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One characteristic of great art is its self-erasing quality: its ability to make you forget that you are, say, looking at a painting, or listening to a symphony, or reading a novel, and thereby to dissolve the fourth wall between creator and viewer. This is a quality that Philip Guston’s paintings have in spades. Received wisdom in recent decades – reversing their initial icy reception – is that his best works are the intransigent paintings he produced after switching from a fully-realised, lyrical Abstract Expressionism (or ‘Abstract Impressionism’ as his style was often termed) to awkward, confessional figuration in 1968. One of the several achievements of the gorgeous and troubling retrospective of his paintings at the Royal Academy, though, is that it papers over the apparent fissures in Guston’s oeuvre, emphasising continuities of form and intention so that it appears all of a piece, and as such it’s much harder to make these straightforward qualitative decisions. The clear upside of this is that there is diamond-dust sprinkled over the whole show, rather than only in its second act; what we’re compelled to accept is that Guston continually painted Gustons, and Gustons tend – though not always, as we shall see – to be wonderful things, no matter what aesthetic school they seem to belong to.

Early Gustons are strange, though. Finding his feet from his teenage years onward – and blessed from the first, it appears, with an academic but forceful drawing style – the artist rattled restlessly through Picasso-knockoff portraits of statuesque women; tightly painted premonitory figuration (his tondo set in a city street under aerial attack, Bombardment (1937-38), in which figures are first compressed into the tight space then blown forward by an explosion at its centre, retains a visceral charge for all its compositional showiness); and grimy, memorable New York street scenes in which feral children joust with dustbin lids and sticks, and hide their faces – menacing or fearful, one wonders – behind masks. Guston would return to masks; seeing this early iteration of a later iconography, one has a first prickling sensation that his career unfolded according to, if not a strict plan, then at least certain inviolable precepts – one of which was that there is always more to be mined from a forceful image. Fast-forward to his later ruminations on hobnailed boots and cigarettes, and this becomes self-evident.





But between the earlier heterogeneity and the later tight self-scrutiny there is a roseate sea to be traversed: that of the celebrated abstractions which Guston produced in the 1950s. ‘Abstract’ is perhaps a misnomer for these paintings which, given that their fleshy palette prefigures that of the figurative paintings Guston would later make, in retrospect always seem to be concealing or exploding a human presence. Formally they tend to comprise concentrations of scumbled pinkish dashes, radiating outward from the centre of a paler field. Sometimes they feel less like corporeal entities in space than embodiments of thoughts about human frailty; always, though, one has an intimation of sentience, of a life trapped – in both positive and negative senses. Guston could be wildly and teasingly allusive in his titling; Fable 1 (1956-7), with its endlessly activated tussles between deep, forest green and sky blue, its push-pull of black, orange and cadmium red, could be a Brothers Grimm tale deconstructed into its colourist elements; with another title it could be something else entirely. An awareness of the fictional, narrative quality of paintings is never far from the surface of Guston’s work. Mark Rothko once told him ‘you are the best storyteller, and I am the best organ player’. And again, when Guston subsequently moved away from abstraction it was, he said, because he wanted to tell stories.

The RA show marks that crucial stylistic transition intelligently, blurring it – a full-blown figuration of three Klan heads is placed non-chronologically between two dark, pregnant abstractions – as if to stage the doubts and second thoughts that must have been in Guston’s mind when he made the shift. From here on in, though, there’s no looking back. The early-’70s figurative inclusions reflect a fantastic release of irrational energy, as Guston spun his polymorphic Klansmen – representing himself and his doubts and hypocrisies, as well as refracting the repressive tendencies that led to the revolutionary fervour of the late ’60s – through all kinds of situations, from driving in a cartoon jalopy to sitting hunched over a kitchen table. Besides the cartoonishness that came from the avowed influence on Guston’s thick black outlines of Krazy Kat creator George Herriman, there’s a slapstick quality to the lurching compositions which, if anything, makes the cloudy self-skewering they enclose more plaintive. One also notices a continued reliance on a consistent stylistic vocabulary: the bare light-bulbs, cigarettes, clocks, accusatory fingers and boots that recur in these paintings are as regular and, in a way, comforting as the perfected painterly tricks that had made Guston’s abstractions look like nobody else’s.

Then, the endless hangover. Throughout the ’70s, Guston dug his scalpel-brush still further into himself, repeatedly essaying blackly comic portraits of the artist as a bed-ridden loser, inveterate smoker and drinker with a grotesque, peeled, Cyclopean eye wide open through insomniac nights. He was capable of great joyous breakthroughs, as is attested to by Aegean (1978), a seascape above which hands punch targets in an ecstatic, domino effect. But often he appears to be struggling against the same unsurpassable cosmic odds that occasionally award him such revelations, piling up masses of calculatedly lumpen objects on the canvas and apparently despairing of communicating anything. This tone may have been compounded by the fact that, as the Timothy Taylor show of figurative works attests, Guston was an inconsistent painter; there are some beauties in the commercial gallery’s small selection, yet a number of the canvases here essay Guston’s most charged iconography – mouldering piles of boots, fearful Klan figures – but somehow fumble it. Occasionally feeling simply does not fly off the canvas and that vaunted transparency is not achieved, suggesting that the balance of image and handling in a good Guston is far more delicate than it looks. Since the Academy show has nary a dud, that’s another reason to celebrate it.

Rosalind Furness

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