Philip Guston, Painter Among Poets

Hyperallergic's Cara Ober visits the latest Philip Guston exhibition, at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, which positions the great painter alongside poets who inspired his work. Ober begins by looking at Guston's fall from grace, after his 1970 show where he first exhibited paintings from his return to figuration. Ober writes:

What more can be said about Philip Guston? America’s beloved painter of muddy pinks, cigarette-smoking klansmen, and dystopian dreamscapes died in 1980, but his Neo- and Abstract Expressionist works have continued to grow to a cult status among devoted fans, collectors, and museums. This postmortem popularity should be surprising, considering the artist’s apocalyptic fall from art world grace in 1970, after scathing universal reactions to his return to figuration in a solo exhibition at Marlboro Gallery in New York.

What salvaged Guston’s art practice after this soul-crushing defeat? Capital-P Poetry. At least this is the argument that curator Kosme de Barañano makes in Philip Guston and the Poets, currently on exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Far from the Giardini and Christine Macel’s Viva Arte Viva, this exhibit is a deep and delicious treat, featuring over 50 paintings and 25 drawings made between 1930 and 1980.

It’s well documented that, after Guston’s fall from grace, he left Manhattan for Woodstock, and surrounded himself with young poets. “They [the poets] see without the jargon of art,” he said in the March 15, 1980 issue of the New Republic. “Sharply. Fresh. Sometimes they are funny or their reactions are funny and I enjoy that.” The exhibit in Venice includes a number of rarely shown collaborations where Guston illustrated the poetry of his wife Musa McKim and friend Clark Coolidge into capricious “poem-pictures” on paper. An added bonus: several reference his frequent travels to Italy — in 1948, he was the Prix de Rome winner, in 1960 he represented the US in the Venice Biennale, and in 1970 he was an artist in residence in Rome. His scrawled vignettes of Italian landscapes add a deeper layer to the context of the exhibit in Venice’s historic home to masterpieces by Tintoretto, Titian, and Tiepolo, among others.

The exhibition does not center on the young poets of Guston's immediate company in the 1970s but rather with the likes of Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and D.H. Lawrence. More about that at Hyperallergic.