An Image Portrait

Philip Guston (originally Philip Goldstein) was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1913 and moved to California when he was six. He began his professional art career in the 1930s, painting murals with social and political themes. In the 1950s, Guston began creating non-representational art (art with no recognizable subject matter), for which he became widely known and respected. After creating this kind of art for nearly two decades, Guston shocked the art world in the late 1960s when he abruptly abandoned non-representational art and started filling his new paintings with objects like eyes, cigarettes, and soles of shoes. “I got sick and tired of all that purity. I wanted to tell stories,” he said. However, the stories in Guston’s paintings weren’t always crystal clear; some of the shapes that he painted resembled real-world objects without being totally recognizable. He wanted “to paint the world as if it had never been seen before, for the first time…”

Guston worked with no master plan, and repeatedly expressed astonishment at the forms created by his own paintbrush. “I am a night painter,” he said. “So when I come into the studio in the next morning the delirium is over. I come into the studio very fearfully… And the feeling is one of, ‘My God, did I do that?’” Late in his life, Guston became completely immersed in his art. He would paint around the clock, working for more than 24 hours at a time. He wrote, “[My paintings] are large, ten feet or so, and take complete possession of me… It is a new “real world” now that I am making—I can’t stop.” Guston died in 1980 in Woodstock, New York.

“The trouble with recognizable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more…I am therefore driven to scrape out the recognition…to erase it. I am nowhere until I have reduced it to semi-recognition,” Guston said. Around 1970, Guston began assembling what he called his “new alphabet”: a set of forms or shapes, mostly objects from his own life experiences, some of which actually looked like letters. Cigarettes (Guston was a chain smoker his whole life), light bulbs, body parts, and soles of shoes began crowding his compositions. These autobiographical forms shared the space with other less recognizable forms, whose origins were sometimes unclear even to the creator himself. Speaking of the forms that comprised his “new alphabet,” Guston said, “Sometimes I know what they are, but if I think ‘head’ while I’m doing it, it becomes a mess…I want to end with something that will baffle me.”

Another source of inspiration comes directly from Guston’s childhood. On his thirteenth birthday, Guston’s mother enrolled him in a correspondence course at the Cleveland School of Cartooning, a fitting gift for the boy who was a fan of newspaper comic strips Krazy Kat and Mutt and Jeff. However, Guston soon grew bored with the drawing lessons and gave up after taking only a few courses. In his mid-50s, Guston returned to his earliest inspiration. Many of his late paintings—like Blue Water—borrowed their style from the cartoons he loved as a boy.