter and curvier, closer and farther apart, more and less regularly spaced (but all sharing a certain wobble in their drawing, a characteristic quaver)—a desire which has found its occasion in a number of things: boots, crossbars, nails, woodgrain, ripples, shadows? Or are both logics, thematic and formal, equally at work, since there is no necessary conflict between them?

Here is another thought, another way to connect the central image to its surroundings while also making sense of the problem of those stretchers sinking into the floor: they are not floating in water but rather marching from left to right, emerging from over a horizon onto a bare shadowed plain, coming into view as they rise toward a completed image (the seascape) and then sink again. (Think of Nicolas Poussin’s The Holy Family on the Steps [1648], with its rising and subsiding triangle of figures.) It’s a heavy rhythm, foursquare, like the stamping of boots. There is the sense of a long journey, slow and deliberate; not just from left to right but forward and toward us, as conveyed by scale and overlaps, culminating in those two soles pressed almost against the picture plane, a riveting insult from which we cannot look away. “In your face!”

This long-march reading of the image need not displace the idea of a sea that leaks and spreads from the internal seascape across the scene. If the stretchers are marching, they also form a wave that rears up from the floor/horizon/sea before falling back again. And what is that crate doing if not floating uneasily, keeping its delicately balanced cargo aloft? It's not exactly Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), but it does make me think of my favorite Tom Hanks movie, Cast Away. Or the lyrics of a song from the 1930s that Billie Holiday made famous: “I rode the crest of a wave / With you beside me / Now who’s to guide me / Because I’m lost at sea.”

This double sense of march and drift, of structure and dissolution, of progress and loss, is no problem: these tensions are the deep structure of the image. All those too-big tacks and triangles are trying to hold something together, something that is hard to hold. The very words “stretcher” and “strainer” suggest effort, but to what end? To realize, at career’s end, a composition that looks like a tossed-off cartoon but whose architectonic structure and elaborate conceit, with its interwoven tensions and ambiguities, is worthy of Poussin? To capture the elusiveness of water and shadow with the simplest of means, to nail them down, to name the unnamable? To give us a look behind—or beyond—the canvas?

For Musa Mayer