Philip Guston. A Day’s Work. 1970. All Guston works © The Estate of Philip Guston.

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HARRY COOPER

A thing is recognized only as it comes into existence. —Philip Guston, 1964

Guston, as always, tells a good story. He is giving a slide lecture at the University of Minnesota in March 1978, and he has just reached his infamous Marlborough Gallery show of 1970, when the Klansmen rode into Manhattan to announce the artist’s return to figuration: The paintings have very simple titles—as Harold Rosenberg called them, laconic titles. This is called A Day’s Work. Before they were shown at Marlborough, Tom Hess, who was then editor of Art News, heard something was up, so we went over to the warehouse to see them. He looked at this painting here, one with a piece of lumber with nails sticking out, and he said, “What’s that, a typewriter?” I said, “For Christ’s sakes, Tom, if this were 11 feet of one color, with one band running down on the end, you wouldn’t ask me what it was.” I said, “Don’t you know a two by four with red nails?”1 The message seems simple enough: just look at what’s in front of you, Tom. The image is just as clearly a piece of wood with red nails sticking out of it as a painting by Barnett Newman (about whom Hess had just written the first of two books)2 is an eleven-foot monochrome swath of canvas with a “zip” at one end. Trust your instinct for what’s what, if you still have it after all those years of New York School nonsense.3 But look again. Guston must be enjoying the fact that his picture has

* This essay first appeared in somewhat longer form in Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, exh. cat. (Yale University Art Gallery, 2000). My thanks to Joanna Weber for securing permission to republish it here. 1. “Philip Guston Talking,” lecture transcript, ed. Renée McKee, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969–1980, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), p. 53. 2. Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Co., 1969). 3. Compare the exchange in Emile Zola’s Masterpiece (1885): “‘What’s she doing, bathing?’ Sandoz asked. ‘Bathing! Of course she isn’t. She’s a Bacchante . . . will be when she gets her vine leaves’” (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 68.

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 97–129. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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gotten Hess to project. Why else would he relish the story, which only casts doubt on his own representational abilities? Hess, the art-world wordsmith, has seen a typewriter, his own symbol of “a day’s work,” and Guston upbraids him for it. But if the referent is so obvious, why in the same breath that Guston proclaims its self- evidence does he commit his own parapraxis? Why does he say the nails are red when in the painting they are clearly black? Either Guston made the mistake in 1970, looking at the picture in the warehouse, perhaps a little dark, or in 1978, looking at the slide screen, perhaps sideways. Or maybe he planted the mistake, for his question—“Don’t you know a two by four with red nails?”—sounds a lot like a schoolyard trick one kid uses to make another feel dumb. (The ensuing dialogue goes, “Yeah, sure I do”—“Well, there’s no such thing!”) But intentional or not, the red nails are the opposite of red herrings. They are clues that we should not take Guston at his word when, a moment earlier in the lecture, explaining his return to imagery in the Marlborough show, he says, “I want to see what it [the motif] looks like. They call it art afterwards, you know.”4 Or, as Robert Storr has put it, “Guston was not toying with codes of representation. On the contrary, he painted as if speaking directly in the language of ‘things.’”5 The red nails are there to say that the language of things is still a language (as Storr’s “as if” perhaps underscores), subject to all the indirectness and slippage that language introduces into things. To put it another way, what the pried-up nails fail to secure—what much of Guston’s art, even at its putative plainest, frustrates as well as stimulates—is recognition. All of this makes me feel better about my inability to recognize what I came across two years ago on a storage screen in the Fogg Art Museum. It was one of the many small Masonite panels on which Guston built his new language between 1968 and 1970. But what was it: a fortification with gunports, a toaster seen from above with too many slots, a building, a book, the tablets of the Law, a bread box? (At eighteen by twenty inches, it was about the size of a bread box.) It was the undecidability itself that intrigued me. Here was a picture that wanted to represent something (for it strongly rendered texture, volume, and weight) and something familiar at that (for the shape of the thing and the handling of the paint breathed ordinariness) and yet that thing seemed unknowable. The picture was neither abstract ( judging from its intention) nor representational ( judging from its effect). And now, as I read over what I have just written, the word “UNCANNY” suddenly appears to me in huge letters. How could I have missed it before? Or is that the way the uncanny always occurs? In 1919, Freud described the uncanny as “that in which one does not know where one is, as it were,”6 which is precisely where Guston’s picture had left me. This was not Freud’s own view, however, but that of a leading scholar who, wrote

4. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 53. 5. Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 66. 6. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), in Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, p. 370.

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Freud, “ascribe[d] the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanni- ness to intellectual uncertainty. . . .” Freud discarded that analysis as being both too inclusive and too cerebral, proposing instead that the uncanny resulted from a return-of-the-repressed. Was I feeling something of the Freudian uncanny as well? I will put the question on hold, for my sense of the uncanny was soon dispelled. A glance at Guston’s subsequent work revealed that the image was a book. In the 1969 drawing The Law, for example, a Klansman props the thing on his knee and reads it with his finger.7 Then there were Guston’s own statements: “I read, so I painted books, lots of books. I must have painted almost one hundred paintings of books. It’s such a simple object you know—a book. An open book, a couple of books, one book on top of another book.”8 And there was Guston himself in Michael Blackwood’s short film from 1972 with this very painting and some

7. Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), repr. p. 114. 8. “Conversations: Philip Guston and Harold Rosenberg: Guston’s Recent Paintings,” Boston University Journal (fall 1974), p. 56.

Guston. Untitled. 1968.

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others: “I wanted to give the feeling of an old . . . crumpled book that had been in existence for thousands of years.”9 But just as I was feeling like Hess under Guston’s reproach (“Don’t you know a book with stone pages?”) I came across this report of one of Guston’s lectures: “He showed a slide of a semi-abstraction of an open book lying on the table with downward strokes on it for the writing and at once it occurred to me that it could also be a contemporary building, a thought that was borne out by Guston saying a book could become heavy, like a stone or a building.”10 Guston’s books and buildings and bricks and boards are all lumpy rectangles scored by a grid of vertical strokes. Those polymorphous marks (or polysemous morphemes) marched right through the Marlborough show, lending themselves in their neutrality to endless figurative reuse. It was as if the antiheroes of the exhibition, the Klansmen or “hoods” as Guston liked to call them, had left tracks, as if their nonchalant mayhem extended from the boards and legs and shoes littering the landscape to the language of representation itself. The downward stroke is their mark, and indeed the Klansmen are all distinguished by a pair of downward strokes for their eye holes. (There will be more to say about eyes later.) Was this pair of strokes the genesis of Guston’s scored grid, just as phonemic doublings were for Roman Jakobson the root of speech?11 No. According to Dore Ashton, “in the beginning, they were identifiably books” (and Guston confirms it).12 It makes sense that an artist who “always talked about ‘reading’ a painting, and the ‘language of paint,’” would make the book itself the marker of a momentous departure in his work.13 In the beginning was the word. And yet, as I discovered by chance during a trip to Düsseldorf, there was a prior beginning, an image behind Guston’s: Picasso’s Open Window of 1919, with its bewildering centerpiece, a grid of black strokes, two by four, on a white rectangular ground. This crowning feature of the still life not only bears a striking resemblance to Guston’s books, it prompts the same question: What is it? A book or perhaps a newspaper, illegibly schematic, propped among the still-life objects as if the artist had wanted to read while he was working? A building seen out the window, distant but unaccountably shadowed by the objects on the table? An upholstered white

9. This footage is incorporated into Blackwood’s documentary Philip Guston: A Life Lived (New York: Blackwood Productions, ca. 1981), 58 min., color, 16 mm. 10. Ruth C. Kainen, unpublished typescript dated April 20, 1977, p. 6. My thanks to Mrs. Kainen for making this available. 11. Roman Jakobson, “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’?” in his On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 309. 12. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1990]), p. 154 (first published in 1976 by Viking Press, New York, under the title Yes, But . . . : A Critical Study of Philip Guston). In the Blackwood film, Guston says the books “led into” the other small paintings. 13. Ashton, ibid., p. 80, reporting the words of Robert Phelps. Guston himself said, “Painting is a symbolic process, it’s not making a picture. What’s it symbolic of? Many, many things, and you have to learn to read the painting” (Gladys Shafran Kachdin, Abstract Expressionism: An Analysis of the Movement Based Primarily upon Interviews with Seven Participants [Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1965], p. 142).

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chairback, detached from the big white chair floating in right-facing profile? I favor the building, but it is impossible to decide (and indeed most of the marks in the painting have more than one referent).14 Picasso’s strange grid not only looks the same as Guston’s, right down to the raggy, tentative marks and the scrubby shadow; in its persistent ambivalence, or multivalence, it acts the same. We know about Guston’s veneration of Picasso, whom he called “the master of the century.”15 “Picasso, the builder, re-peopled the earth—inventing new beings.”16 “Picasso wasn’t even a painter, he was a volcano.”17 Ashton traces Guston’s pursuit of real-life Picassos from the Arensberg collection in Hollywood, which he first visited around 1930, to the Gallatin collection in New York in the mid-1930s, to the 1940 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, to the Pulitzer and Golschmann collections in St. Louis in 1946–47. And around 1966–68 he turned to Picasso with new interest.18 But which Picasso, which spout of the volcano? Ashton suggests it was Picasso’s neoclassicism that most influenced the Marlborough manner,19 and indeed Picasso’s female nudes of the early 1920s have a cartoon clunkiness that must have delighted Guston. But if the figurative style of the Marlborough works owes something to one Picasso, their compositional structure is rooted in another, in the Cubist device of the “pile-up.”20 The jumble of legs, shoes, and boards stuffed into the trash can of A Day’s Work is second cousin to the crush of objects teetering on the table in Open Window. “I taught still life in which elements were constructed via Picasso and Braque,” Guston told Ashton of his years in Iowa (1941–45); he was especially enamored of later, Synthetic Cubist pictures like Three Musicians (1921), which he had studied at Gallatin’s along with Léger’s The City (which proposes its own kind of pile-up).21 Given his bookish

14. For example, the black decorative pattern across the bottom of the picture represents both the wrought-iron railing of the balcony glimpsed behind the table and the fringe of the tablecloth. The first reading makes more sense of the specific pattern, but the second is supported by the fact that the pattern falls in front of the table legs. 15. Jan Butterfield (interview with Guston), “A Very Anxious Fix,” Images and Issues (summer 1980), p. 31. 16. Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 181, citing an undated fragment. 17. Joanne Dickson, “Transcript of a Conversation with Philip Guston, May 14, 1980,” National Arts Guide (November–December 1980), p. 38. Parts of this conversation are recorded in Blackwood’s film. 18. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 20, 40, 46, 72–73, 145. When Ashton saw Riding Around, one of the key pictures in the Marlborough show, “the first thing I thought of was Picasso” (Dore Ashton, “That Is Not What I Meant At All,” Arts Magazine [November 1988], p. 68). 19. “The manner of painting recalls Picasso and Léger in the period after Cubism, a period that had always interested Guston. The manner is emphatic. The purpose is to present the object as firmly as possible. . . .” (A Critical Study, p. 173) Guston had associated Picasso’s neoclassicism with his earlier work: “I did a Mother and Child that came out of Picasso’s Roman period. . . .” (William Berkson, “Dialogue with Philip Guston,” Art and Literature: An International Review [winter 1965], p. 66). 20. I am borrowing this term from Archie Rand (“The Victory of the Futile,” Arts Magazine [November 1988], p. 62): “When he [Guston] does poach an image, it is often from the sympathetic metaphysical pile-up of painters like Alberto Savinio.” But I am arguing that it is the pile-up itself Guston borrows, and directly from Cubism, not one of its offshoots. 21. Ashton, A Critical Study, pp. 53, 40. “Guston himself remembers a tremendous effort to reconcile fifteenth-century artists with Picasso, Braque, and Léger,” Ashton notes.

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temperament, it would not be surprising if he had tracked down other major Picassos from that period, such as Open Window. Could Guston have seen this particular picture? Before it arrived in Düsseldorf in 1966, it was in the well-known collection of the artist Mary Callery in New York. If Guston did not see it at her home, perhaps he made the trip to see the 1945 exhibition of her “Picasso Léger” collection at the Philadelphia Museum. Or he might have seen it at the Baltimore Museum, where the picture was on loan with several other Callery paintings from 1959 to 1964, especially since his friend Ashton wrote an article about the loan (reproducing the paint- ing) for the museum newsletter in 1961. Or he might even have seen it in the pages of Cahiers d’Art, where it appeared in 1931.22 Or was the whole thing just a weird coincidence, a bit more of the uncanny (in the everyday sense)? The visual evidence that Guston had relied on the Picasso did not seem to rise above reasonable doubt, especially given the simplicity of the marks in question and the ubiquity of the grid in modernism. But then I came across a picture that had been in front of my nose all along, Guston’s own Open Window (1969), which was included in the Marlborough show and reproduced in the catalogue. Like the grid, the open window is a famous device in modern art, from the Fensterbildern of Friedrich to the abstract windows of Matisse and Motherwell.23 But that did not explain what the spitting image of Picasso’s “building” with its telltale brushstroke-windows was doing smack in the middle of Guston’s window. The only real difference is that Guston renders the building infinitely more tangible and unambiguous, as if to say, “Yes, it is a building after all (and here are a few more of them).” But just to the right and the left of the window, the same brushstrokes appear on stretched and hung canvases, making finished abstract pictures, as if to add, “Yes, but they are only marks (and voilà a short history of modernism).” In short, the relationship between Guston’s Open Window and Picasso’s is too

22. The information in this paragraph is from Werner Schmalenbach, Bilder des 20.Jahrhunderts: Die Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1986), p. 240. According to Ashton (A Critical Study, p. 16), the Cahiers had become a bible for Guston and his friends starting in 1930, a pipeline connecting Los Angeles to the School of Paris. 23. In “Grids” [1978], Rosalind Krauss locates an early appearance of the modernist grid in the mullions of Friedrich’s windows. See her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 16.

Pablo Picasso. Open Window. 1919. © 2002 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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articulate and pointed (Guston’s signature is strangely centered, right below the window, just like Picasso’s) to be accidental. But of course Guston is doing more than just borrowing. The Picasso is a foil, and Guston is pointedly mistaking it, announcing his difference from the master. To begin with, there is the difference between opacity and translucency. In Guston’s picture, every object, be it window shade or stretched canvas or apartment building, is opaque and thick, as if objectness itself were defined by those properties. Like a child who has just learned perspective, Guston registers thickness with comical diligence by revealing just enough of the side of each object to show its depth. This was the culmination of a dissatisfaction he had been feeling in various ways since about 1960, as he explained in Blackwood’s film: “What equipment did I lack? It was a stronger contact with the thickness of things. I suppose I was reacting against being too imaginative and wanted everything to come from things.” Picasso’s picture, by contrast, is built from translucent planes without thick- ness. Take the “building.” The fact that it seems to block out the dark rectangular halo around the vase that intersects it at left suggests that it lies in front of the vase, and is therefore no building at all but perhaps a newspaper held up to the

Guston. Open Window. 1969.

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sun with the bare outline of the vase visible behind it. Or is the dark halo the flat schematic side or shadow of the flat schematic building, glimpsed with the building through the glass of the vase? Such is the logic, or illogic, of the whole picture: with careful choices along the gray scale, Picasso orchestrates impressions of overlay that are then contradicted by the play of shapes and contours. His Open Window is all screens and shades whose spatial sequence is impossible to determine. Translucency, which “seems to promise an immediate communicability,”24 ends up producing a contest of hints, an interpretive openwork. Of course, it is not exactly that the translucency creates the multiple readings; they are a result of the semiotic principle, which Picasso lays bare, that meaning is a matter of differences and relations. (Thus the square shape that functions as the sound hole of the mandolin has a very different function when it appears to the right in triplicate.25) But translucency does encourage referential multiplicity, creating a spatial analogue of semantic shifts. The identity of the “building” would not be so uncertain if it did not seem composed purely of light, allowing it now to float forward of the vase, now to recede behind it into airy distance. The picture is a play of substitutions, both spatial and semantic. We are in the register of metaphor, which Jakobson defined, in distinction to metonymy, as based on the association of similar, substitutable entities.26 To t ake another example, the object to the right of the “building” seems to be either a flowerpot or a skull depending on whether one reads the three floating squares as solids or voids. I favor the skull, given the highlighting of the edge that nicely turns the form, and the way the cheekbone seems to embrace the left-hand eye socket. But the sockets ought to be dark: their lightness suggests flowers, and the “jaw” of the “skull” looks more like a pot. Once again we are firmly between readings. It is not that the flowers are metaphors of the sockets or vice versa, as we might expect in a poem. Picasso’s metaphorics is more egalitarian: each is a metaphor of the other, in fact an extended metaphor. If the squares are blossoms, then the central image is rain; if they are sockets, then it is a calendar or grim tally sheet, and the large central oval is a mirror, a staple of vanitas images. For each object in the picture we try one line of interpretation after another while the translucency of Picasso’s planes keeps our metaphoric gaze afloat. In Guston’s Marlborough manner we are also faced with case after case of multiple identities (typewriter or board with nails, book or building, etc.). The difference is that we feel sure that the object has a single fixed identity, even if we cannot decide what it is. This conviction of fixity is encouraged by the opacity and thingness of Guston’s handling, just as the feeling that all interpretive balls are in the air is encouraged by Picasso’s juggling of planes. Or, to put the difference

24. Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in his Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1990), p. 74. 25. For a discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign in Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism, see ibid. 26. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” On Language, pp. 114–33.

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another way: the metaphorical substitutions in Guston, as in Picasso, are every- where—a book looks like a building looks like a painting, et cetera—only these substitutions are, thanks to Guston’s insistence on opacity, merely potential, waiting to be realized in the next picture, or, as in his Open Window, in the next object within the picture. As Guston says, “a book could become heavy, like a stone or a building”— could become, not (as with Picasso) is. In commentaries on post-1970 Guston, the key word has been “metamorphosis” not “metaphor.” “Metamorphosis, which Dante saw as the most terrifying of all phenomena, takes over.”27 And in metamorphosis, the comparison is not simultaneous but sequential: a narrative, a récit. Guston free- associates on canvas: “You’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread.”28 “This painting started out as a hand with a brush and it turned into a paw.”29 The bare adequacy of Guston’s rendering and his economical recycling of basic elements greases the skids of this metamorphosis, but so does the content. As if in reaction to the scandal of the pictures’ “laconic” (recall that Guston liked Rosenberg’s word) handling of their Klan theme, we fly down the associative path Guston offers. Hess was not wrong about A Day’s Work: the board with nails does look like a typewriter after all, at least the one invented by Guston’s favorite cartoonist, George Herriman, for the cockroach-poet Archy.30 But it is also the head of a Klansman, or rather it was. The body and most of the vertical forearm are still there (compare the other two figures) and the shape of the board still conforms roughly to the size and shape of a hood, but there is no mistaking the board for a hood.31 “When you paint things they change into something else, something totally unpredictable.”32 Metamorphosis is not only shocking but, at least in Kafka (The Metamorphosis was one of Guston’s favorite stories33), irreversible. It is a chain, not a switch.

27. Ashton, untitled essay in Philip Guston: New Paintings, exh. cat. (Boston: Boston University School of Fine & Applied Arts Gallery, 1974), n.p. Storr (Philip Guston, p. 66) agrees: “Thus, despite his concern for facts and the apparent realism of his new imagery, Guston’s imaginative world was subject to constant, urgent metamorphosis, and the state of any image represented but one possible incarnation of its basic form.” See also Dabrowski (Drawings of Philip Guston, p. 39): “The forms never have only one meaning; they are multivalent symbols that, from their placement within the composition, can evolve into an entirely different form and symbol. . . .” See also Kenneth Baker, review in Boston Phoenix (April 2, 1974): “Objects recur in Guston’s painting with haunting regularity; and sometimes they change identity from one picture to another.” 28. Guston, interview with William Berkson, “The New Gustons,” Art News (October 1970), p. 44. 29. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 52. 30. See Don Marquis, The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel with Pictures by George Herriman (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1950), p. 243. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker (October 3, 1988) notes that Guston and Robert Crumb both “adapted a style that had been invented by George Herriman in the 1920s, in his illustrations for the Don Marquis ‘Archy’ poems.” 31. Another such subreading is put forth by Kenneth Baker (“Philip Guston’s Drawing: Delirious Figuration,” Arts Magazine [June 1977], p. 89), who sees in Guston’s “sheriff’s head,” an untitled 1970 drawing related to the painting Sheriff of the same year, the secondary, unintended image of a “squat, massive” wooden door, “another image of closure.” 32. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 54. 33. See Mark Stevens, “A Talk with Philip Guston,” The New Republic (March 15, 1980), p. 26.

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No doubt it was this one-thing-after-another aspect of metamorphosis that prompted Guston’s friend (and one of his best critics) Ross Feld to write that his Marlborough manner was one of “metonymy, not metaphor.”34 Jakobson defined metonymy, in contrast to metaphor, as an operation based on the association of contiguous, conjoinable entities. He related it to the horizontal axis of language, e.g., the combination of different parts of speech in a sentence, whereas metaphor he related to the vertical axis, the implicit choice of each word in the sentence from a stack of similar units. No doubt Guston’s insistence on physical presence and novelistic detail—the pull-cord of the shade, the nails on the canvas edge—also led Feld to think of metonymy, which Jakobson associated with literary Realism (in distinction to Romanticism and Symbolism, which for him were essentially metaphoric): “Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time.”35 In Guston’s Flatlands (1970), Feld continues, “what you see is metonymy: objects placed next to each other, a sort of slum neighborhood of the real.” But if digression and metamorphosis are fundamentally metonymic, the mechanism of Guston’s changes still seems metaphoric. The book with text turns into a building with windows, or the hood with eye holes turns into a board with nail holes, thanks not to contiguity but to similarity. The book is not a predicate, a concomitant, a part, or a setting of a building; it looks like a building. In an earlier essay Feld speaks of “visible metaphors here, enigmatic, but also utterly explicit.”36 So what are we dealing with, metaphor or metonymy? For Jakobson the distinction is not absolute, which is why he insists on metaphor and metonymy as “poles.” No act of association is just metaphoric (based on similarity) or metonymic (based on contiguity), for it has both positional (syntactic) and semantic (meaningful) aspects, each of which themselves may be marked by similarity or contiguity. Positional similarity obtains between words that belong to the same or similar parts of speech (e.g., a proper noun and a pronoun), while semantic similarity obtains between synonyms (which are always positionally similar as well). Different parts of speech that could combine to form a sentence have positional contiguity, while nonsynonymous words that might follow one another in a chain of association have semantic contiguity (a very loose category, it should be noted). “In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic),” Jakobson concludes, “an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences.”37

34. Ross Feld, “Guston in Time,”Arts Magazine (November 1988), p. 44. 35. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” p. 130. 36. Feld, “Philip Guston,” in Philip Guston, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1980), p. 25. Feld is writing in 1980 about works from 1975, but he sees them as being of a piece with the 1968–70 works (which in 1988 he called metonymic), a refinement of the same “personal symbology.” 37. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” pp. 129–30.

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If, taking Feld’s apparent vacillation about metonymy and metaphor in Guston as a hint, we conclude that the “personal style” of the Marlborough works is mixed, then perhaps Jakobson can help us describe it. It is easy enough to see that Guston’s work has plenty of both semantic similarity (e.g., the book/building metaphor) and semantic contiguity (e.g., the metonymy, one of Guston’s favorites, of a single dangling lightbulb standing for the painter’s whole studio). But can Guston’s paintings be said to have positional similarity and/or contiguity? For that matter, does painting have positionality, i.e., syntax, at all? On the analogy of parts of speech, one would need to identify different categories of pictorial signs or marks and the rules for their combination, most likely an impossible task. To stop here, however, is simply to force one language (pictorial) to obey the definition of syntax appropriate to another (verbal). If painting does have a syntax, it will be found not on the model of the linear, unfolding sentence, but in the simultaneously present spatial array of the conventionally rectangular surface. In other words, if verbal syntax specifies rules of ordering, pictorial syntax should specify rules, or at least principles, of placement. More than one theorist has attempted to chart the different qualities and valences of the available positions (center, axis, edge, corner, etc.).38 For now, however, let us be content with the following conjecture, which proposes not an entire syntax of painting but simply a division of the concept of pictorial syntax parallel to Jakobson’s division of linguistic syntax: depicted objects have positional (syntactic) similarity if they share the same set of signifying marks (like the building and book in Picasso’s Open Window) and positional (syntactic) contiguity if they are contiguous or clearly aligned (as the paintings in Guston’s Open Window communicate with the buildings and themselves along an implicit grid). So Guston’s Open Window, at least in the realm of positionality or syntax, moves away from its metaphorically oriented “source” (the Picasso) toward the metonymic pole. Once we realize this, the metaphoric pole of Guston’s Open Window begins to fade altogether. True, the picture does propose at least one plausible semantic similarity, that between a window with its sill and a tenement with its roof: a simple inversion of one silhouette produces the other, and the operation is recom- mended to us by the fact that the buildings are “in” the window. But the principal metaphoric claim of the image, that buildings look like paintings, is entirely arbitrary, for the similarity (beyond the rectangularity they share with so many things) is merely an artifact of Guston’s ubiquitous downward strokes. The appearance of these marks in the paintings-within-the-painting is what makes the

38. See Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” in his Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society: Selected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: George Braziller, 1994), especially pp. 12–22.

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paintings look like the buildings next door. It is as if the marks that Guston used to represent windows in a building or eye holes in a hood or letters of a text simply slid onto an adjacent object, a painting on the wall—or, to put it the other way, as if the marks remained fixed in a state of potential signification while various objects (book, building, painting) slid under them, borrowing them as they went to signify “book” or “building” or “painting.” “We are forced, then, to accept the notion of the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier”—I have admittedly been working toward Jacques Lacan’s dictum, his image of language as a “chain” that will always “signify something quite other than what it says.” And this basic slipperiness of language, this difficulty that the signifier and the signified have in cleaving to one another, Lacan continues, has a name: metonymy.39 So when Guston mistakenly calls the nails in A Day’s Work red instead of black, the signifier (red paint) had simply slipped from the contours of the board, which are indeed red, to the nails within, which are not (and if we follow Lacan, we are encouraged to believe that Guston’s slip was real, not planted, since metonymy is the language of the unconscious). Guston’s slip reveals slipperiness, or metonymy, to be the fundamental logic of the picture itself.

*

Let us begin again, with another slip: The Marxist philosophy of the John Reed Club . . . interested my father greatly. With his friend from Otis [Art Institute], Reuben Kadish, Philip painted portable murals for the walls of the club on the plight of the American Negro, specifically the famous case of the Scottsboro Boys. On one occasion, the so-called Red Squad of the L.A. Police Department broke into the club and shot out the eyes and genitals of a fresco he’d painted depicting a black man being flogged by Ku Klux Klansmen.40 Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer is referring here, in her 1988 memoirs of her father, to an incident that was documented in the February 13, 1933, issue of the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News. The newspaper photograph shows the situation of two murals after the raid. The one on the left, which must be the work of Kadish, has been methodically vandalized: “A heavy instrument has been driven through the head of each of the Negroes in a careful program of mutilation,” reads the caption. In addition, the support has been ripped in a wide gash extending from the mouth of the standing figure to his waist. Guston’s mural did not receive such precise treatment. It seems to have been ripped in four places: one gash runs diago- nally from the left eye of the Klansman across his hood and onto the left shoulder of

39. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in his Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), pp. 154–56. 40. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 19.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 the black figure, a parallel lower gash goes across the torso of the black figure, a third obscures the area around his head, and a fourth extends between his knees. Mayer must not have had this picture in front of her, for her description of the damage is confused. There are indeed holes that could have been made by gunshots (although the caption says a blunt instrument), but they are in Kadish’s mural, not Guston’s, and they have been made on the figures’ foreheads, not their eyes or genitals. Indeed, no genitals are depicted in either mural. The ripping of Guston’s mural has effaced an eye, it is true, but rather haphazardly (the other one is intact), and it belonged to the Klansman. The black figure did not have eyes at all, for in the mural’s undamaged state, recorded in a photograph, his face is largely hidden by the post to which he is tied. Mayer was describing something that happened over a half-century ago, so she must have been relying on her father’s account.41 Indeed, Ashton reports: “as Guston recalls with a shudder, [they] shot out the eyes and genitals of the figures in his completed work.”42 The “substitutive relation between the eye and the male member,” and more specifically between blinding and castration, is of course at the heart of Freud’s

41. It is also possible that Kadish’s memory may have influenced her, since she was married to his son for about ten years. 42. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 27. In “Philip Guston Talking,” Guston says simply, “Some members of the Klan walked in, took the paintings off the wall and slashed them. Two were mutilated.” This appears to be the most accurate report, except that Guston means Red Squad, not Klan. In the Blackwood film, which pans over both the newspaper clipping and the photo of the mural before damage, Guston says, “with lead pipes and guns [the KKK] shot through the eyes of a black guy being whipped by a Klansman,” p. 52.

Left: Photograph, Illustrated Daily News, Los Angeles. February 13, 1933. Right: Guston. Fresco panel (destroyed). 1930 or 1931.

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theory of the Oedipus complex: “In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration— the only punishment that according to the lex talionis [law of retribution] was fitted for him.”43 We are back at the uncanny, for this declaration occurs in Freud’s essay of that name in the course of his brilliant analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sand-Man,” the tale of a young man who is haunted for years by his nanny’s threat: If you do not go to bed a man will come to throw sand into your eyes and then steal them. In the story, the young man, having associated the sand man with his father, finds himself unable to have a successful sexual relationship following his father’s early death and finally kills himself. Freud takes this plot as evi- dence for the Oedipal equation of castration and blinding, and, more generally, as a reason to adopt Schelling’s definition of “uncanny” or (in German) unheimlich as “something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.” Freud concludes that “an uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”44 Guston’s spontaneous production of Freud’s blinding-castration equation in misremembering the events surrounding his Scottsboro mural, along with his dread at the recollection (Ashton’s “with a shudder”), strongly suggests the return of Oedipal material. This leads to several questions. What in the mural triggered this return of the repressed? Exactly what returned? And speaking of returns, what do we make of the return of the hoods themselves to Guston’s art in 1968–70? This last question is central to any consideration of Guston’s Marlborough manner. Behind Guston’s Scottsboro mural lurks another painting, Conspirators (ca. 1930), which Guston exhibited in 1933 in a Los Angeles bookstore and sold to its owner.45 This was the twenty-two-year-old painter’s first exhibition and first sale. The painting is lost but a photograph remains and so does a preparatory drawing from 1930. Clearly, Guston used only a part of the drawing for the painting—the rear group of Klansmen, which he condensed from eight figures to three. The Klansman in the foreground of the drawing he used not for the painting but for the mural, translating the figure quite directly in its general pose as well as the rendering of the hood, the left hand, and the drapery below the waist (which in turn recalls the drapery of the seated figure in Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring, [1921]). The principal change in the figure—the raising of the right hand to whip the victim—is an adaptation to the demands of the new subject, and a rather awkward one at that, since the persistence of the old pose

43. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 383. 44. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” pp. 401, 394, 403. 45. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 17.

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makes the whipping action seem directed to a nonexistent figure on the Klansman’s left rather than the one on his right. This suggests that the mural may have been a rush job. But for whatever reason, the drawing for Conspirators is emphatically, even intrusively present in the mural, so the trigger for Guston’s slip of memory about it can in some measure be referred back to the drawing. This crucial work, which Dabrowski placed at the beginning of the retrospective of Guston’s drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, has always struck me as deeply autobiographical. No doubt my feeling is partly the retroactive effect of knowing about Guston’s embrace of the Klansman as an alter ego in the Marlborough works. But it is also a response to the somehow sympathetic por- trayal of the central figure, who is contemplating a short length of hangman’s rope and perhaps also the two irregular shapes at his feet. The sensitive rendering of his shadowed hood and the shadow it casts onto his body seem like the analogue of a troubled reflection spreading outward, the psychic becoming somatic. Behind this autobiographical mood lies, I believe, a specific content, namely the most harrowing event of Guston’s life, the suicide of his father some seven years earlier. The story is not often told (Ashton omitted it entirely from her monograph, possibly at Guston’s request)46 but Guston’s daughter recounts it: My grandfather’s despair worsened until finally, in 1923 or 1924 (the exact date isn’t certain), he took his own life. It was my father, then ten or eleven, who found his father, the body hanging from a rope thrown over the rafter of a shed. Sometimes, decades later, when Philip was deeply depressed or drunk, or both, he

46. Guston reviewed the first draft in 1974 and worried to Ashton in a letter: “Do you think the

Top: Guston. Conspirators. ca. 1930. Bottom: Guston. Drawing for Conspirators. 1930.

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would mention his father’s suicide to close friends. “Can you imag- ine how it feels to find your father like that?” he would ask.47 One of the people in whom Guston confided was the poet William Corbett: “That March [1980] Philip told me that he had found his father . . . dead, hanging from a rope ‘thick as a hawser’ and had cut him down.”48 Perhaps not surprisingly, few commentators have broached this horrible subject. Michael Auping is an exception, but he quotes from Mayer’s account only to note that “evaluating the effects of such a brutal experience on so young a person is difficult, if not impossible.”49 One difficulty, aside from the overwhelming nature of the psychological material, is the entanglement of private and public trauma in this drawing. As Marjorie Welish has pointed out, Guston proposed quite deliberately “to align political awareness with personal pain” throughout his career.50 This alignment came naturally to him: for a Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles between the wars, the Klan was a real threat. Ashton writes: “At the time Guston was working on this painting [Conspirators] it was estimated that there were 4.5 million members of the Klan in the United States, a great many of them residing in Los Angeles, where they burned crosses and raised hell all during Guston’s child- hood and youth.”51 Guston said, “The KKK has haunted me since I was a boy in L.A. In those years they were there mostly to break strikes, and I drew and painted pictures of conspiracies and floggings, cruelty and evil.”52 As this state- ment suggests, from the very first Guston’s pictorial imaginings of the Klan went beyond his direct experience to include the greater violence the Klan was perpetrating in the South against blacks. And the drawing for Conspirators embraces a larger history still, comparing lynching to crucifixion and from there calling up art-historical precedents then very much on Guston’s mind, from Piero to de Chirico. Into this already rich territory of the drawing enters the episode of the suicide of Guston’s father, principally by means of the rope, “thick as a hawser”

frequent use of ‘crisis’ and ‘anxiety’ gives the impression that I am in constant pain?” (Mayer, Night Studio, p. 105). A similar worry might have impelled him to delete the central tragedy of his life from the book. A manuscript with Guston’s annotations exists, but I have not seen it. 47. Ibid., p. 12. 48. William Corbett, “What a Miracle Images Are!,” Arts Magazine (November 1988), p. 51. A hawser is a rope for mooring ships. 49. Michael Auping, “A Disturbance in the Field,” in Philip Guston: Gemälde 1947–1979, exh. cat. (Bonn: Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1999), p. 28. Auping goes on to emphasize the Scottsboro mural incident as another great trauma of Guston’s young life (p. 31): “The experience of seeing the effect of art on life and life on art never left Guston.” I could not agree more with Auping’s assertion of the signal importance of these two episodes. 50. Marjorie Welish, “I Confess: The Drawings of Philip Guston,” Arts Magazine (November 1988), p. 48. She continues: “Early on in his career, the theme of confession takes the form of assuming the burden of political guilt on behalf of the polis. Later in life . . . [he] portrays the individual admitting to sin.” I am arguing that on some level Guston was doing the latter all along. 51. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 7. 52. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 149, from notes for a 1977 lecture.

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indeed, needlessly thick for the task at hand, and having far more physical pres- ence than anything else in the scene. The rope disappears abruptly on the far side of the Klansman’s left thigh before reemerging below his knee, creating an apparent cut that recalls the fact that Guston had had to cut his father down from the rafter. The fact that the crucifix in the background is steeply angled implies that a deposition (literally a “taking down”), not just a crucifixion, is present in the image as well as in the mind of its central actor (given that the angle mirrors that of his inclined head). In this context of tragic, sin-struck reflection, the gesture of holding the rope, indeed fingering it, recalls the telling of the rosary, and the two blocks at the Klansman’s feet, one supporting the carefully draped rope, suggest the pieces of a puzzle that do not quite fit together. If we treat more schematically the relationship between the drawing and Guston’s report of finding his father and deposing him (and we should remember that it is only a report, with all that that implies about factual distortion and psychological truth), if we overlay them like two screens, then two equations become evident: first, the equation between a Klansman (or Klansmen) hanging a black man and Guston’s father hanging himself; and second, the equation between a Klansman cutting down a black man and Guston cutting down his father. In the first equation, the father is identified with both perpetrator (Klansman) and victim (black man); in the second, Guston displaces his father in the role of perpetrator, leaving the father to occupy the role of victim only. But these two equations are not equally present in the drawing. The first one is embodied by the group in the middleground, the conspirators of the title, while the second is embodied by the dominating foreground figure. Indeed, we might read the drawing in early Renaissance fashion as a progression of three temporal moments distributed through pictorial space: Conspiracy (middleground), Lynching (background), and Deposition and Expiation (foreground). These three moments/locales are formally united by the vector of the crucifix rising from a fourth space (far background) to nearly link up with the main Klansman’s hood (foreground)—although, given the anachronism of this irruption, one might say it comes from another space and time entirely, a (Christian) prehistory symmetrically opposed to a (contemporary) aftermath. By placing the aftermath in the foreground, Guston gives prominence to the second equation, that between the Klansman cutting down the black man and Guston cutting down his father. This second equation allows Guston to assume the guilt for his father’s suicide by identifying himself with the Klan and its lynchings; but it also allows him to achieve some measure of identification with his father through the very fact that in assuming the role of Klansman he has taken the place that was his father’s in the first equation. Support for this latter identification (Guston equals father) can be found in Guston’s contemporaneous painting Mother and Child. The mother holds the child with the same hands (slightly rotated) that the Klansman holds the rope, and her pose is

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the mirror image of his, suggesting a kind of pendant relationship between the two works, a pair of parents.53 The Oedipal wish, then, appears in the Conspirators drawing in the consciously acceptable form of guilt mixed with melancholy.54 This melancholy is conveyed not just by the central figure’s lassitude and empty fixation, but in the iconography as well, for he is posed, and disposed, in a way similar (in reverse) to the figure in one of the prints that always hung in Guston’s studio, Dürer’s Melancholia.55 Backed by walls, both figures seem lost in meditation, heads bent, hands forgotten and fiddling. The shaded blocks at the Klansman’s feet are a distorted recollection of the large geometrical solids, spherical and pentagonal, in Dürer’s image, and the angled crucifix has its counterpart in an angled ladder in the print, also pointing at the protagonist’s head.56

53. Ashton notes (A Critical Study, p. 7) that the painting is based in large part on Max Ernst’s Virgin Chastising the Christ Child. 54. Freud saw melancholy as mourning interrupted and diverted by narcissistic regression. (“Mourning and Melancholia,” Collected Papers 4, pp. 152–70.) He observed that melancholia and mania often go together (pp. 164–66), as they certainly did for Guston, who wrote (describing with apparent innocence a chronic manic-depressive condition), “the counterpart of melancholy can become unbearable excitement. . . . You’d think I’d be familiar by now with all these going on—but that’s not the way it works, is it?” Letter to Ashton, August 11, 1975, cited in Mayer, Night Studio, p. 172. 55. See Ashton, A Critical Study, pp. 54–56. 56. Much later, in 1968, the Dürer will return to provide another springboard in addition to Cubism for Guston’s investigation of logic of the pile-up.

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And if melancholy and guilt cover the underlying complex in Guston’s drawing, then the uncanny effects will be subtle—a matter of the way that all life in the scene seems to have migrated from the colorless figures into the barely pink bricks, and death into the slightly sallow flagstones, or the way that the posts surmounting the wall, in addition to being a classic defensive multiplication of the phallus, take on an anthropomorphic, watching quality. (Freud noted that the confusion of organic and inorganic, and of living and dead, were characteristic features of the uncanny.) We are dealing in short with a private, unmastered uncanny, not a public, theatrical one. The psychic material has risen not into the full light of day, but only into the preconscious half light of anxiety and foreboding. When Freud writes that the uncanny occurs “when repressed infantile complexes have been revived,” he leaves it pointedly unclear as to how far that revival may extend into consciousness. Exactly what might have triggered the return of this psychic material is hard to say, but since 1930, the year of the drawing, Guston took his first steps toward professional and romantic maturity, which certainly means that conditions were favorable for a resurgence of an Oedipal struggle with an absent father over whom (with his suicide) too easy a victory had been won. The year 1930 was a huge year for Guston. He left home (though not L.A.), met his future wife Musa McKim, and became involved in radical politics. It was probably also the year that his older brother died of gangrene after being hit by a car, a shock that must have redoubled the trauma of his father’s death.57 And in 1930 Guston began his post- secondary study of art, at Otis Art Institute and then privately with Lorser Feitelson, discovering the modernists in the Arensberg collection and the artists of the Italian Renaissance, the two sets of masters who would stay with him as a distinctly paternal pantheon.58 Thus the mixed feelings that must have accompanied the young boy’s discovery of his dead father—guilt, anger, shock, betrayal—found belated expression in the double-edged identifications activated by and ranked in the very structure of the Conspirators drawing. The drawing captures a crucial symbolic substitution of son for father (and thus an equation as well), one whose conflictedness is proven by the fact that Guston proceeded to split the structure back in two, using the middle- ground figures for the painting and the foreground figure for the mural. (Here it is worth noting that Guston’s pre-1948 figuration was explicitly received as symbolist.)59

57. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 17. She writes that Guston’s “leaving home at seventeen” (he was born in 1913) “must have been close to the time of Nat’s death.” 58. Guston’s filial relationship to the old masters is clear from an interview near the end of his life. “Question: Mr. Guston, 500 years from now, in the history of art, if you could be remembered for just one thing, what would you like it to be? Guston: I would like to be in the same place as Goya would be, where Manet would be, and where Cézanne would be. I wouldn’t mind a pat on the back from them saying, ‘Not bad, sonny! Pas mal.’” See Dickson, “Transcript of a Conversation,” pp. 38–39, and the Blackwood film. 59. See, for example, the article in Life magazine of May 27, 1946, “Philip Guston: Carnegie winner’s art is abstract and symbolic.” In 1949 J. L. Shadbolt called Guston a “new symbolist.”

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A crucial symbolic substitution: We seem to be back at Jakobson’s metaphoric pole. If, as I proposed earlier, the distinctive sign of pictorial metaphor is positional similarity defined as two objects occupying the same set of signifiers,60 then the figure of the central Klansman is clearly metaphoric, for under his hood he represents in condensed fashion both Guston and his father. But it is not just at the level of formal grammar that the drawing is metaphoric. Jakobson himself suggested that the metaphor-metonymy distinction might be applicable to psychoanalysis (and every other sign system). Toward the end of the essay he briefly applies the distinction to Freud’s categories of dream work, associating displacement and condensation with metonymy, identification and symbolism with metaphor.61 It was Lacan who spun this suggestion into the sketch of a theory. Extending his definition of metonymy (see above) as the fate of language “to signify something quite other than what it says,” Lacan invokes the “rails—eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else—of metonymy.” Thus metonymy is not just a signifying but also a desiring chain, and metaphor (if I read correctly) is the initial substitution that sets the chain in motion and continues to haunt it: “Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved—a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element.” Or, as Lacan suggests next, metaphor is the “suspension point of the signifying chain where the memory screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified.”62 Whether metaphor for Lacan is a symptom or a fetish, a behavior or an object, it is what gets substituted for the repressed memory of a sexual trauma, allowing desire (metonymy) in some fashion to continue functioning. If the fundamental trauma according to Freud is the threat of castration and the fetish is a phallic substitute, in Lacan’s abstracting reinterpretation the sexual trauma is rooted in a manque (lack) or what he sometimes calls a manque-à-être (which he translates as “want to be”). Metaphor attempts to reinstall being through a substitution or condensation,63 but metonymy frustrates that move by extending the initial substitution into an endless chain of displacements, a “veering off of signification.” In this way Lacan, as he himself concludes, “links

60. The difference between this and the centerpiece of Picasso’s Open Window is that this is a “second-order semiological system,” as Roland Barthes would have put it, for here it is a signified (a Klansman) and not just a signifier (a grid of marks) that calls up two further signifieds (Guston and his father). See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), pp. 114–15. 61. Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” p. 132. 62. Lacan, “Agency of the Letter,” pp. 166–67. 63. Here Lacan implicitly corrects Jakobson, who had linked condensation as well as displacement with metonymy. Compare Lacan, “Agency of the Letter,” p. 160, to Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language,” p. 132. Perhaps Lacan did not want to mar his “homage” to Jakobson (see his note 20) by pointing out his departure.

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metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack.”64 Desire, one might summarize, is metonymical, but to the extent that one is a fetishist it is metaphorical. What Lacan’s gloss on Jakobson’s distinction suggests, indeed insists on, is that far from being alternate “personal styles,” metaphor and metonymy are linked by a psychological logic that prescribes a movement between the two, generally from the former to the latter. Earlier we found an instance of this move- ment in the relationship between Guston’s Open Window and its Picasso source. Now we are prepared to map it again, in the shift from the metaphoric structure of the Conspirators drawing, via the abstractions of the 1950s and ’60s, to the metonymic logic of the Marlborough manner, a manner marked not coincidentally by the return of the Klan theme.

*

Guston is clear about why the hoods rode back into town in 1968: “They became my subject matter and I was flooded by a memory.” The memory, Guston explains, was the Scottsboro mural incident, and what triggered the memory was “the [Vietnam] war and the demonstrations.”65 But as usual with Guston, the political and the personal intertwine. Early in 1966 Guston stopped painting, broke off an affair with a photographer, and moved with his wife from Manhattan to Woodstock, New York, in an effort to rebuild his personal life and career. For two years he did hundreds of drawings, alternating violently between abstraction during the day and figuration at night, between what he called “pure” and “object” drawings. In 1968 he decided in favor of figuration and returned to painting, and what followed were “the two most intense and prolific years of his whole career”66—an avalanche of books, shoes, cars, buildings, all revolving around the hoods. Guston described them this way: They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood. In the new series of “hoods” my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. . . . Then I started thinking that in this city, in which creatures or insects had taken over, or were running the world, there were bound to be artists. What would they paint? They would paint each other, or paint self-portraits. I did a whole series in which I made a spoof of the whole art world.67

64. Lacan, “Agency of the Letter,” pp. 160, 175. 65. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 52. 66. Mayer, Night Studio, pp. 131–42, 149. 67. “Philip Guston Talking,” pp. 52–53.

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The most emblematic, programmatic hood painting is The Studio of 1969, which appears to show a Klansman painting his own portrait. If the hoods them- selves are self-portraits, as Guston always suggested, then this is a self-portrait squared, a doppelgänger producing his own double (and here we should recall that Freud considered the theme of the double a cardinal instance of the uncanny in fiction68). The result is a double-hooding or distancing, a simultaneous donning and denying of an alter ego. This accords well with the ambivalence in Guston’s 68. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 387.

Guston. The Studio. 1969.

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69. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 53. It might be objected that the Klansman is not painting his self- portrait but another Klansman. As Guston said, they “paint each other or paint self-portraits.” But this indifference is just the point: It doesn’t matter, since the Klansman are not individuals, but simply slightly varied links of a chain.

Guston with The Studio. 1969. Photo by Frank Lloyd.

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across the canvas found in all of Guston’s Marlborough work. The Klansmen are never really just “riding around” (the title of one of the key works in the Marlborough exhibition, which depicted three Klansmen in their convertible driving right out of the picture); they are riding through, emphatically pointing and looking across the space at right angles to the beholder’s line of vision. When they are on their feet, they tend to wander busily at cross-purposes. They embody, even thematize, pictorial metonymy, the “positional contiguity” of one thing next to another, leading to another, pointing at another. (And the fact that the hoods rarely have bodies, that they stand for whole figures, is a perfect part-for-whole metonymy, thus an instance of “semantic contiguity.”) For Guston to adopt this kind of vectored narrative structure in 1968 was a departure almost as great as his embrace of a demotic, cartoon-like figuration. One has to go back to paintings like Gladiators (1938) or Martial Memory (1941) to find equally strong lateral movements. In the fifties this kind of movement all but disappeared from Guston’s work—not because he turned to abstraction, but because of the type of abstraction he turned to. In every picture there is an insistence on centered and frontal presentation, which only gets stronger the more Guston puts out compositional feelers from center to edge. Indeed a virtual contest between forms for the center develops in the later 1950s, with acid colors trying to make inroads by sometimes going around, sometimes crawling directly over competing hues, producing a characteristic central thicket. This game of king-of-the-hill is the abstract equivalent of what I defined earlier as positional similarity, or rather it is the struggle for it. The structurally metaphoric aspect of this effort of each form to displace or substitute for another is thrown into relief by a rare figurative drawing from the period, Head: Double View of 1958. David McKee, Guston’s devoted dealer, notes of this drawing that Guston “considered it to be the first manifestation of the head and the beginning of his disaffection with abstraction.”70 The drawing takes Picasso’s old trick of condensing front view and profile and radicalizes it by multiplication, turning the face into a grimacing, illegible road map.71 Rather than the double view of the title, we get a view whose multiplicity is barely contained by the head’s outline. At the same time the drawing, in its pulling apart of the face, inaugurates a disarticulation of the center, something that Guston took further in other drawings that year, such as Drawing No. 21, which he significantly retitled “Forms in Change” at the time of his 1980 retrospective.72 The ferment is verified in Mayer’s memoirs: “During the last three years of the decade, Philip painted dozens of small gouaches and oils. When his work was changing rapidly, my father

70. David McKee, artist’s questionnaire prepared for the Department of Drawings, Museum of Modern Art, July 24, 1984, cited in Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, p. 47, n. 23. 71. Or is it a portrait of Guston’s friend the composer John Cage? The shape of the head and the prominence of the ears recall Guston’s ca. 1955 caricature of Cage, reproduced in Storr, Philip Guston, p. 31. 72. Philip Guston (San Francisco, 1980), pl. 28, which gives both the old and the new titles.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 often worked small—as he did again, a decade later, producing a flood of small panels of shoes and books—as if gathering momentum for the state- ment of larger work.”73 The larger work was a series of paintings in gray, relieved at first by orange, red, blue, and green, then (from 1963 on) only by pink, which Guston showed at his Jewish Museum exhibition in 1966. They were distin- guished by one or more floating dark blobs, often central but never quite centered, that Guston referred to, with some reservation, as heads: “Sometimes I know what they are. . . . But if I think ‘head’ while I’m doing it, it becomes a mess . . . I want to end with something that will baffle me for some time.”74 The referential lability of the “heads” was echoed by their locational one. Guston said he was after an image that “must feel as if it’s been in many places all over this canvas, and indeed there’s no place for it to settle— except momentarily. . . .”75 This was a deliberate working method, as Arnason reports: “He was painting rapidly and continuously and increasingly felt that he was living in the painting. As the forms shifted from place to place, were scraped out, reconsti- tuted, developed new relationships with other forms, they acquired a past, a history which became part of their existence and motivation in the finished work.”76

73. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 92. 74. Berkson, “Dialogue with Philip Guston,” p. 66. 75. Helmut Wohl, “Philip Guston and the Problems of Painting,” Harvard Art Review (spring–summer 1967), pp. 28–30. 76. H. H. Arnason, “Philip Guston,” in Philip Guston, exh. cat. (Guggenheim Museum, 1962), p. 33 (based on his 1962 interview with the artist).

Above: Guston. Head—Double View (Drawing No. 20). 1958. Left: Guston. Afternoon. 1964.

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These works can be seen as a declaration of the rights of the individual form over against the compositional whole, a dissent from the secretly strict compositional dictates of fifties “gestural” abstraction that Guston himself had done much to put in place. First among these rights was that of freely erring across the canvas. (Guston explained that he used white as a means of correcting and moving the black forms, thus the resulting field of grays.) His regret over the “loss of the object” in contemporary art and his longing to restore “the thickness of things”77 led to a mode of organization in which newly enfranchised forms attracted and repelled one another in their wanderings, drawing near but (unlike the works of the late 1950s) avoiding all overlap—another instance of the connection between opacity and metonymy (positional contiguity) that we saw in Guston’s Open Window. As Ashton implies, it was the meandering structure of the gray paintings that anticipated the Marlborough manner: “Those drunken shapes, shambling through the large paintings or sitting incongruously in the midst of nowhere in the small gouaches, were the prototypes of later, frankly satirical works.”78 This is not to say that all the Marlborough works are compositionally errant. In The Three,

77. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 111; Blackwood film. 78. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 135.

Guston. The Three. 1970.

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for example, partly shadowed hoods and the buildings behind them are neatly rendered by an interlocking structure of white, gray, and (inverted) red triangles. What could be more classical? But this monumental group of figures towering above the horizon, far from being static, is given a lateral shove by the pointing, gesticulating riders and by the strip of sky that dislodges them from the right edge of the painting. Where are the hoods going in all their metonymic motion? We have been tracing one rather formalist and genealogical answer, namely that they were escaping the impacted, condensed abstractions of the late fifties, with the transition provided by the early-sixties gray paintings. Of course, this answer undoes its own formalism as soon as one recalls that this transition from a “metaphoric” or centered to a “metonymic” or displaced abstract structure coincided with the obtrusion of a human or psychological image, first in Head: Double View of 1958 and then with the “heads” of the gray paintings. Which in turn suggests that the metonymic hoods may equally have been escaping an earlier metaphoric struc- ture/image, the uneasy condensation of father and son in the Conspirators drawing. Guston made a point of showing that drawing and commenting on it in his 1978 University of Minnesota lecture: This drawing (for the Conspirators) was done in 1930. I discovered it about five years ago in a drawer, in a package of old drawings. It’s a sketch for one of the early Klan paintings, though later Klan paintings are totally different. So one never forgets anything, one never goes forward and forward, you are always moving in a circular way, and nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever finished until you leave. Here Guston reveals that he had lost track of the drawing until about 1973, and he takes the rediscovery as evidence of his circling unconsciously around the same themes over the years. It’s a moving statement, partly because of the contradiction between Guston’s sense of a return and his insistence that the “later Klan paintings are totally different” from the earlier ones, which he had called illustrations. Of course, the Conspirators drawing is about as far from mere illustration as one can get, as we have seen. In fact, insofar as it is a self-portrait, it is totally the same as the later Klan paintings. Is it simply an accident that this drawing had such a checkered history— that the painting it proposed was never really executed; that the psychologically central figure of the Klansman holding the rope was dropped when the image was split into two destinations, an easel painting and a mural (one of which was vandalized and both of which were eventually lost); that the drawing was itself lost by Guston until 1973? Is it too much to suggest that the “loss” was a moti- vated slip—that the psychical-structural metaphoric of the drawing was something that Guston simply could not face, at least not until 1973, after the Klansmen rode back out of town for good (“when I came back [from Italy], I had finished with the hoods, they were done, you can’t redo a thing once it’s

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done”79), at which point he rediscovered the drawing simply by pulling it out of a drawer? Isn’t it conceivable that the drawing was not really lost, but remained present as a central absence in Guston’s career, a vanishing point from which much of his subsequent work was projected?

*

I have skipped a moment between Conspirators and the Marlborough show when the Klansmen briefly poked their heads up: Guston’s Tormentors of 1947–48. As in 1930 and 1968, they came at a crisis in Guston’s life: He had, by the age of thirty-four, won most of the major honors avail- able to American artists of the time. He was deeply admired by students and colleagues . . . [but] Guston’s sense of having completed a phase in his artistic life was profound enough to fill him with uneasiness. . . . He was already mentally preparing for a struggle with himself that would end, after two academic years in St. Louis [1945–47], in what Guston has at various times called a kind of breakdown.80 The timing is striking: since Tormentors was Guston’s farewell to figuration and the Marlborough hoods were his return, that means that these two (the only two) post- 1930s appearances of the hoods are bookends for Guston’s practice of abstraction between 1948 and 1968. It is as if he needed the Klansman as a chaperon in the passage back and forth between abstraction and figuration, an apotropaic object, a fetish. Why the need for magic? Guston himself suggested an answer in 1978: “I think it’s the devil’s work. You know damn well you’re dealing with ‘forces.’ It’s hubris. We’re not supposed to meddle with the forces—God takes care of that. He says cherish what I’ve made. The ten commandments tell us not to make graven images.”81 Guston (born Goldstein: he always felt bad about having changed his name82) was Jewish enough that the Mosaic bilderverbot or image prohibition carried a special sting. “The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.”83 Recall too that Guston saw painting at its best as God-like: Picasso “re-peopled the earth—inventing new beings.” In this internal debate, what weighed in favor of painting was the possibility of bearing witness. In a public conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School in 1969, Guston began by proposing that the sole psychological

79. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 53. 80. Ashton, Yes, But, cited in Mayer, Night Studio, pp. 37–38. Although Mayer’s footnote does not clearly say so, this passage must be drawn from Ashton’s 1975 manuscript rather than the published book, in which the last sentence does not appear. 81. Dickson, “Transcript of a Conversation,” p. 39. 82. See Mayer, Night Studio, p. 229. 83. Philip Guston, “Faith, Hope and Impossibility,” Art News Annual (1966), p. 101.

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Guston. The Tormentors. 1947–48. motivation of Holocaust survivors had been the need to testify, and he went on to turn this into a parable of the artist.84 This was a role ingrained in Guston since his early days as a muralist with Siqueiros in Los Angeles and Mexico, and then, albeit in less “committed” fashion, as a very successful WPA muralist. But witness was not always a viable option, as Guston’s turn to abstraction just after the war indicates. If painting had to “question itself constantly,”85 his questioning in the 1950s took the form of an investigation of the medium itself. What accounts for this refusal of representation after Tormentors, this retreat into what Guston later referred to as “a family club of art lovers”?86 Was it the impossibility of bearing witness so soon after the war? Was it the need to focus on questions of painting without the distraction of “content”? Was it the peer pressure exerted by the examples of de Kooning and Pollock? Or—without denying these possibilities—was the retreat Guston’s act of penance for having made illusionistic images, an attack by the artist on his own eyes? One of the main drawings for Tormentors features a rare combination of eyes and hoods. The eyes at far left, heavy-lidded and flatly gazing (in a word,

84. Audio tape, New York Studio School library. Guston also said more than once that his piles of shoes and legs, which appeared first as the work of the Klan (in paintings like A Day’s Work) and then rose up in the mid-1970s to became horrible self-supporting monuments, were his response to photos of the liberation of the camps. 85. “I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn’t have to exist at all—I mean, it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai; it’s not written in the ten commandments—unless it questions itself constantly” (“Philip Guston Talking,” p. 50). 86. “Too much of a collaboration was going on. It was like a family club of art lovers” (“Philip Guston Talking,” p. 50). Also: “I got sick and tired of all the Purity! wanted to tell Stories!” (Berkson, “The New Gustons,” p. 44).

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melancholy), avert themselves from a jumble of hoods with blank, armor-like visors made by the semicircles of horseshoes or hobnailed boot soles. A strongly modeled arm gropes from left to right across a kind of firewall to grasp a central hood. Further right the hoods lose definition, trail off, become no more than disconnected, triangular thoughts about structure. (In the painting this narrative is entirely suppressed thanks to the elimination of both the head and arm.) We are witnessing the birth of a reaction-formation, another kind of magic. Guston flees the reappearance of the Klansman with his load of impossible Oedipal material by, of all things, donning his hood. Of White Painting (1951), arguably his first total abstraction, Guston said, “I forced myself to paint the entire work without stepping back to look at it.”87 This not quite white on white picture, which also includes pale ochers, grays, and greens not mentioned in the title, presents (far from the infinities of Malevich’s White on White) a limit of visibility. We are confronted everywhere by the texture of paint and canvas, in some sense a view from inside the hood.88

87. Arnason, Philip Guston, p. 21. 88. I owe this suggestion to Sarah Boxer. The equation of raw canvas and white hood anticipates Guston’s more explicit metaphorizations of painting, e.g., a bloody whip is a red paintbrush, of his Marlborough period.

Guston. Drawing No. 1 (for Tormentors). 1947.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702317274657 by guest on 24 September 2021 Feldman recalls an experi- ence, probably in the mid-sixties, of waking up from a nap he was taking in Guston’s studio: “He was still painting, standing almost on top of the canvas, lost in it, too close really to see it, his only reality the innate feel of the material he was using. As I awoke he made a stroke on the canvas, then turned to me, confused, almost laughing because he was confused, and said with a certain humorous helpless- ness, ‘Where is it?’”89 Guston was painting discrete forms at this point, or at least the “thickness of things,” but he was sure to keep it all uncertain: “I want my work to include more,” he told Harold Rosenberg in 1966. “I am therefore driven to scrape out the recognition, to efface it, to erase it. I am nowhere until I have reduced it to semi-recognition.”90 No surprise then that Guston’s return to imagery in 1968 was so difficult. Speaking of his two-year contest in 1966–68 between figurative and abstract drawings, he told Ashton, “It wasn’t a transition in the way it was in 1948, when one feeling was fading away and a new one had not yet been born. It was two equally powerful impulses at loggerheads.”91 One of the first hoods to emerge from the struggle was Hooded Self-Portrait of 1969, one of the only cases (other than the Tormentors drawing and the Conspirators works) of hoods and eyes in a single image.92 He looks shell-shocked. The eye-holes reveal two staring pupils, one normal and the other a cat-like vertical slit. For all subsequent Klansmen the slit of the left eyeball becomes the slit in the hood itself, hiding the eyes. The mask reached for by the arm in the Tormentors drawing is donned just in time to expiate the Old Testament crime of picturing. The books (or buildings or bread boxes) stand by in all their Mosaic tablets-of-the-law solidity, the floodgates open. Guston woke each morning to create new adventures for his klan of Klansmen. “I was like a movie director.” What could be more God-like for a boy from Los Angeles and an idolizer of Fellini, to whom he dedicated a major painting? But of course, what Guston discovered was not some Edenic set of natural names, some divine “language of things” (to recall Storr’s phrase), but a slippery mess. With the logic of metonymy unleashed, each stroke represented not too little but always possibly too much. Guston had traded the underrecognition of the gray

89. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 105, citing Morton Feldman, “After Modernism,” Art in America (November–December 1971). 90. “Philip Guston’s Object: A Dialogue with Harold Rosenberg,” in Philip Guston: Recent Paintings and Drawings, exh. cat. (Jewish Museum, New York, 1966), n.p. 91. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 154. 92. After writing this essay I saw another work like the Hooded Self-Portrait (also showing eyes under the hood) in a private New York collection.

Guston. Hooded Self- Portrait. 1969.

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paintings for the no-more-stable condition of overrecognition. Which is why he was careful not to describe it as a simple movement from ambiguity to clarity: “in time I tired of this kind of ambiguity”; he was after a “sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space,” but an enigma still.93 Do the thick outlines and chunky modeling of Guston’s return to “realism” really offer us anything more convincing than the floating heads of the sixties? The new characters are “thick shells” not solid presences, “props or symbols of people” waiting to be recognized or not.94 For Guston, recognition was at once a perceptual problem and a historical one. The same 1966 conversation in which he announced his desire to “scrape out the recognition” included this exchange: “Rosenberg: You want to go into new territory. Guston: New territory has to have recognition in it too. R: What kind of recognition? G: It has to be new and old at the same time, as if that image has been in you for a long time but you’ve never seen it before. When it comes out, it must have this double experience in yourself.”95 What is this kind of déja-vu but the way we greet the uncanny when it comes across the threshold? And not just the Freudian uncanny. Guston’s art allows us to think back together the psychoanalytic and the gothic versions—the uncanny as return-of-the-repressed and the uncanny as anguished uncertainty, category confusion, a place where (recalling Freud’s description of that view) “one does not know where one is, as it were.” Guston himself explicitly connected the problems of memory and locatability: It’s the unsettling of the image that I want. . . . It must of necessity be an image which . . . has not only not made up its mind where to be but must feel as if it’s been in many places all over this canvas, and indeed there’s no place for it to settle—except momentarily. Yet it must have its past. It must feel as if it’s lived. A picture is finished when it’s in this unsettled, hovering state; not indecisive, though, because it’s lived a long time everywhere else, lived in me, lived in previous paintings of mine, and now in this picture it’s in a new and very particular situation . . . it’s won its freedom from inertia, you might say.96 This remark, made in 1967, applies equally to the wandering hoods of 1968–72, the wandering heads of the mid-sixties, and the purblind abstractions of the fifties. Guston’s invocation of “unsettling” brings us back to the uncanny or unheimlich, literally “unhomelike,” which is not far from “homeless.” Guston

93. “Philip Guston Talking,” p. 50. 94. Alex Schwertfeger, “Philip Guston and the Expendable Conventions of Abstraction,” unpub- lished student paper, Harvard College, May 24, 1999, p. 6. 95. Guston said much the same thing in 1960: “I would like to think a picture is finished when it feels not new, but old. As if its forms had lived a long time in you, even though until it appears you did not know what it would look like.” “Philadelphia Panel” [transcript of a Philadelphia Museum School of Art discussion, March 1960]: It Is (spring 1960), p. 36. 96. Wohl, “Philip Guston,” p. 30.

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remarked once, “Clement Greenberg once said that some artists, like de Kooning and me, were ‘homeless.’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment but we accepted it as one.”97 Actually, Greenberg had written not of homeless artists but “homeless representation,” referring to the fact that the kind of strokes used by de Kooning and Guston seemed to have a representational intention without a representational effect.98 Guston’s slip in paraphrasing Greenberg makes reference to the immigrant status he shared with de Kooning, and perhaps also to the fatherless condition he shared with many of the other Abstract Expressionists.99 But as Freud pointed out about the uncanny, “the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression,”100 and the same is true of the suffix “–less.” The other side of Guston’s celebration of homelessness is the ambivalent desire for a homecoming.101 Nostalgia can be freezing and fixating, “the place where the memory screen is immobilized” (recalling Lacan on the fetish), and Guston seems to have been on his guard. In all his near-returns he found paradoxical reinvention, a “freedom from inertia” that exploded the most impacted psychological and historical determinants. Perhaps what Merleau-Ponty said of psychoanalysis in applying it to Cézanne is equally true in the case of Guston: it “does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves.”102

97. Stevens, “A Talk with Philip Guston,” p. 27. 98. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” Art International (October 1962), p. 25. Greenberg wrote that “‘homeless representation’ is neither good nor bad” except if it “hardens into mannerism” (and here he mentioned the mid-fifties work of de Kooning, Guston, and Kline). 99. When Franz Kline was about eight years old his father committed suicide; when Mark Rothko was about ten his father died; when Jackson Pollock was about nine his father abandoned the family (and died twelve years later); and when de Kooning was about three his father left home due to a divorce and had little further contact with his son. In addition, Arshile Gorky’s mother died before he was fifteen. No doubt there are other cases of the early loss of a parent among artists in this circle, yet no interpretation has treated this striking commonality. 100. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 399. 101. He once said about his 1968 revolution that he was hoping to recapture a sense of wholeness remembered from childhood. 102. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in his Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Herbert L. and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

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