Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston

"This is a brilliant piece of social history. It’s a daughter’s expression of love for her father, even though it was a complicated love. I think it’s a very memorable portrait of a particular painter. She relates his work to his life, to his fathering, and regrets the toll taken on him by the rather damaging macho culture of the male artists of the New York School, who seemed to have felt obliged to drink at least a bottle of whiskey and smoke five packets of Camel no-filter cigarettes every day. It’s amazing that he lived as long as he did, given that he died in his mid-sixties. I know her a bit and have interviewed her for films a couple of times. She’s the caretaker of his memory, but unlike some caretakers of famous artists’ memories, she doesn’t pull her punches. People write all sorts of nonsense about art because they forget that it’s made by real living people. They write that so-and-so had a passion for this, or they loved that, and Musa Mayer reminds you how complicated people actually are. And Guston was very complicated. “People write all sorts of nonsense about art because they forget that it’s made by real living people.” She writes very well of the great turnaround of his life when he turns away from his Abstract Expressionist past—the style he’s painted in all these years—and begins painting these mad seething, weird, cartoonish depictions of Ku Klux Klansmen smoking fat cigars, driving through imaginary pink landscapes. Or he’s painting President Nixon with a grotesquely distended suppurating leg that represents the rottenness of his politics. She writes very well about how this was seen as beyond the pale by the other artists and their dealers in Guston’s circle. They were just so shocked that he could be doing this. It was like farting at the volume of an organ in the cathedral. But this is a tremendous book about a really fascinating figure. You really get face to face with history in lots of different levels: art history, political history, the history of taste, and the history of this man and his relationship with his wife. It’s a very good book about the real life of a real artist. He wrote about it himself, I can only paraphrase. He was painting these pictures that were about atmosphere and were very much in the tradition of Monet, with a bit of Chinese ‘ism’ thrown in for good measure. So, they were almost Daoist Abstract Expressionist pictures of the eternal movement of the elements. At one point, he just says, ‘How the effing hell can I continue to adjust a blue to a red when America is going to war in Vietnam and the world is going to shit? How can I do this? I’ve got to paint about what’s around me’. I think he remembered his early education when he went to Italy and looked at the fresco painters, thinking, ‘They painted the world around them—why aren’t I doing it?’ That’s right. In a way, he was turning the clock right back to his time with the Works Progress Administration when he created a number of murals for places like homeless refuges. This was all part of the attempt to give work to artists during the Depression and the years that followed. He was turning the clock back, but in a completely different form. “He begins painting these mad seething, weird, cartoonish depictions of Ku Klux Klansmen smoking fat cigars, driving through imaginary pink landscapes.” At the time, there was this massive antagonism between the Abstract Expressionists and those who sought to replace them or steal their glory, namely the pop artists. The perception was that Guston had swapped camp and become a cartoon pop painter, having lost his marbles and trying to be down with the kids like Warhol. This is completely removed from the truth, but that was the perception that was put out at the time. It has taken a long time for the Guston estate and Philip Guston’s dealer to try to correct that. Because of his reinvention of himself, people don’t know what to do with the Abstract Expressionist works—which are actually very good. They are every bit as good as Reinhardt or Franz Kline. You could see his Abstract Expressionism in that mould, but because he changed and had this volte-face , it’s as if the volte-face tainted everything that he had done. But I still think the market is quite high for Guston’s early Abstract Expressionist pictures, which is always a good way to tell what people really think. But art history has never really known what to do with him. He literally opened the door at the back of his Abstract Expressionist studio and found another studio behind it; he went in there and people went looking for him, wondering where he’d gone. That’s why Musa Mayer’s book is so good and so important. It gives you the real context for the shifts and shape changes in his apparently chameleon career, at the end of which you realise that it is not a chameleon career at all. Why shouldn’t a poet also write satire? I like the last eight years, but I also like some of the Abstract Expressionist work very much. But I like the later work, like Head and Bottle , with that dour, full single eye, the lightbulb, the stubble, and the rawness of it all. They’re not all great, but when they are good, they’re very, very good."