"When the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue."
With a captivating intensity, Studio Celebration embodies the audacious self-reflection and figuration that burst forth in Guston’s later works, providing revelatory insight into an artist categorically regarded as one of the most important visual innovators of the twentieth century. Acquired directly from David McKee Gallery, the present work has since been held in the esteemed private collection of Gabriele and Robert Lee. In 1968, disillusioned by Abstract Expressionism, Philip Guston determinedly abandoned abstraction, turning towards his now iconic style of bold, evocative figuration. Executed in 1978, in the present work, Guston illustrates a self-portrait of the artist, cigarette lit, gripping his hands above paintbrushes, cans, upturned soles and bottles. Richly textured and painted with viscerally urgent, impasto brushstrokes, the limited palette of red, black and blue recall Guston’s celebrated years as a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. The figuration of Studio Celebration is a marked departure from his earlier style and a superlative expression of the innovation and arresting impact of the artist’s highly regarded later corpus of paintings.
On May 1st 2022, the long-awaited retrospective of Philip Guston's work Philip Guston Now will open at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, highlighting the artists later works and motifs. This major exhibition, which will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Tate Modern in London, is the first retrospective of Guston’s work in nearly 20 years. The array of brushes, bottles and visibly extended wrists does not provide a clear narrative, yet they achieve an acute invocation of psychic angst and complexity. A hauntingly powerful image, Guston explores the plight of the artist, while simultaneously synthesizing the upheaval of the race riots and socio-political mayhem that surrounded him. In Studio Celebration, the self-referential allusion to paint cans and brushes illustrates Guston wrestling with his identity as an artist. He negotiates the relationship between the interiority of his artist’s studio and his own tortured psyche, examining his own pursuit of figuration juxtaposed against his history with abstract expressionism.
Clustered together with an anxious urgency, the upturned souls, opened bottles, and paint cans are amongst the most iconic motifs of Guston's later paintings. Rendered in the limited palette of reds and blacks and painted with dense ferocious brushwork, the willfully cartoonish familiar forms become uncanny. His figurative paintings are a profoundly raw and evocative exploration of artistic production within the political and social upheaval of the late 1960s and 70s. Guston's personal iconography, including the bricks referencing his time as a WPA muralist in the 1930s, the stiff hands gripping a cigarette, and the artist tools, examines the self and artist's role. Studio Celebration is a striking example of Guston's aspersion of modernist purity in favor of a figurative style marking a sociopolitical statement of the present. As Guston explains in a 1977 interview describing this transformation, "When the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. (Philip Guston quoted in Jerry Talmer,"Creation' Is for Beauty Parlors," New York Post, April 9, 1977, reprinted in Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Sieveking/Munich, 2016), p. 171.) A defiant testament to Guston's legacy as one of the most innovative painters of the twentieth century, Studio Celebration evokes the charged, tumultuous climate of America, which Guston sought to depict in his paintings of this period.
PHILIP GUSTON, MONUMENT, 1976. THE TATE MUSEUM, LONDON Absurdist, alien, and highly redolent at once, the tightly knit cluster of limbs and upturned soles recalls piles of shoes confiscated from their owners during the Holocaust. Evoking the specter of historical trauma, this forms a powerful and visceral recurrent motif in Guston’s painterly lexicon.
PHILIP GUSTON, THE STUDIO, 1969. LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF ART, Humlebæk
The self-referential allusion to paint cans and brushes shows Guston wrestling with his identity as an artist. In his attempts to make sense of the upheaveal of the contemporaneous race riots and the sociopolitical mayhem that surrounded him, Guston worked to negotiate the relationship between the interiority of his artist’s studio and his own tortured psyche in his paintings.
PHILIP GUSTON, BEGGAR’S JOY, 1954-55. SOLD AT SOTHEBY’S NY NOVEMBER 2008 FOR $10,162,500 The treatment of thickly layered paint and rich impasto in the present work is reminiscent of his earlier, luminous abstract works, for which the artist is widely acclaimed.
Philip Guston, Talking, 1979. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The cigarette, rendered here as a prop clutched between the fingers here as its gestural plume of ashy cigar smoke curls across the studio, imbues Guston's late paintings with the candid presence of the artist himself. Like Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, Guston was a heavy drinker and smoker, indulgent of the vices that plagued the New York school. Openly suggestive of his role as both a painter and a smoker, the cigarette recurs in Guston's late paintings as a symbol of his artistic introspection.
In Studio Celebration, the composition is segmented by densely layered impasto strokes of maroon, black and flesh tones, set against the stark contrast of a periwinkle blue skyline; the sea of red is further divided by the slanted row of bricks. The layered bricks and stark smooth border of the sky encapsulate the figures and somber cluster of objects; even the gestural smoke hovers horizontally between the borders. The borders contoured with black emphasize the intimacy and isolation of the studio space. In describing these objects, Guston explained, "I knew I wanted to go on and to deal with concrete objects…And the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world is abstract and mysterious enough, I don't think one needs to depart from it in order to make art." (Philip Guston quoted in Exh. Cat., Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Philip Guston: the Late Works, 1994, pp. 54-55)
"I knew I wanted to go on and to deal with concrete objects…And the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world is abstract and mysterious enough, I don't think one needs to depart from it in order to make art."
Palpating with anxious intensity, the self-referential iconographic allusion to his early murals of the 1930s, clenched fists suspended above paint cans and brushes in Studio Celebration demonstrates Guston's wrestling with his identity as an artist; fraught with his conflicted negotiation of a relationship between the interiority of his artist studio and the exterior world.Guston’s radical paintings of the studio and figure were contrary to the principles of Abstract Expressionism, and as such sparked controversy when first unveiled in 1970, this body of work, created during his last decade of production, has since become regarded as canonical in its importance for contemporary art and has proved to be the genesis of an immensely rich and varied body of work. Furthermore, Guston’s brave return to figuration at the time stood as a beacon to artists of later decades who celebrated figurative painting and its power to reflect a given historical moment. Returning anew to the stylistic mode in which he had begun his artistic career, Guston now approached figuration with a cartoonish, crude simplicity. Guston’s newfound visual vocabulary afforded him a means through which he felt he could more accurately convey his attitude toward the social and political atmosphere at the time; realism would lack the imaginative potency necessary to communicate the state of turmoil—which for Guston was also deeply personal.
At once a reaction to the sociopolitical landscape of 1960s America and also an evocation of the interiority of the artist's studio, the deep emotive power of Studio Celebration lies in the ambiguity of the simplified objects and the dueling anxieties that they symbolize; Studio Celebration reveals an artist negotiating both the turmoil of the outside world and also his own interior restlessness. The foreboding density of the built-up, blackened maroon impasto, offset above by the periwinkle blue and below by the crimson bricks, simultaneously recalls the painterly flourishes of his early abstractions and embodies the solitude and intimacy of the studio. A profound meditation on Guston's identity as an artist, Studio Celebration evidences the artist's deeply personal, emotional and psychological struggle to take stock of his artistic output and its impact on the world in which he lived. As curator Magdalena Dabrowki describes, “He came to feel that the artist's role was not to paint private and appealing subjects but to produce public art, art with a social message, which would comment on vital issues and engage a large public. His work of the thirties is informed by a powerful belief that art should be a vehicle for social comment.” (Magdalena Dabrowski, Exh. Cat., The Drawings of Philip Guston, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988, p. 14)
