Late works. He was the first to return figuration to postwar American painting, with a combination of "high art" with images from popular culture. The exhibition presents a selection of seventy paintings and drawings.
CURATOR: Dr. Ingrid Pfeiffer
CURATORIAL ASSISTANT: Lea Schleiffenbaum
The bold and extraordinary oeuvre of the American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) was one
of the most widely discussed of his time. He was the first to return figuration to postwar American
painting, was innovative in his combination of “high art” with images from popular culture, and is
today celebrated as the pioneer of postmodern, figurative painting. On the occasion of the artist’s
100th birthday, from November 6, 2013, to February 2, 2014, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is
presenting late works by Philip Guston as a milestone of American painting. With a selection of
seventy paintings and drawings, the exhibition unites loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
The autodidact Guston gained a foothold in New York’s art scene in the 1950s and became one
of the most important representatives of Abstract Expression around Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, and Mark Rothko. An intense drawing phase began in the late 1960s, culminating in a
painterly break with the “purity requirements” of abstraction: Guston introduced crude figures and
fragments of figures into his works; they populated his pink, red, black, and blue canvases -
smoking, drinking, often painting as well. Guston’s subjects include large heads, hairy legs,
clumsy shoes, and all manner of architectural fragments such as walls, doors, and light bulbs
reminiscent of 1920s comics, and they often come over as the precursors of “Bad Painting”. The
large-format works come down full force on the viewer. Despite their apparent formal weightiness,
content-related openness, and blurred mystification, the paintings are based on profound
sensitivity and the artist’s far-reaching content-related and painterly consistency.
In 1970, the first exhibition of these paintings outfitted with an anarchistic sense of humor and the
grotesque caused an art scandal in New York, as numerous critics took offense at his “betrayal”
of abstract art. Yet the intensity and unsettling power of Guston’s late works exercise an
enormous influence on many of today’s younger artists.
“Philip Guston. Late Works” is sponsored by the Deutsche Bank Stiftung.
Max Hollein, director of the Schirn: “Radical, surprising, and challenging: eyed critically during his
lifetime, Philip Guston’s late works are meanwhile regarded as the most well known and most
important works in his oeuvre. Our exhibition seeks to provide fascinating insight into this important
phase of the American painter for the first time. Guston’s late work is an outstanding phenomenon
and has essentially influenced and impressed a subsequent generation of painters both in the United
States as well as in Europe.”
“Guston has always been, and continues to be, an ‘artist’s artist.’ Despite his presence in large
collections, his late works in particular are considered to be an insider’s tip. For the viewer, they
are discoveries; elusive and touching at the same time,” states Dr. Ingrid Pfeiffer, the curator of
the exhibition. “While at first glance they appear to be simply structured, Guston’s paintings are of
outstanding quality and characterized by a sensitive reflection of himself and the events of his
day.”
Philip Guston is born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, in 1913 as the son of Russian-Jewish
parents. He grows up in Los Angeles and demonstrates a talent for painting at an early age. His
artistic and personal defiance prompt him to leave art school. His entire life is characterized by his intense involvement with European art history. His role models include Pablo Picasso, Max
Beckmann, and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Goya and Rembrandt. Guston travels to Italy in
order to examine Renaissance and Baroque painters such as Giotto, Piero de la Francesca, and
Tiepolo. He is also interested in Mexican muralists. This is associated with his strong political
involvement, whereby he sympathizes with left-wing groups and artists. In 1936 he adopts the
artist’s name Guston and moves to the East Coast, quickly gaining a foothold in New York’s
1950s art scene. He becomes one of the most important representatives of Abstract
Expressionism along with fellow artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert
Motherwell. For the critics, his later renunciation of this postwar art form, which was so decisive
for America, is all the more serious. Guston plunges into an existential crisis in 1965 and
concentrates on drawing for a good two years. It is not until the late 1960s that he increasingly
paints, and figuration returns to his work. In 1970, the first exhibition of these new paintings
meets with a lack of understanding even in his own environment, and it evokes hostile reactions
among art critics. The potential of these sophisticated paintings is not acknowledged until the late
1970s. In 1980, shortly before his death, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art devotes a
large-scale retrospective to Philip Guston. The last extensive presentation of Guston’s oeuvre in
the German-speaking world took place in Bonn in 1999.
“I got sick of all that purity! I want to tell stories!”*
With around 650 large-format paintings and hundreds of drawings, Guston’s late work was overall
his most productive phase. New ideas developed out of an altered world of motifs. On the one
hand, Guston’s examination of in part bizarre, violent comics as a child began to surface, while
his works were permeated by a wide range of allegories and heavily symbolic objects on the
other: huge hands, for instance, whose fingers point down from the heavens like the Last
Judgment; clocks that, like a memento mori, visualize the passing of time; light bulbs that
symbolize the light of knowledge and the spontaneous idea; burning cigarettes as a symbol of the
briefness of life, which burns up all the more quickly the more deeply one inhales the smoke;
fragmentary limbs reminiscent of massacres and escalating violence. In his use of this allegorical
pictorial language, Guston does not provide the viewer with a palpable interpretation; rather, the
highly educated artist plays with the symbolic value of objects. With his apparently primitive
choice of motifs and comic-book-like scenes, he creates distance, blends high and low, and
disrupts the viewer’s expectations.
“My whole life is based on anxiety - where else does art come from, I ask you?”*
There has been much speculation over the reasons for Guston’s artistic orientation and his
ultimate change in direction, for example his struggle with lifelong depression due to tragic
experiences in his childhood or an identity crisis caused, among other things, by his name
change in the mid-1930s. It seems certain that his entire life was marked by melancholy and
black humor. Yet like numerous other artists, Guston had the energy and strength to productively
integrate all of his doubts, fears, and conflicts into a large number of powerful paintings. This is
demonstrated above all in the numerous self-portraits among Guston’s late works. They recall
distorted Cyclops, sorrowful giants with oversized heads. At the same time, the artist prefers to
depict himself in a gloomy mood, eating, drinking, and smoking excessively or wearing a mask.
This relentless handling of himself is underscored by the large formats of these works, which
allow more space for self-analysis. This is also emphasized by the artist’s preferred use of
cadmium red, to which he adds white to produce pink, deliberately turning it into a “non-color.” He
intensifies and counteracts the seriousness and the severity of the depicted scenes and
heightens bizarre effects to the point of absurdity. Guston’s preferred color palette with black and
red dramatically and effectively reinforces his strategy of content-related circumvention, rupturing,
and surprise.
“I paint what I want to see.”*
Alienation, combinatorics, and metamorphosis - three basic principles of Surrealism that also
appear time and again in Guston’s late works. The artist places unexpected objects in the
pictures that lack context. The individual object changes constantly. Guston elicits irritation and
uncertainty, yet he likewise creates surprising elements and ambiguity. He deliberately sets
mental and psychological processes in motion in the viewer. The artist himself placed emphasis
on the unconscious, which participates in the success of his work and forces itself into his
paintings.
The exhibition developed by the Schirn Kunsthalle will subsequently be presented at the
Falckenberg Collection part of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (February 22–May 25, 2014) and at
the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (June 4–September 7, 2014).
*Quotes by Philip Guston. Cf. the introduction by Ingrid Pfeiffer in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.
Catalogue: Philip Guston. Das große Spätwerk / Late Works. Edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer and
Max Hollein. Foreword by Max Hollein, introduction by Ingrid Pfeiffer, essays by Harald
Falckenberg and Rafael Rubinstein, including a text by Philip Guston.
Press contact:
Axel Braun, Pamela Rohde, Simone Krämer, Lara Schuh tel: +49.69.299882-148, fax: +49.69.299882-240, email: presse@schirn.de
Press preview: Tuesday, November 5, 2013, 11 a.m.
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt
Hours:
Tuesday, Friday-Sunday 10 AM - 7 PM
Wedsday + Thursday 10 AM - 10 PM
ADMISSION: €7.00,
reduced €5.00, family ticket €14.00; children under 8 free of charge.