Philip Guston, Tate Modern, review: Outstanding paintings of crisis, violence and injustice

Towards the end of Tate Modern’s exhibition comes a painting of Philip Guston lying in bed, his head rendered as a pink monocular bean with a shadow of stubble. A filterless Camel (one of his 60 a day) indicates where his mouth might be. On his bed cover sits a plate of fat chips, their edges daubed in the cadmium red of tomato ketchup. Behind him are paint cans filled with brushes, a stack of coarse boots showing their nailed soles, and a bare lightbulb with a pull-chain.

The title Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973) suggests that some of this is a painting within a painting, but it’s hard to work out where Guston’s room stops and the canvas begins. How to separate life from art? That is Guston all over – a brilliant intellectual, but not one prone to cool impersonal analysis. Everything was personal, wrestled with, fretted over. His default state was anxiety.  

There are many reasons Guston may be unfamiliar to British viewers. There has not been a significant UK show since 2003. His name does not trip off the tongue in the rollcall of great mid-century New York painters in part because his mid-career success provoked such a personal crisis that he stopped working. He does not fit neatly into a school, or an ism, or any tidy history of art. Perhaps for this in particular he is revered by the painters that followed him.

For many artists a visit to this long-delayed show will be an act of pilgrimage. It is an outstanding exhibition, offering a startling view inside the creative mind, and a career spanning the dynamic years of art in the mid-century. Expect the cult of Guston to proliferate dramatically.  

Guston was born Phillip Goldstein in 1913 in Montreal, the son of Jewish immigrants from present-day Ukraine. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1922. Unable to find solid employment, Guston’s father Leib was reduced to gathering junk as a rag picker. In 1923 he hanged himself in the shed behind the family home. Guston would later describe finding his father’s body and cutting the rope. Reading and drawing cartoons and caricatures became an escape, conducted in the privacy of a cupboard lit by a bare bulb.

At Manual Arts High School Guston met Jackson Pollock and was introduced to the Italian Renaissance through reproductions of paintings by Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, artists who would remain touchstones throughout his career.

This exhibition first encounters Guston, still in his teens, in 1930, with a Picasso-esque painting of a mother and child, and a reproduction of a political mural destroyed in a Ku Klux Klan raid on a communist social club. On canvas Guston was dipping his toe into surrealism, inspired by the uncanny streetscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. On city walls, however, he found early success as a political muralist, inspired by the great public art of post-revolution Mexico.

Knowing a little of Guston’s later career, it is startling how many references are in place in his late teens. The bare light bulb from Painting, Smoking, Eating makes its first appearance in the surreal Nude Philosopher in Space Time (1935) in which the heavy, nippled form of the bulb stands in for the pendulous breast of a suggested female body. The hooded Klansmen whose sinister presence haunts his political murals of the 30s make a startling return in Guston’s final decade.

As conflict erupted in Europe, Guston painted children engaged in junkyard battles, wearing pans and kettles for helmets, using bin lids for shields and splintered poles as lances. These children’s games feel deadly serious, in compositions as tightly crammed and charged with symbolism as the 15th-century frescoes Guston so admired. He was aware of the violence and destruction on the other side of the Atlantic – the aerial bombardment of the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937, and of Poland in 1939. Still, in these scenes of scrappy conflict it is hard not to think of the violence his father fled in Russia, and his time in the junkyards of Los Angeles.

Guston’s was a career of crises. The first major one came after the war. His friends in art, argument and alcohol – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman – marked out their own dynamic territory within what became known as abstract expressionism. Guston, meanwhile, worked with tortuous slowness, producing dark-red canvases, clotted and depressive, that felt haunted by figures that refused to either resolve themselves or entirely disappear. 

His breakthrough as an abstract painter came in 1951 with a work that reflected only his physical engagement with the canvas – he painted without stepping back to take an overview until it was done. The result was the pale and clustered forms of White Painting I, and a 14-year span in which he found critical and commercial success.

The abstract paintings start gestural and bodily, Guston’s colours fleshy and sanguine. As the 50s progressed they became darker, and the suggestion of clustered bodies and unfolding drama crept into the work. His success was crowned with a mid-career retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1962. Cue crisis number two.

This second period of tormented introspection affords one of this exhibition’s loveliest rooms. On one side, a sequence of canvases filled with pinky, silver-grey waves above which float black head; on the other, the simple ink drawings through which Guston started painting again as if from scratch. Between them float a few minutes of For Philip Guston (1984) written by his friend, the experimental composer Morton Feldman. It is moving, sublime. In real time Guston’s crisis was something messier: drinking, depression, and an affair (Guston had married the artist and poet Musa McKim in 1937).

In 1970, Guston reappeared, apparently fully reinvented, with works that drew together his early interest in cartooning, his political murals and clashes with the Klan in Los Angeles. He assembled a vocabulary of images that had peppered his paintings from the earliest years: lightbulbs, bin lids, kettles, clocks, cigarettes. In this era of political assassinations, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, Guston’s response was to turn within himself in an attempt to understand the human roots of evil.

His major paintings of this era feature Klansmen in patchy homemade hoods, often smeared with bloodstains (or perhaps cadmium red paint), going about their everyday business against the backdrop of cartoonish violence, the horrific rendered banal. The Klansmen paint, smoke, and introspect, suggesting Guston himself is within the hood, implicated in the structural ills of his society, including those he finds most repugnant.

Few would follow Guston into this new territory. He lost friends, Feldman among them. Yet this late phase now seems extraordinarily vital, full of feeling and enquiry as Guston poses himself difficult questions, never allowing himself an easy or a less-considered answer.

The final gallery of “night paintings” feels like a journey through insomnia. Guston pictures himself in fragments – that one-eyed bean head, a hand clutching a cigarette – often balanced by the brow of his wife Musa, who suffered a stroke in 1977. One of the final paintings shows the couple in bed, huddled beneath the covers, Guston’s arm stretched around Musa while still holding his paintbrushes.

The political idealism of his youth has ebbed, and by the end, Guston portrays himself as an impotent, compromised figure. He asks what art can do, and what an artist’s position might be in a world of violent injustice.

‘Philip Guston’ is at Tate Modern, London to 25 February 2024