Untitled

For Philip Guston, drawing was a central element of his painterly practice as it allowed him to work through the complexities of his ideas before committing them to canvas. “In the course of his decades-long career, [drawing] repeatedly ushered in new phases of creativity and repeatedly served to articulate radically different approaches ...Drawing invariably had a key role to play whenever Guston’s painting was in a state of crisis. For him, to draw was always to pause for thought, was always a chance to catch his breath or an opportunity for critical reorientation (“Forward,” Philip Guston: Works on Paper, exh. cat., The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 2007, p 7). In the early 1950s, Guston took classes in Japanese painting with Zen master Suzuki, an influence whose presence is seen in Untitled. Here, working with bamboo tubes, quill pens and Japanese brushes, Guston uses the fluidity of the ink to make marks that approach the quality of calligraphy. Guston was also looking at the compositions of De Stijl pioneer Piet Mondrian, whose patches of color hang on structured black lines that organize the picture plane into an architecture and in the present work the staccato lines of Guston’s brushstrokes coalesce into a kind of network. The artist said of drawings like Untitled, “At the time, I wanted to make drawings more like painting, without contour. These were drawings with masses, accumulated strokes” (P. Guston, “Untitled,” Modernism: Selections from the Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht Collection, exh. cat., The Art Institute, Chicago, 2004, p. 164).

The vertical format of this particular drawing is rare for the artist, and he works within it to create a composition that utilizes the paper’s proportions to the drawing’s benefit. Christopher Schreier's description of another example of a vertical drawing from this time, East Side, equally applies here “There is even reason to suppose that he began drawing at the top and worked his way down from there. This, at any rate, seems to be the origin of the downward motion conveyed by what, for the most part, are vertical ink markings—a motion which, after gathering momentum, is slowed down by the interposition of several horizontal accents and which, in the lower half of the work, finally peters out altogether. This is just one of many possible descriptions of the dramaturgy of a drawing whose composition was clearly never intended to be a homogeneous, compositional structure—like the “polyfocal allover” Jackson Pollock developed for his paintings. Guston’s allocation of specific roles to figure and ground is much too unequivocal for that, for there can be no doubt that the ink is the vehicle of dynamism here and the paper its sound box—a sound box the artist does not occupy in toto, but definitely wishes to colonize. That is why the right quarter…remains largely untouched by the cascading rivulets of black. Rather this part of the drawing is an activated empty space at which a few horizontal lines seem to be pointing, but which is, in the end, spared any graphic organization as such” (C. Schrierer, “The Creative Potential of the Line: Guston’s Drawings of the Forties and Fifties as a Springboard for His Development, ibid., p. 48).