An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex
painting The Studio.
Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural
to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913-1980)
produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him--along
with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline--an influential
abstract expressionist of the "gestural" tendency. In the late 1960s,
with works like The Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from
the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings,
ignoring the prevailing "coolness" of Minimalism and antiform
abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like
characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and
complex. In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the
artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait.
In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines
The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal
motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative)
critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks
closely at the structure of The Studio, and at the influence of Piero
della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers
the importance of the column of smoke in the painting--as a
compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The
Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader
shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to
the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.
