Page 33 - Studio International - February 1965

2

of the paintings, or of the vital questions they pose. allegory. In answer. he swept aside the conventional
Guston's paintings are more than a collection of visible human figure and all recognizable aspects of his
facts. They are intentionally endowed with meaning, for environment.
as the Zen master says, as soon as the questioner poses At this point, moving beyond external nature, Guston
the question, he already has an intuition of the answer. began to paint the pale, calligraphic abstractions which
The questions posed in Guston's new paintings emerge were then compared with Mondrian's plus-and-minus
from a long life of painting and from the different paintings and with late Monet. Although neither of
questions he has asked at different epochs in his these comparisons is accurate (the measured rhythms
painting life. of Mondrian were never Guston·s. and Monet's late
When, for instance. he first began to study the paintings were still attached to their physical motifs)
'structural' painters such as Uccello and Piero della they indicate a specific question posed by all of these
Francesca. he worked in their aloof mode willingly, artists: Is not a painting about the known but not
putting distance between his emotion and his execution, visible forces of nature. as well as about other things 7
seeking an equilibrium of clear volumes in space. By eliminating classical perspective. then Ii near com­
After a time he came to question the Renaissance position, then colour as local agent, and finally, even
world in which everything was assigned its eternal the cues to external phenomena, Guston arrived at the
place. He then began to think about 'the total picture new questions which characterize his metaphysics of
plane.· His compositions-allegories of urban life for painting.
the most part-became intricate plays of forms in To begin with, the dim, palpable atmosphere of his
strangely imagined spaces Certain painterly ambiguities new paintings is no place known to the eye. But it is
already began to take possession, undermining the known to the imagination. Hints of sea-washed air, of
static Renaissance harmonies. distant silvered lights, of buoyancy, of inhalation and
As Guston's thought turned to the symbol. or at least exhalation, stir the imagination. From sense experiences,
to the abbreviated form which bespeaks a wider radius layered in the mind. the imagination construes its own
of meaning, his vocabulary changed. More and more universe. a universe that is illusion.
the atmosphere within which the figure moved (his Illusion: a word almost lost to us through obfuscation.
early paintings were always about the human situation) 1//udere, L. to play against: It is the play against the
became his subject. Finally, he was constrained to ask immediate quality of 'real' experience which is the
Winter Form. 1 963
Gouache 30 X 40 in. himself whether his subject was in fact a readable artist's strength. To form a many-dimensioned experi-
65