PHILIP GUSTON IN ROSEN. A. 'IMAGINING JEWISH ART'

Philip Guston: Recasting the Past, or How to Make a Golem in Rosen. A. ‘Imagining Jewish Art’

This is a summary of Chapter 2 of Rosen’s book: ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’.  2009.  Legenda. 

The Introduction to Rosen's ‘Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the masters in Chagall, Guston and Kitaj’ was summarised in this blog on 22nd October 2014.

‘Philip Guston: Recasting the Past, or How to Make a Golem’

In the 1960s many of the New York School of Art came to the end of their life: Pollock, Kline, Reinhardt, Newman and Rothko all died between the years 1956 and 1970; none of these had lived for more than sixty six years.  One wonders whether any of these artists would have painted in styles other than abstract, had they lived longer. 

It is Philip Guston who actually moved from abstraction to figurative art between 1968 and his death in 1980.  At the time critics reacted to Guston’s espousal of figurative art as a traumatic surrender.  Recently Guston’s change of style has been seen as a triumph for the principle of the individual freedom of the artist.

Guston’s figurative work is in the style of ‘emphasis on the common and the ordinary’: this style by Guston influenced subsequent painters including Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades.  Retrospective exhibitions of Guston’s work in 1980 and 2003/4 influenced further artists. 

Jewish themes and meanings

Jewish themes and meanings in Guston’s work have not been fully examined to date.

At the time of Guston’s espousal of figurative art he is recorded as having spoken about his early life and his Jewish identity.  Guston’s parents – Leib and Rachel Goldstein - had fled pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine.  Philip Guston – the youngest of seven – was born in Montreal, Canada in 1913.  In 1919 the family moved to Los Angeles: Philip Guston’s father worked as a rubbish collector, and it is this kind of material that appears in Guston’s figurative works.  Lieb committed suicide in 1924: Philip found the body; this may be the origin of ropes that appear in Guston’s figurative works.  During Philip’s youth one of his brothers died from gangrene: this may be the origin of severed limbs that appear in Guston’s figurative works.

In the mid-1930s the surname Guston was adopted by Philip in preference to his family name: this may have been an attempt at distance from the traumas of youth but it may also have been to impress the parents of his fiancée.  In retrospect, Philip Guston bitterly regretted his rejection of his Jewish surname, particularly so after details of the Holocaust were published after 1945.  Guston did not consciously seek to present himself as a Gentile, but having established himself as Philip Guston the artist, he could not re-name himself. 

To make a Golem

In the 1970s Guston explicitly explored his Jewish identity, and he declared that he was attempting to ‘make a Golem’. 

Psalm 139:16 is the only reference to ‘golem’ in Scripture; in the Talmud Adam is described as ‘golem’ before he is animated by the breath of God.  The sense is that golem means ‘amorphous, unformed matter’. 

The Medieval Kabbalistic tradition gave methods for making golems from earth and water: this was a ‘ritual representing an act of creation’ which gave insight into God’s creative power, and thus ecstasy. 

By the 15^th Century a legend of a Golem had evolved: the creation of a man-like creature that had destructive powers, the best-known having emerged in Prague.  Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (the ‘Maharel of Prague’) had made a being and had animated it by placing into its mouth a parchment on which was written the name of God.  The Golem was servant to its master, who controlled it by removing the parchment on the Sabbath: on one occasion when this was not done the Golem grew in size and wreaked havoc, potentially threatening the destruction of the world.  The Maharel of Prague managed to remove the parchment, the Golem returned to mud, and its remains were placed in an attic in Prague where, according to legend, they remain.

Rosen asserts that it is Rabbi Loew’s ‘autonomous clay creation’ that inspired Guston.  In 1965 Guston published an essay – ‘Faith, Hope, Impossibility’ – in which he asserted his faith that it is ‘possible to make a living thing’: ‘to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day’. 

Rosen argues that Guston’s ‘wager on making a living thing’ out of paint is a ‘Faith located within Impossibility’.   The dirt from which Guston works is ‘the accumulation of art history’.

Rosen explores the path by which Guston arrives at figurative work in the late 1960s: ‘Guston’s late dilemma’.

Guston’s late dilemma

Guston’s paintings from his teenage years had derived from the Renaissance works that he knew from textbooks.  Giotto, Mantegna and Pierro della Francesca particularly inspired him, and he would return to these later in life.

In the late 1940s Guston moved from his figurative style to abstraction.  After touring Italy to view the Renaissance works he had previously only known by reproductions, Guston began working in the early 1950s in a fully abstract style: he was associated with the Abstract Expressionists.

Rosen traces the course of Guston’s abstract period through the ‘delicate cadmium red cross-hatchings’ of his ‘Zone’ of 1953-4, through the ‘lumpy duodenal shapes’ of ‘Fable 1’ of 1956-7, to Guston’s ‘dark paintings’ of the early 1960s which begin to show the ‘emergence of a new, tactile language of things’, such as his ‘The Light’ of 1964 and his ‘New Place’ of 1964. 

In 1960 Guston had commented that the notion that abstraction is pure and autonomous is wrong because painting, by its nature, is ‘impure’, and its impurities ‘force painting’s continuity’.  Rosen asserts that this statement by Guston was a provocation to the prevalent abstractionist aesthetic that had been defined by Greenberg’s essay of 1955: ‘American-Type Painting’, in which the artist should be engaged in a ‘process of self-purification’.  Guston feared that, rather than achieving purity and perfection, the process commended by Greenberg would lead to art ‘without any essence at all’.

In 1966 the Jewish Museum in New York City exhibited a collection of Guston’s ‘dark paintings’: this confirmed in Guston his desire to ‘go on and deal with concrete objects’. 

But the next two years were a time of crisis for Guston.  On the one hand Guston was producing ‘pure drawings’: simple black brushstrokes on paper at the conjunction of abstraction and the depiction of objects.  On the other hand, in 1967 Guston produced a drawing (‘Prague’) of a barred window that evoked imprisonment and the golem legend. 

It is in the latter genre, which Guston called his ‘object drawings’, that Guston’s golems would appear.  Guston’s ‘pure drawings’ were gradually supplanted by his evolution of his ‘object drawings’, which were Guston’s re-establishment of his ‘faith in the figurative tradition’ – ‘solid forms in an imagined space’. Guston then came to develop his own ‘visual alphabet’ which provided the content of his works: books, buildings shoes etc. 

‘Paw’ of 1968 is an early example: its animalistic left hand, apparently drawing a line ‘the wrong way’ announced that Guston’s second career as a figurative artist would be ‘clumsy, backwards, even bestial’. 

Guston went on to cherish the quality of awkwardness.  Inspired by Isaac Babel’s address to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he sought to ‘paint badly’ so as to, as Corbett put it, ‘negotiate a path between the imperatives of non-representational art on the one hand, and the tradition of illusionistic painting on the other’.  Babel had said that writers in the Communist state had been given everything by the party and the government ‘but have deprived us of one privilege: that of writing badly’.

Rosen observes that Guston was seeking to escape from two illusions: the fantasy of his own artistic past which no longer had any meaning for him, and the fantasy of art’s path of the distant past that he could not allow himself to believe.  Thus he adopted the methods that he admired in Renaissance painters, and he did so ‘badly’.

Rosen asserts that, while Guston’s late period works did not come to life in the manner of paintings that pre-dated this time, by ‘breaking down the enchantments of illusionistic space’ - by yielding to the urge to use ‘the stuff – the matter’ of paint, and to use it badly - Guston achieved a reality in the objects that he depicted that brought them to life as if they were a Golem.

And in his last years, as he adopted this method, he engaged in dialogue with the Renaissance masters.

Rosen goes on to consider two works by Guston: ‘Deluge II’ of 1975 which he compares with Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’ of c1447, and ‘Green Rug’ of 1976 which he compares with Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Flagellation’ of c1455.  Guston re-imagines and re-constitutes both works from the Fifteenth Century so that they have a new tangible life as deposits of paint – as golems - which emerge towards the viewer, rather than there being a rational illusion of aerial perspective.

Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’ concerns the narrative in Genesis Chapters 6 to 9. 

Guston seems to have embraced the Flood as a metaphor for his fear of the end of the practice of painting.  Guston painted as if he was re-starting from the remains of an all-destroying deluge: he produced, emerging from the flood, objects muddy from his memory, and memories of other paintings including Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Great Flood’, and mud is the stuff from which a golem is made. 

In his Deluge II Guston dispenses with the depiction of the Ark and focusses on the detritus of the flood.  Red is the dominant colour: the colour of blood and of earth. 

Piero della Francesca

Guston became convinced that, despite the apparent perfection of Piero della Francesca’s carefully balanced paintings, there was anxiety and impossibility within.  Rosen observes that Guston projected on Piero his own unresolved doubts about ‘illusionistic painting’. 

Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Flagellation’ was particularly seen by Guston as disturbing, its two distinct halves setting up unresolved tensions. 

Rosen asserts that Guston’s ‘Green Rug’ best achieved the painter’s homage to ‘The Flagellation’: both sides of the painting have elements that make the painted space claustrophobic; the floor and far wall echo the colours of these elements in ‘The Flagellation’ but again, Guston makes them agents of unease; and at the vertical centre of the painting an enigmatic form divides and disrupts.  The enigmatic feet and shoes that occupy the centre of the painting may be the remains of the people who stand in ‘The Flagellation’; or they may be Guston’s memories of severed and lifeless limbs; and it is known that Guston was preoccupied with the Shoah at the time that he produced ‘Green Rug’. 

Rosen states that as Chagall worked with the crucifixion as an image to speak of the Holocaust, Guston used iconography from ‘The Flagellation’.  And in the same way that the figures in ‘The Flagellation’ invite the viewer to respond to the Passion of Christ, so Guston may be making the same challenge about responsibility for the Holocaust, particularly in view of the whip that rests at the side of ‘Green Rug’. 

Rosen concludes that in ‘Green Rug’ Guston is violently manipulating the art of the past to achieve a new and less finished form for the modern world– a golem.

Conclusion

Rosen reviews the ‘Jewish concerns and themes’ in Guston. 

The concept of the golem lets Guston engage with the past.  Guston could not believe in past artistic illusions: this may have been part of a broken Jewish faith for Guston.  Guston was also preoccupied with his own parental roots in Odessa, but he could not recreate any of these lost realms.   

In the tradition, a golem was a means of drawing closer to God.  For Guston there was neither irony nor piety in his pursuit of ‘making a golem’: he was simply providing forms of paint within the Jewish tradition that would capture the ‘breakdown of tradition’ and leave ‘something to hold on to’.