Ars poetica - 'poem-pictures' of Philip Guston

When, around 1970 Philip Guston withdrew from the fresh York art world-in the wake of the generally hostile replication to his newly figurative paintings of head covered figures cruising through cartoonlike cities-it was among writers, mainly younger, that he found a more appreciative audience. He also base something else, for in the '70 the author of poemss Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge and William Corbett, as well as Guston's wife, Musa McKim, became, to varying steps the artist's collaborators. The originate of these encounters were a certain quantity of 200 of what Guston called "poem-pictures," pen-and-ink drawings combining images and text

A number of new events have drawn attention to this previously over-look chapter of Guston's career. Last October, a traveling exhibition titled "Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures" lay opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., and it was in novel York City at the Drawing Center during the summer The exhibit gathers nearly 100 of the "poem picture" drawings. In addition to devoting a latitude of drawings (for the Addison version) to each of Guston's chief collaborators, the present to view also traced Guston's involvement with poesy through drawings for the overlays of books and literary journals like Big celestial expanse and The World.

To viewers who know Guston's late paintings, the visual vocabulary of the poem-pictures is familiar: a huddle of bulbous heads, shoe alones naked lightbulbs, stark horizon lines and all the other clunky hold ups of his '70s work. The addition of writing does not look to have significantly affected his imagery, and perhaps this is what is greatest in quantity initially striking about the drawings-the ease with which Guston was able to incorporate body into his art. He was clearly comfortable with introducing piece of poetrys into drawings and with generating drawings without of poems.

Our knowledge of Guston's artistic dialogue with bards and poetry has been further enhanced by dint of two new books. Although she published single sparsely before her death in l992 Musa McKim (as a writer she generally preferr to use her maiden name) was a committed bard as can now be seen in Alone with the secondary planet Selected Writings of Musa McKim, a contortion which also reproduces 17 Guston drawings that incorporate her poems(1) In Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir, the noted Boston author of poems William Corbett interweaves commentary upon Guston's '70s paintings with recollections of his friendship with the artist.(2) While Corbett refrains from speculating as to on what account Guston was drawn to him and other author of poemss he is clear on what Guston had to proffer writers:

In the years I knew him I always awoke the nearest morning after a late-night talk with the desire to earn to work. His commitment to his art was for a like reason great that he hfted yours to his horizontal In his presence there could be no question that making metrical compositions matters, and for me this restored my youthful dreams.(3)

Elsewhere in his volume Corbett recalls that when the Museum of fresh Art mounted its retrospective of Guston's drawings in 1988 among the more than 150 works in the exhibit there was not a single example of the poem-pictures. Looking back, individual notes that the closest the museum came to acknowledging these collaborations was a catalogue mention of Clark Coolidge as Guston's "poet-friend." wherefore did MOMA overlook this aspect of Guston's oeuvre? Was the curator simply unaware of the existence of the poem-pictures or, more probably, did she not think them important enough to include?(4) The works are also absent from Robert Storr's otherwise comprehensive 1986 application of mind of Guston.(5) Again, one amazements why.

Perhaps the reason for the exclusion lies in the incompatibility of museological/art-historical makes and most collaborations. Within the departmentalized museum and the world of retrospectives, monographs and one-person displays collaborative works are poor cousins. At best they slip in via the domain of works and prints, or as a king of esthetic novelty item (eg a Surrealist exquisite-corpse drawing). Collaboration is too many times passed over because its multiple authorship confuses an esthetics built upon the notion of the individual artist.

It's also a phenomenon in which motives are not easily understood. To say that Guston was isolated and sequestered is not enough to explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason writers like Coolidge went beyond being bare "sounding boards" (as MOMA'S curator narrowly defined their role) for the artist.(6) A possibly more interesting line of speculation is that, through 1970, Guston was no longer afraid of the accusation, lengthy deadly in New York, of making literary art. Upstate in Woodstock, with nothing left to be deprived of in terms of career, Guston was unrestrained to open his work to other presences

Actually, individual of the poem-pictures almost infiltrated MOMA'S Guston drawing present to view If you look at the catalogue's 1976 studio discharge of Guston holding up a framed application of mind for his 1939 Queensbridge Housing throw out mural, behind him you will diocese nine drawings pinned to the wall. The drawing upon the lower left is obscur by means of Guston's bulky midriff, but it's still possible to make without a landscape peopled with more [i]or[/i] less of Guston's favorite forms: a cavernous tree trunk, a kind of scraggy table made from a garbage-can lid, and a certain number of blocky cloud forms. Turning to page 69 of William Corbett's memoir we diocese this drawing in its final state, after Guston has added lines from individual of Corbett's poems. In the canopy of heaven above the tree trunk, Guston has alphabetic charactered in the following quatrain: "Walker Evans dead / the sweeps empty out / many thousands gone / no survivors unseasonable spring." Below it, flush left the name "William Corbett," and in a tall tabletlike unclose book (invisible in the studio shot) Guston has written in a date "12 April." (Evans died Apr. 10 1975)