Page 32 - Studio International - February 1965

Philip Guston The painter as metaphysician

by Dore Ashton

Photo: Dan Budnik

The painter cannot remove himself from the currents of -his most recent paintings particularly-are strongly
time, nor can he pretend that time, 'that fluid mass, on the side of esprit. His paintings indicate that for
that moving, mysterious, grand and powerful ocean'* him, painting is a mode of inquiry and a mode of stating
does not pull him irresistibly forward. an intuition concerning the meaning of existence.
The radical aesthetic assumptions of the 20th century Such a statement, abstract and perhaps a little
leave no modern painter untouched. The chief grandiloquent, cannot stand alone. An experiment:
assumption-that painting is an interpretation of Supposing we could list, as on a bill of lading, all the
experience on all levels, psychological and spiritual as components in a painting by Philip Guston. It might
well-has opened the way for another language in read:
painting, the language of metaphysics. Item: Traditional oil paint from tubes (rose, ochre,
It is the simple literal meaning of metaphysics that blue, grey, black).
concerns the painter, meta beyond, physics external Item: Stretched canvas, normally no higher or wider
nature. The vital painter in our century cannot subsist than the reach of a tall man.
merely describing the surfaces of visible things. He Item: Strokes (long, loping; short, stacatto).
must move beyond external nature. Item: Textures ( opaque, dense; transparent, thin).
When Mir6 observed that 'in the work of Leonardo I General Descriptions: Greyish strokes weaving in
think of the esprit and in the work of Paolo Uccello, it and out with occasional flickers of silvered highlights,
is the plasticity and structure which interest me,' he forming a resilient webbing, or a thickish atmosphere,
could have been describing the two main directions in which supports, surrounds, forms and corrodes two
modern painting. The difference, though, between the or three major shapes. Shapes are composed of
painters of the past and the modern painter is that the strokes, usually closely articulated, more densely
modern painter has been able to go beyond external painted. Suspended in the 'medium' they move
nature, has found other subjects, while both the inward or outward. Roughly rectangular or arc-like
spiritual and plastic painters of the past were compelled in design. Largely tonal but sparse indications of non­
to allude to the apparent facts of nature. naturalistic colour, rose, blue, ochre.
These two directions are often pursued together, but This is a lifeless series of words, yet it is a fair verbal
ultimately the artist gravitates to one pole or the other. transcription of the visible facts of a recent canvas
He chooses his assumptions. Philip Guston's paintings by Guston. A catalogue of his characteristics, his
• Eugene M1nkowsk1. reflexive gestures, says nothing of the moving efficacy
64