The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely moving human document it deserves to be seen.
Guston was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, and moved to America in 1919. When he began to paint in 1927, he was largely self-taught. He worked on government-funded mural projects and absorbed the drawing techniques of the Old Masters. The early work in this exhibition portrays war or social issues through an uneasy blending of Renaissance and Surrealist styles. But whatever the distortions, there’s no doubt that young Guston could draw, and that he felt deeply about his subjects. And it was this fluency of drawing that led him to further experiment.
Look at the landscape drawing of Ischia in the first gallery — it has a flow and delicacy which was to find fulfilment in the two beautiful abstracts hung either side of the entrance to Gallery II, the delicate tracery of ‘White Painting I’ (1951), and ‘Painting No 9’ (1952). For pictures such as these, Guston acquired a following as an Abstract Expressionist; yet despite the ravishing exercises in pure painting, Guston the tortured artist, whose father committed suicide and whose brother died of gangrene after a car accident, was already rearing his head. Two of his early subjects were ‘Conspirators’ and ‘Tormentors’, highly suggestive of the self-questioning which lay in the future.
Gallery II takes up the theme of abstraction and develops it with confidence into dancing, vibrant paintings, their gestures becoming bigger and more generous, even perhaps somewhat unstable and frenetic in the transitional works, ‘The Mirror’ (1957), and ‘To Fellini’ (1958).
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