The Brooklyn Rail

Philip Guston’s late paintings can be dense, dark, and apocalyptic, but Life with P. shows this period in a different light by setting some selected works from the artist’s last decade in the context of daily life. The exhibition grounds these works in Guston’s deep relationship to his wife Musa McKim, whose newly published journals, including her own drawings and poems, provide context—a quotidian stream of consciousness in which language and vision routinely merge. The show includes four large paintings that address issues related to marriage, but smaller paintings and works on paper predominate; Guston’s modest drawings of leaves or birds at a feeder have much in common with McKim’s meditative observations of nature and people.

The juxtaposition of words and images creates the sense of a common, cultivated space from which art might emerge, but the journal originates from a time of stress, both in the marriage and in Guston’s work. Its interweaving of personal and artistic conflicts begins with the couple separated—McKim in retreat at MacDowell Colony and Guston in Florida, confronting the end of an affair and trying to reconcile the abstraction of his “pure drawings,” which typically consist of just one ink-drawn line, to his “objects,” in which a few modifications to the “pure” line transform it into a humble coffee cup or book. McKim’s journal continues beyond MacDowell, sustaining her in their difficult reconciliation, while Guston’s struggle culminates in the rupture of his return to figuration, as showcased in his famous 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery. McKim describes that controversial show, their travels together in Europe, and their subsequent return to exile in Woodstock, chronicling the deep working relationship that sustained Guston’s final surge of productivity. Their daughter, Musa Mayer, who edited the journals, has explored that relationship more fully in her 1988 memoir, Night Studio.

The show’s dual focus sheds special light on its inclusion of eight collaborative “Poem Pictures,” in which Guston copied and graphically embellished McKim’s poems. If the show doesn’t include any of the major allegorical paintings Guston created during this exceptionally fertile period, the “Poem Pictures” convey their graphic invention on a more intimate level. In a letter to poet Bill Berkson, Guston commented, “It is a strange form for me in that it does make a new thing—a new image—words and images feeding off each other in unpredictable ways.” McKim’s poem “Unhappy Drugstore” (ca. 1972–1975) echoes the melancholia of Guston’s obdurate, isolated objects. His visual rendering—sustained by the formal stiffness of lettering that proudly asserts the presence of language—introduces geometric patterns to reinforce the text; even if Guston runs out of space at the end, the downward curl of the last line completes the poem with a gestural flourish.

Guston’s “Poem Pictures,” like his paintings, animate literal content within unstable visual contexts. In a composition that harks back to the “pure drawings,” Untitled (Wall) (1970) deploys a dozen picture objects on its planar surface, the playful heterogeneity of their “pure” outlines implying the collapse of modernist idealism. At the same time, their syncopated composition, full of surprises, exemplifies the overall understanding of placement that lent Guston’s abstractions visual identity. By this time, he could call his own stance of autonomous purity a “sham” and American abstract art “a mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself.” Yet in Pink Clouds (1972) he is still able to delineate an improvised internal framing motif with abstract authority, his graphic imagination constantly engaged, even on this modest scale.

A 2016 exhibition, Philip Guston: Painter, 1957–1967, traced the artist’s transition from abstraction to depiction through his consolidation of accumulated brushstrokes into objects, unnamed but endowed with mass and spatial location. The earliest work here, The Three (1964), resonates with those proto-depictions, but within the narrative context of this exhibition it readily lends itself to interpretation as a depiction of the nuclear family. It sets the stage for three other large works related to marriage. Blue Cover (1977), which anchors the group, exemplifies Guston’s “deceptively simple” approach to objects. Set in Renaissance perspective, like the room in Giotto’s Last Supper from Padua’s Arena Chapel, it depicts the king-size bed which Guston insisted on and which McKim, according to their daughter, felt was “not the best thing for a marriage.” The overall asymmetry of the bed and pillows and the mute contrast of the pillows—his robust and pink, hers painterly and multicolored—suggest underlying tensions, carnal intimacy discreetly masked.

Many have discussed Guston’s interest in allegory in terms of dense accumulations of objects in static piles, but the instabilities and displacements that animate Blue Cover endow its restraint with dramatic intensity. Two Hearts (1978) is more explicitly allegorical, its merger of tenderness and sadism bearing overtones of Christian martyrdom that are reinforced by an extraordinary portrait of McKim on the adjacent wall. Here, her ears mirror the asymmetry of Blue Cover’s pillows and her eyes turn to heaven beneath the decorative scroll of her hair, whose pure form offers reassuring containment, just as her journal lends a sense of routine to the daily stress of life with an artist.