Shabby Chic

"Untitled (Book)," 1968

Philip Guston: Works on Paper
The Morgan Library & Museum
May 2 - August 31, 2008

I stopped by the Morgan last weekend, mainly to see the Guston show. I've always known him for his cartoonish oils with hooded KKK figures, which I first saw at the MoMA many years ago. But I didn't know anything else about him -- and I had no idea that the bulk of his celebrated career he worked in the abstract style, and that the style I knew was only developed in the last 10 years of his life.

In 1966, American painter Philip Guston put down his brushes, deciding to do nothing but drawings for two years. One of the most celebrated and accomplished artists of his generation, Guston had been part of MoMA's 1958 "New American Painting" show that was a high-water mark for Abstract Expressionism. Pals with Pollack, Rothko and Motherwell, he was the subject of one-man retrospective at the Guggenheim, a show that traveled to London, Brussels, Amsterdam and Los Angeles. All this wasn't enough. He had to evolve.

"Philip Guston: Works on Paper," an instructive and illuminating show of drawings at the Morgan Gallery, helps illustrate this crucial before-and-after moment in the artist's style, a split that is emphasized by the show's arrangement into two rooms. In room one, we witness Guston's embrace of the abstract style beginning in the 1940s. An early ink-on-paper drawing, a remnant of his earlier more social realist style, features a human head. Soon this gives way to pure abstractions that celebrate the line -- Cubist-like groupings and loose jazzy scratchings. Although, in a few of the works, if you look closely enough you will sometimes see hints of material life: a pair of eyeglasses, a shoe, a clock. It's a tendency he shares, albeit to a lesser extent, with fellow New York School all star Willem de Kooning, who, at least in the 50s was more expressionist than absract, best known for his somewhat violent portraits of women.

Then in the mid sixties, after all the acclaim, he hit a wall. He quit painting to "clear the decks." Laboring to crank out perfectly nice abstractions, he soon found that he got more pleasure making real-life objects. Like books. So he made drawings of books. Dozens and dozens of books, represented in their most elemental form with squiggly lines for text. The sad-sack mundane, everyday ur-book.

Then another thing happens. It's 1968 and his politics resurfaces. He starts drawing and painting comical and robe-wearing, cigar-chomping KKK members in a R. Crumb-like cartoon style. (As a young man, he was trained as a cartoon artist.) Depicted amidst an urban milieu, the KKK members seem to represent a kind of banal evil, a bumbling and poisonous stupidity. Their sheets have visible ticking, the bottoms of their shoes show nails.

Unsurprisingly, these darkly comic works, first shown in 1970, were not well received. A truly unique style, they weren't Pop and they weren't Abstract Expressionism, they were something entirely new, prefiguring the Neo-Expressionism of the 80s.

After a couple years of pursing the KKK works, he entered a more introspective psychological mode, making shaggy cartoonish images, including existential representations of himself as a disembodied head with one bloodshot eye. And, combining his styles of the 50s and 60s, he made clustered groupings of mundane things -- paintbrushes, a sandwich, trash can lids, cherries. This prodigious body of work culminated in 1980, the year of a major retrospective by the MoMA that opened on May 16. He died of a heart attack less than a month later.

I'm not usually very enthusiastic about drawings shows, I'd rather see the paintings. But these weren't poor substitutes for the real thing, or sketchy yet-to-be-realized ideas. They are all fully realized works, and expertly presented to give real insight into the artist's development.