“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.” Philip Guston
Best known as an American Abstract Expressionist painter but also a Social Realist & a renown & respected Figurative Painter Guston was born in Canada in 1913 to a large Jewish family moving in 1919 to the USA. His childhood was a difficult one suffering hardship & persecution which influenced his art greatly. Amongst these difficulties & influences was Guston’s discovery of the his father’s suicidal, hanging body as well as suffering racism following the growth of the Klu Klux Klan, then later in life seeing the tragedy of Jewish persecution through pictures of the early Nazi death camps.
Guston’s career was very long and varied so I went on to look at his work at approx 10 year intervals.
1944 – The Young Mother, oil on canvas, 100.2 x 74.9 cm – on display at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. 
Illustrating Guston’s Social Realism period.
“In The Young Mother, Guston presented his wife Musa McKim and daughter Musa Jane, born in Iowa City in 1943, as a secular Madonna and Child with a faint reminder of the monumentality of Social Realism. A melancholy and lonely mood permeates the interior scene. Guston’s wife Musa McKim was said to have had a quality of “dreamy inwardness,” which is suggested in the portrait. The assortment of earth and mineral-derived pigments—siennas, ochres, umbers, and blues—that Guston used, and the dry quality of the pigment, were also influenced by the materials and techniques of fresco mural and early Renaissance painting.”
1950 – Red Painting oil on canvas, 86.4 x 158.1 cm – The Estate of Philip Guston
Illustrating Guston’s Abstract Expressionist period.
“With this abstraction, Guston has more definitively entered the domain of the object-less painting, a trend which continues in his work for the next decade as brushstrokes and varying degrees of the density of paint become the essential components of the painting.”
1963 – Untitled, Lithograph on paper, 566 x 767 mm – purchased in 1990 by Tate.
Illustrating Guston’s Abstract Expressionist period.
1973 – Painting, Smoking, Eating (from the Cyclops series) oil on canvas, 77 x 103 inches, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Illustrating Guston’s Neo-Expressionist period.
“it is also the suffering of the artist as The Studio, By the Window and Edge of Town (all 1969) suggest. (Painter’s Table and Painting, Smoking, Eating, both dating from 1973, hammer home the point, along with other works.)”
As I study these paintings and images my feelings for this artist are disappointingly neutral . Obvious influences are playing their roles, hardship and horrors, society & the politics of Guston’s time, as well as the influence of other artists, Rothko being an obvious one in relation to ‘Red Painting’ shown above as well as the dark heavy lines of Franz Kline and abstract figures of Willem De Kooning.
My best liked, if I was pushed to choose, has to be of his wife Musa McKim as her eyes challenge me from within the painting. I don’t see dreamy inwardness there, I see an honest frankness with some small sense of unhappiness lurking in the depths. It is said that “a melancholy and lonely mood permeates the interior scene” but this seems rather contradictory considering the mother has her child is on her lap, Musa’s hands tenderly under her childs hands helping to balance unsteady feet. It surely is a scene of tender love, a pose indicating contentment, social standing, fertility, usefulness and a whole host of other very positive emotions. So perhaps the challenge was aimed at her husband then, perhaps she was less than pleased at being the sitter. Or maybe it could have been that by painting the child standing on her mother’s lap, Guston was indicating that Musa is second to her child in his mind, this social shift could be the inflection of challenge I see in the mother’s eyes.
And I do like the use of the earthy, natural colours Guston used in this painting, the sense of goodness and heartiness which I also get from the outside being bought inside through the lack of boundaries, casually mirrored by the childs happy toys, the childs lack of a nappy also indicating again a more naturalistic inclination.
I’ve spent a good two hours or more just looking and thinking about this one painting but perhaps further study is necessary to really get to grips with some of the contradictions happening here.
Sources:
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-guston-philip.htm accessed 29/11/12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Guston accessed 29/11/12
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art428/PhilipGuston.html accessed 29/11/12
http://uima.uiowa.edu/philip-guston/ accessed 29/11/12
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit12-4-03.asp accessed 29/11/12
http://www.phillipscollection.org/ accessed 29/11/12
OCA Painting 1 Learning Log 