The Brooklyn Rail

Although so much has been written about Philip Guston of late, his works yield continuous surprises. Of course, it all begins with the insistence of his images. His assertive storytelling holds us in thrall as details abound.

The late prints in this show, titled Room, Sea & Sky, on view through October 26, take us inside Guston’s head as, in the last year of his life, 1980, he reworked and concentrated themes and obsessions. In these lithographs, created with his print collaborator Gemini G.E.L., we find his dreams and fears documented. His narratives play out in the piles of hobnailed shoes trapping him in his bed, evoking concentration camps, and in the sky and sea filled with clouds and waves of ordinary objects playing against pipes and dangling limbs.

Emotions run high in Guston, with introversion spelled out in the tangles of things, evoking wars, politics, memories, nightmares, and self-perpetuated demons in the form of cigarettes, alcohol, hamburgers, and French fries—all ready to attack.

These lithographs are filled with “the painter’s forms”—the everyday objects—that are his vocabulary. The images in this show take us from works such as Room (1980), a conglomeration of legs and studded hoof-like feet, to Curtain (1980), with fixtures hanging from a string above the artist’s signature Cyclopean face, to Door (1980) featuring a prominent black lock that keeps at bay an arsenal of objects consisting of everything from possibly lungs or kidneys to an arm pushing against an intruding shield, perhaps. The congested Pile Up (1980) literally gathers and compresses limbs and pipelike forms.

Moving outside, Sky (1980) is filled with furies in the form of arms once again wielding fists that hold forth against manhole covers or trashcan lids acting as shields, fighting against time. These images interestingly skip back Guston’s Abstract Expressionist paintings to his early Social Realist pictures and other figurative works. And then, we come upon floating heads and crawling limbs moving into or trying to escape the ocean in Sea (1980). Angst and agitation prevail.

At the heart of the action in all these works is the struggle between abstraction and figuration, where the parts and whole share near equal sway. It stands as a record of life’s transitions with the parts composing the legs, wheels, and open and shut doors aiming to ward off mortality.

In her poignant memoir Night Studio, Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, refers to the imagery in her father’s late works “not as ‘Art’, but as real things in the world, painter’s forms to be reviewed again and again.” In this way, printmaking is the ideal vehicle, a chance to replay, reconfigure, and provide art with an extended life, traversing time and trends.

Mayer wondrously reveals finding notes in one of her father’s drawers that most concisely and eloquently sum up his relation to his objects, including “Dried blood stains … Empty booze bottles … The hands of clocks … Empty streets,” etc. She tells how he said in an interview with Bill Berkson in Art News that he had rediscovered the “pleasures of narrative,” elaborating, “You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread.”

So here Guston exposes the humble magic of creation and sets his wry, one-eyed figure to cover the whole mess, as, tightly tucked into his bed, he sends up plumes of cigarette smoke, scorning and laughing at the universe. We feel his feelings.