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拍品專文
'I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid...wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt...I knew that I would need to test painting all over again in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was...I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn't have to exist at all...unless it questions itself constantly'
(P. Guston quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., London 1982, p. 50)
'To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish'
(P. Guston quoted in, 'Faith, Hope and Impossibility', in Art News Annual 1966, New York, 1965, p. 96)
Painted in 1973, Untitled belongs to Guston's last great body of work which, having already moved from figuration to abstraction, marked his return to a more representative style of painting. Its vivid, distinctive imagery has lost none of the artist's cutting edge aesthetic and is increasingly recognised as marking Guston's feelings of frustration, not only artistically but also increasingly towards the social upheaval of post 1960s America, an emotion which had come to dominate the best examples of his work from this time. At first glance the rich array of seemingly innocuous objects laid out across the surface of Philip Guston's Untitled seems to be a collection of rejected objects, abandoned by society and left as a reminder of the increasingly disposable nature of our modern consumer culture. But in fact these apparently neglected objects act as a pictorial metaphor for Guston's life-motifs that have personal significance for the artist and are presented like a hieroglyphic code to be deciphered and decoded to reveal their deeper, inherent meaning.
Arranged across this large canvas, a series of familiar-and some more ambiguous-objects are laid out like clues to an unresolved mystery. A boot, the sole and heal of a shoe, a green glass bottle and an open tin can lie scattered, as if discarded by their previous owners. The sense of mystery continues with a tablet at the top edge of the work engraved with what appears to be letters from the Greek alphabet evoking some sort of mysterious code. This collection of objects is carefully watched over by the cycloptic eye of one of Guston's iconic hooded figures from this period. These figures are among the most important motifs in his later paintings. Enigmatic and haunting, they recall those presented throughout art history, ranging from the religious figures in Piero di Cosimo's sixteenth century frescos to the blank faces of de Chirico's later paintings. Guston would have been aware of the religious nature of these images from his time in Italy but unlike these historic figures, upon whose anonymity we are supposed to project our own image, Guston's figures have developed a distinctly contemporary resonance. Moving beyond their obvious connections to the Ku Klux Klan, these mantles become uniforms that break down and mask social divisions becoming, 'coverings that either humble or embolden the wearer-disguises that mark the wearer as an individual among other individuals or efface individually altogether' (J. Weber, 'Philip Guston and Soren Kierkegaard: Facing the Despairing Self,' Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, The Late Transition, New Haven 2000, p. 17).
The period during which Untitled was painted marks the last of the three distinct movements that occurred in a career that spanned more than fifty years. Like others of the generation that came to be known as Abstract Expressionists, Guston was inspired by the muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. He produced his earliest works in this format, and was part of the New Deal WPA Art Project. The shift to easel painting took place in the realm of Social Realism, a logical segue from the deeply political arena of the mural. From there to abstraction was a more complicated transition, but one which earned Guston a reputation among the finest painters of that moment. Clement Greenberg identified Guston, alongside Arshile Gorky, as personifying the 'romantic idea of the artist' (R. Storr, Philip Guston, New York 1986, p. 83).
The final decisive change in Guston's style came after a show at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Living a relatively isolated life in upstate New York, Guston, over the next decade, grew troubled by the inappropriateness of his art amidst the increasingly traumatic political climate in America. 'I was feeling split, schizophrenic,' he recalled, 'The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world, What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything-and then going to my studio to adjust a red to blue. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid...wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt...I knew that I would need to test painting all over again in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was...I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn't have to exist at all...unless it questions itself constantly' (P. Guston quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., London, 1982. p. 50).
Radically altering course, Guston moved away from his painstakingly ordered non-objective painting by attempting to paint, without thinking, whatever he could see. Beginning by painting all the flotsam lying around his attic, Guston soon recognised, like Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann before him, the bizarre metaphysical power of reality and the objective world. 'The more I painted,' he remarked, 'the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough, I don't think one needs to depart from it in order to make art' (K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds.), Philip Guston Talking. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley 1996, p. 250).
Following what he described as a 'powerful desire...to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet,' Guston's new-found obsession with the mysterious unreality of the physical world he had discovered soon developed into a profound existential awareness that started to manifest itself in his increasingly strong painting. This new regime was also partly inspired by his increasing affinity with drawing as an expressive medium, 'It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, with the distractions of colour and mass. Yet, it is an old ambition to drawing and painting one...On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear and I feel the drawing make itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting-anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light' (P. Guston quoted in H. T. Hopkins, Philip Guston, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1980, p. 41).
Guston's new paintings began to depict the world as a sparse and often desolate, Beckett-like landscape, translating the raw ordinariness of the everyday into fascinating and troubling metaphors of the absurd. By miraculously and asserting the unnerving, and stubborn facticity of objects Guston used the realism of the ordinary and the banal as the foundation of a new art. Rendered by Guston, in an unaffected, raw, and even cartoon-like way that, materially and abstractly, employed all the painterly precision, accuracy and painstaking care that he had lavished on his earlier abstract paintings, Guston's ordinary forms outlined a potent new vision that bridged realism and abstraction. 'Where Guston's clue images used to be masked by paint,' the editor of Art News Thomas B. Hess wrote of his work, 'now his equally important pictorial intentions-his delight in virtuoso handling, in translucencies and viscosities-are masked by narrative' (T. Hess quoted in R. Storr, Philip Guston, New York 1986, p. 66).
The eclectic range of objects that Guston lays out before the viewer represents the last great series of works by one of America's greatest twentieth century painters. Originally received with some degree of shock, they are now regarded as some of the most personal works of his lengthy career. Their influence can be seen in an ever expanding roster of contemporary painters including Susan Rothenberg and Elizabeth Murray, who have all openly acknowledged their debt to Guston. In 1965, just before he would abandon abstraction, Guston wrote: 'To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish' (P. Guston, 'Faith, Hope and Impossibility', in Art News Annual 1966, New York, 1965, p. 96). Each of Guston's previous modes feeds this late work, which is rich with history and memory and as such Untitled becomes as much an act of personal contemplation and reflection as it is part of the dialogue about the state of modern painting.
(P. Guston quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., London 1982, p. 50)
'To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish'
(P. Guston quoted in, 'Faith, Hope and Impossibility', in Art News Annual 1966, New York, 1965, p. 96)
Painted in 1973, Untitled belongs to Guston's last great body of work which, having already moved from figuration to abstraction, marked his return to a more representative style of painting. Its vivid, distinctive imagery has lost none of the artist's cutting edge aesthetic and is increasingly recognised as marking Guston's feelings of frustration, not only artistically but also increasingly towards the social upheaval of post 1960s America, an emotion which had come to dominate the best examples of his work from this time. At first glance the rich array of seemingly innocuous objects laid out across the surface of Philip Guston's Untitled seems to be a collection of rejected objects, abandoned by society and left as a reminder of the increasingly disposable nature of our modern consumer culture. But in fact these apparently neglected objects act as a pictorial metaphor for Guston's life-motifs that have personal significance for the artist and are presented like a hieroglyphic code to be deciphered and decoded to reveal their deeper, inherent meaning.
Arranged across this large canvas, a series of familiar-and some more ambiguous-objects are laid out like clues to an unresolved mystery. A boot, the sole and heal of a shoe, a green glass bottle and an open tin can lie scattered, as if discarded by their previous owners. The sense of mystery continues with a tablet at the top edge of the work engraved with what appears to be letters from the Greek alphabet evoking some sort of mysterious code. This collection of objects is carefully watched over by the cycloptic eye of one of Guston's iconic hooded figures from this period. These figures are among the most important motifs in his later paintings. Enigmatic and haunting, they recall those presented throughout art history, ranging from the religious figures in Piero di Cosimo's sixteenth century frescos to the blank faces of de Chirico's later paintings. Guston would have been aware of the religious nature of these images from his time in Italy but unlike these historic figures, upon whose anonymity we are supposed to project our own image, Guston's figures have developed a distinctly contemporary resonance. Moving beyond their obvious connections to the Ku Klux Klan, these mantles become uniforms that break down and mask social divisions becoming, 'coverings that either humble or embolden the wearer-disguises that mark the wearer as an individual among other individuals or efface individually altogether' (J. Weber, 'Philip Guston and Soren Kierkegaard: Facing the Despairing Self,' Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, The Late Transition, New Haven 2000, p. 17).
The period during which Untitled was painted marks the last of the three distinct movements that occurred in a career that spanned more than fifty years. Like others of the generation that came to be known as Abstract Expressionists, Guston was inspired by the muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. He produced his earliest works in this format, and was part of the New Deal WPA Art Project. The shift to easel painting took place in the realm of Social Realism, a logical segue from the deeply political arena of the mural. From there to abstraction was a more complicated transition, but one which earned Guston a reputation among the finest painters of that moment. Clement Greenberg identified Guston, alongside Arshile Gorky, as personifying the 'romantic idea of the artist' (R. Storr, Philip Guston, New York 1986, p. 83).
The final decisive change in Guston's style came after a show at the Jewish Museum in 1966. Living a relatively isolated life in upstate New York, Guston, over the next decade, grew troubled by the inappropriateness of his art amidst the increasingly traumatic political climate in America. 'I was feeling split, schizophrenic,' he recalled, 'The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world, What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything-and then going to my studio to adjust a red to blue. I wanted to be complete again, as I was when I was a kid...wanted to be whole between what I thought and what I felt...I knew that I would need to test painting all over again in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was...I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn't have to exist at all...unless it questions itself constantly' (P. Guston quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., London, 1982. p. 50).
Radically altering course, Guston moved away from his painstakingly ordered non-objective painting by attempting to paint, without thinking, whatever he could see. Beginning by painting all the flotsam lying around his attic, Guston soon recognised, like Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann before him, the bizarre metaphysical power of reality and the objective world. 'The more I painted,' he remarked, 'the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough, I don't think one needs to depart from it in order to make art' (K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds.), Philip Guston Talking. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Berkeley 1996, p. 250).
Following what he described as a 'powerful desire...to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet,' Guston's new-found obsession with the mysterious unreality of the physical world he had discovered soon developed into a profound existential awareness that started to manifest itself in his increasingly strong painting. This new regime was also partly inspired by his increasing affinity with drawing as an expressive medium, 'It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, with the distractions of colour and mass. Yet, it is an old ambition to drawing and painting one...On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear and I feel the drawing make itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting-anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light' (P. Guston quoted in H. T. Hopkins, Philip Guston, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1980, p. 41).
Guston's new paintings began to depict the world as a sparse and often desolate, Beckett-like landscape, translating the raw ordinariness of the everyday into fascinating and troubling metaphors of the absurd. By miraculously and asserting the unnerving, and stubborn facticity of objects Guston used the realism of the ordinary and the banal as the foundation of a new art. Rendered by Guston, in an unaffected, raw, and even cartoon-like way that, materially and abstractly, employed all the painterly precision, accuracy and painstaking care that he had lavished on his earlier abstract paintings, Guston's ordinary forms outlined a potent new vision that bridged realism and abstraction. 'Where Guston's clue images used to be masked by paint,' the editor of Art News Thomas B. Hess wrote of his work, 'now his equally important pictorial intentions-his delight in virtuoso handling, in translucencies and viscosities-are masked by narrative' (T. Hess quoted in R. Storr, Philip Guston, New York 1986, p. 66).
The eclectic range of objects that Guston lays out before the viewer represents the last great series of works by one of America's greatest twentieth century painters. Originally received with some degree of shock, they are now regarded as some of the most personal works of his lengthy career. Their influence can be seen in an ever expanding roster of contemporary painters including Susan Rothenberg and Elizabeth Murray, who have all openly acknowledged their debt to Guston. In 1965, just before he would abandon abstraction, Guston wrote: 'To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish' (P. Guston, 'Faith, Hope and Impossibility', in Art News Annual 1966, New York, 1965, p. 96). Each of Guston's previous modes feeds this late work, which is rich with history and memory and as such Untitled becomes as much an act of personal contemplation and reflection as it is part of the dialogue about the state of modern painting.