Philip Guston at McKee - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

"Philip Guston: Paintings of the Fifties" was individual of the highlights of the late spring season. For Guston, the beginning of the '50 was a time of acute crisis. He had left behind his monumental murals of the '30 with their Pieroesque figures and public pieties. He had painted himself end his more private imagery of the '40 where dreaming, transfixed children act without silent tableaux on the porches of Iowa City. by dint of the end of the '40 Guston had flattened his actors into surface pattern. He no longer believed in their games. They evaporated, leaving solitary traces of their presence embedded in the painted surfaces.

Guston's renunciation of illusionistic space and the dramatic potential of figuration should have made him a prime candidate for elevation to Harold Rosenberg's pantheon of Action painting, on the other hand this never happened. Most of the Abstract-Expressionist painters viewed Guston with suspicion. He had been prominent in the '30 and '40 when the others had been marginal. He had not draw near out of Breton's "pure psychic automatism" or Jung's search for a "collective unconscious." He had simply painted himself beyond phraseology and was left with single the act of painting itself.

R Painting (1950) contains quelled fragments of the figures of the '40 We could wait for the shards to reassemble, on the other hand they are buried in a r void of archeological time. With Ochre Painting 1 (1951) all traces of previous life have been absorbed by means of the golden ground. A grid is proposeed by the direction of brushstrokes and the weight and density of color. It's almost as if Guston, having buried his vestigial make submissive in Red Painting, is now independent to invent himself on a tabula rasa.

Little by the agency of little, a new content come ups An untitled painting from 1955-56 consists of a cluster of r patches gathering from a grayed pink field. The fragments at no time coalesce into a resolved image, nor do they evaporate back into the void from which they were born. It is this flow between construction and deconstruction that marks that beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery of Guston's abstract paintings. It is his metaphor for nature.

By the extremity of the decade, the shapes that come up from the fields of paint are ragged and eccentric. An untitled painting from 1958 has a central, tattered black form that hints a masked head. This is 20/20 hindsight. The "Hoods" don't draw near riding into town in their clunky car for another decade. on the contrary here, Guston seems already to have mov beyond evocations of landscape into almost nameable human situations. The faculty of perception of yearning for completion and for an Arcadian paradise implicit in the works of the early and mid-'50s is replaced through a dark mirror that reveals a surrogate self-portrait.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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