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Selections from the Collection
Philip Guston
Wayward and defiant of genre, Philip Guston (1913–1980) passed through the abstract expressionism of the 1950s and came out the other side into a new kind of narrative. A high-school friend of Jackson Pollock, Guston had begun his career as a painter in the 1930s with figurative images that referenced social issues and childhood icons. Later, he shifted to abstraction, but after gaining acclaim for his densely worked canvases, he said, “I got sick and tired of all that purity! Wanted to tell stories.” His works of the late 1960s and beyond are highly charged and grotesquely funny, simultaneously blatant and opaque.
Guston’s distinctive political-personal iconography is manifest in Central Avenue (1969), on view in Selections from the Collection in Gallery 5. Explaining his series of “hood” paintings, he said, “What would it be like to be evil? . . . I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan.” In this large-scale canvas, a pair of hooded, cigar-smoking figures (who also bear a marked resemblance to missile warheads) ride through a deserted urban landscape in a cartoon jalopy festooned with a crude wooden cross, their jaunty Mickey Mouse gloves tinted an ominous red. Guston wields cuteness as a weapon, prefiguring the work of artists like Enrique Chagoya, for whom he was an inspiration.
Juliet Clark
Editor
