Philip Guston and the poets

Philip Guston was a lifelong friend of poets—from his teenage years in Los Angeles, to his time as a member of the New York School of painting, to his move to Woodstock. His famous—for some, infamous—switch in the late ’60s from abstraction to figuration lent itself to collaboration with various writers. The Morgan Library’s current exhibition of Guston’s drawings prominently features a number of works with accompanying text by poets such as Clark Coolidge (that’s one of them above) and Guston’s wife Musa McKim. (A selection of the Guston-Coolidge collaboration was published back in 1991 with the title Baffling Means by Peter Gizzi’s o-blek editions.)

Sadly, however, drawings from Guston’s Poor Richard series weren’t included in the show. Partly inspired by conversations with Philip Roth while the latter was writing the novel Our Gang, Guston’s scathing caricatures of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Spiro Agnew don’t quite fit the Morgan exhibition’s clean formal trajectory of abstraction and figuration struggling for supremacy in Guston’s work. Guston’s father committed suicide when Philip was ten (he discovered the body), and while Guston’s art may only fully embrace life in his final decade (Guston hints at this in interviews), there’s also a wicked death-drive undercurrent both to the work and to Guston himself. To immerse oneself in the “thickness of things” (as Guston described his process in the ’70s) is also to swim in their mortal shadow. While watching Michael Blackwood’s documentary film Philip Guston: A Life Lived, which screened at the Morgan last Friday night, various audience members squirmed as Guston chain-smoked cigarettes the same year he suffered a major heart attack, and less than a year before he died. Like Charles Olson, with whom I’ve compared Guston’s life, art, and politics, Guston couldn’t slow down, or bother with saving himself, in the heat of his final—and perhaps greatest—production.
Yet even in Guston’s darkest and most ambitious work from the ’70s, there remains an element of deep compassion, as well as of black humor. Similarly, Guston pities Nixon as much as he loathes him. Debra Bricker Balken’s book Philip Guston’s Poor Richard reproduces the drawings, preceded by her valuable scholarly essay on the work. UbuWeb has all the drawings online, along with Balken’s text. Below is one of my favorites.