Philip Guston at Tate Modern is a big show, providing me with much-needed insight into the artist. I wasn’t a big fan of his but can now appreciate him more than I did.
The child of Russian Jews escaping persecution in Odessa, he was born in 1913 in Canada, the family moving to Los Angeles in 1919.
The self-portrait above from 1944 shows his long fingers, echoing the painting below which closes the show.
Guston’s early work was influenced by Renaissance fresco painting as you can see from this portrait of his wife and creative partner Musa McKim.
Finding his way as an artist was not easy: he moved from figurative work to abstraction quoting this piece below as a turning point. The Ku Klux Klan hood, a key motif, appears for the first time.
Then in the 1950s he moved further into abstraction where the reds and pinks begin to dominate his palette.
” It took me a few years to get the feeling of red, and particularly cad red medium, which I happen to love. I like pastrami, I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why. I like cad red medium, it has a certain resonance to it.”
This wall of small panel paintings shows his visual alphabet.
Guston’s frequent images of Klan hoods have caused controversy over the years. They represented in his work the evil in the world and in all of us. See below, where he paints the artist as a Klansman.
I found this picture, one of the last ones in the show, to be very tender. In a double portrait Guston clings to his brushes and McKim, his life’s partner, who had recently suffered a series of strokes.
As I said at the beginning, I’m not a massive fan of Guston, but learning about the context of his work is important to any appreciation of his oeuvre. Nothing exists in isolation – context is everything.
