Entitled "Philip Guston and The Poets", the exhibition offers a reflection on the ways in which the artist entered into relationship with the sources of inspiration, examining five fundamental poets of the twentieth century, who were the catalysts for the enigmatic paintings and visions by Guston. Fifty years of Guston's artistic career are retraced by exhibiting 50 paintings considered among his masterpieces and 25 fundamental drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, the last year of the artist's life. Thus parallels are drawn between the humanistic themes, reflected in these works, and the language and prose of five poets: DH Lawrence (Great Britain, 1885 - 1930), WB Yeats (Ireland, 1865 - 1939), Wallace Stevens (United States , 1879 – 1955), Eugenio Montale (Italy, 1896 – 1981) and TS Eliot (Britain, American by birth, 1888 – 1965).
The “Philip Guston and The Poets” exhibition, open until 3 September, is curated by Kosme de Barañano and is organized by the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice in collaboration with the Estate of Philip Guston. The exhibition fittings are curated by the GRISDAINESE studio of Padua.
The exhibition is a "premiere" by Philip Guston in the city that exerted a profound influence on his work and is at the same time a tribute to the artist's relationship with Italy. From a young age, in creating murals he looked to Renaissance frescoes as inspiration and in fact this love of his for Italian painting remained as a leitmotif throughout his career.
In a 1975 letter addressed to his friend Bill Berkson, an important poet, critic and teacher, Guston stated: “I am more than ever immersed in fifteenth and sixteenth century painting! And when I go north to Venice, in front of Tiepolo, Tintoretto and the so-called Mannerist works of Pontormo and Parmigianino I lose my mind and betray my first loves.”
Paola Marini, director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia states: “We are happy to present the first exhibition in Venice on Philip Guston. The artist's return to our city is particularly pertinent, given that it was here that he immersed himself in a history and heritage that was important for his subsequent artistic development. From his own writings of the Italian period we know that the paintings he admired in the halls of the Academy exerted an enormous influence on his artistic vision. Contextualizing Guston's work, encouraging his studies and a new interpretation is a real pleasure for us”.
Musa Mayer, daughter of the artist and President of the Philip Guston Foundation, recalls: “On the occasion of Guston's exhibition at the United States Pavilion at the 1960 Venice Biennale, my father took my mother and me to Italy before my departure for the college. Venice and the Accademia Galleries were our very first stop. More than half a century later, I still have strong memories of his love for the great masterpieces of Italian art. My father would be deeply moved and honored by this wonderful opportunity to exhibit his work in the painting gallery he loved so much."
“Guston's love of Italy adds a complex and rich depth of texture to his painting,” wrote curator Kosme de Barañano. “Now, when we look at his art through the eyes and prose of the literati who were his kin – some of whom he gravitated to and from whom he drew throughout his life, others he read only occasionally – we can study how their words share an affinity with the complexity of Guston's later works".
The exhibition
"Philip Guston and The Poets" is organized by thematic nuclei of works related to a selection of writings and poems by the five poets. Starting with DH Lawrence's 1929 essay "Making Pictures," Guston's painting will be presented by an exploration of his world of images, moving from a reflection on the creative act to one on the possibilities contained in painting. With works that belong to both his youthful and more mature work, the exhibition delves into Philip Guston's intimate journey towards a "visionary awareness", that is, the relationship, always evolving, with forms, images, ideas, and their physical manifestation.
As regards the relationship with Yeats' writings, Guston's journey in search of a personal vision of painting takes place in particular through the poem "Byzantium" of 1930. As in Yeats, also in Guston's artistic evolution there are references to the agony and purification. The artist moves away from the rarefied confines of modernism, from the language of abstraction and from the canons of the New York School to move towards a new, more expressive pictorial structure, which he traces in figuration.
From the Italian Eugenio Montale, with whom Guston shares a poetics of the fragment that is expressed through tragic and powerful symbols, to arrive at Wallace Stevens and TS Eliot (to whom Guston explicitly refers in the 1979 painting "East Coker - TSE"), the The exhibition offers a literary survey of metaphysics, puzzles and the search for meaning as they appear in Guston's work. Guston's work is presented in relation to the poetic environment, rather than in a chronological or trend sequence, as is the case in more traditional exhibitions. The curatorial approach of "Philip Guston and The Poets" therefore allows a rereading, and a reconsideration in some ways unprecedented, of his work.
The enormous influence that Italy has had on Guston and his painting will be highlighted thanks to the installation conceived for the Gallerie dell'Accademia. In 1948, a young Guston visited Italy for the first time, having been awarded the Prix de Rome. He returned again in 1960, when his work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and again in 1970 for an artist residency in Rome. This further Italian trip took place following the wave of criticism raised around his first exhibition of figurative painting in New York. Guston's more existentialist canvases, considered by some to be "crude" and "cartoony", are permeated by the influence of the Italian cultural and artistic tradition: from the ancient and modern urban views that populate his series dedicated to Rome, passing through the references to Federico Fellini's films, his work shows a huge debt to the great Italian masters: Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Giotto, Tiepolo, and De Chirico, to whom he pays homage in "Pantheon" of 1973. And, again, they will be exhibited paintings inspired by the Renaissance, works that allude to Cosmè Tura and Giovanni Bellini, and works created by Guston during his travels.
Philip Guston
Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) is one of the great luminaries of 1930th century art. His commitment to producing works that arise from emotions and lived experiences develops an emotional involvement that remains alive over time. Guston's legendary career spans nearly half a century, from 1980 to XNUMX, and his paintings, especially those of his later period, continue to exert a powerful influence on the younger generation of contemporary painters.
Born in Montreal in 1913 to a family of Russian Jewish emigrants, Guston moved to California in 1919 with his family. He briefly attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the 1930s, but outside of this experience he never received a proper formal education. In 1935 Guston left Los Angeles for New York, where he enjoyed early success with the Works Progress Administration commissioning murals from artists under the Federal Arts Project. Along with the strong influence exerted on Guston by the social and political environment of the XNUMXs, his paintings and murals evoke stylized forms of De Chirico and Picasso, motifs originating from the traction of Mexican murals and from the frescoes of Renaissance historic houses. Experience as a mural painter allowed Guston to develop the sense of large-scale storytelling to which he would return in his later figurative works.
After teaching for several years in the Midwest, Guston began to divide his time between the artist colony of Woodstock and New York City. In the late XNUMXs, after a decade of experimenting with a personal allegorical and figurative language for his easel paintings, Guston began to veer towards abstraction. His studio on Tenth Street was close to those of Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and Rothko.
Guston's abstract works were now anchored in a new spontaneity and freedom, a process the critic Harold Rosenberg later described as "action painting". In the early XNUMXs Guston's atmospheric abstractions prompted cursory comparisons to Monet, but as the decade progressed, the artist worked with thicker impastos and menacing colors, which gave way to greys, pinks and blacks.
In 1955 he approached the Sidney Janis Gallery along with other New York School artists, and was among those who left in 1962 in protest of the Pop Art exhibition Janis had mounted, and against the shift in favor of the commercialization of art that this exhibition represented for them. Following a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1962, Guston grew impatient with a language of pure abstraction and began experimenting again with more tangible forms. The work of the following many years was therefore characterized by the use of black and the introduction of bright greens and cobalt blues – altogether disturbing, distressing and gestural. This darker work was influenced by European writings and philosophy, especially the works of Kierkegaard, Kafka and Sartre. At this point, Guston withdrew from the New York art scene to live and work in Woodstock for the rest of his life.
By 1968, Guston had abandoned abstraction, thus rediscovering the narrative potential of painting and exploring surreal motifs and combinations of objects within his work. This "liberation" led to the most productive period of his entire creative life. Over the next few years, he developed a personal lexicon of light bulbs, books, clocks, cities, cigarettes, abandoned shoes, and hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. His pictorial expressiveness of the seventies was often an open autobiographical reference to nature: the figure of the artist masked by a hood often recurred, or tender portraits of his wife Musa, or even a semi-abstract Guston wrapped in a cocoon. The late work also reveals echoes of Guston's early life, the religious and racial persecutions he witnessed, and his father's suicide. His later works possess a growing freedom, unique among artists of his generation. In the mid-XNUMXs, strange iconic shapes never seen before appeared. “If I speak of a subject to be painted, I mean that there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I must remember”, Guston wrote in a study note. “I want to see this place. I paint what I want to see”.
Guston's late work was not easily accepted by critics and remained largely misunderstood until his death in 1980. His work underwent a radical reconsideration following a traveling retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco which opened three weeks before his death. In the following years, other retrospectives and monographs were held in the United States, Europe and Australia. Today, Guston's last paintings are considered to be among the most important works of the XNUMXth century.
Note on the editor
Kosme de Barañano is a scholar emeritus of Guston. He has organized, among many projects, two important exhibitions “Philip Guston: Roots of Drawings” (Rekalde, Bilbao 1993) and “Philip Guston One Shot Paintings” (IVAM, Valencia 2001). An internationally known art historian and curator, De Barañano was director of the IVAM and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofìa in Madrid. He has a Ph.D in History of Art from the University of Deusto, Bilbao. De Barañano is Professor of Art History at the University of the Basque Country and at the University of Elche, Spain, and has been Visiting Professor at the IUAV in Venice and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He has signed numerous books and essays on a large number of subjects, from Pontormo and Max Beckmann to Alberto Giacometti and Eduardo Chillida.
Philip Guston: Painter, 1973, oil on canvas, 72 3/4 x 80 1/2 in. Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
