“To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies all previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish. For me the most relevant question and perhaps the only one is ‘When are you finished?’ When do you stop? Or rather why stop at all.”
P hilip Guston’s Grove II, painted in 1959, is a brilliant example of the artist’s richly coloristic abstract paintings from the 1950s, which according to curator Robert Storr, as a body of work, “represent one of the most poetic contributions to Abstract Expressionism” (Robert Storr, Philip Guston, New York: Abbeville Press, 1983, p. 7). Typical of the highly influential artist’s softly gestural approach to painting during this important decade in his career, Grove II combines Guston’s signature boldness and subtlety, displaying a formal language present throughout his idiosyncratic oeuvre, which oscillated between figuration and abstraction for nearly fifty years. Interesting in how it prefigures the highly original figurative style Guston adopted in the late 1960s and produced throughout the 1970s, Grove II also suggests an orientation toward an expressive vein of abstract painting, including an all-over quality reminiscent of the canvases of his high school classmate, Jackson Pollock, who shared Guston’s fascination with the emotional possibilities of paint and color, albeit to a wholly different effect. Contrasting Guston’s evocative use of gesture and painterly space to his fellow New York School painters, including Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, Storr notes that “Guston’s brush, by contrast, patiently explored the canvas, establishing a network of short, discontinuous strokes that charted the exact dimensions of the painting’s format and located its center of gravity. His gesture was not that of the hand that grasps a tool while the arm sweeps but that of an arm that extends a groping hand” (Ibid, p. 27). These unique qualities and approaches clearly characterize Grove II, a work spatially arranged to emphasize the squareness of the canvas.
Fascinating in how the glowing bursts of reds, yellows, blues, and cloud-like grays also recall Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s iconic abstract works from the 1920s, Grove II, in contrast, is neither impersonal nor hard-edged, but rather atmospheric, expressive, and imprinted everywhere with Guston’s rapidly moving hand. Characterized by its patchwork of dynamic, multicolored forms moving in a central mass, Grove II is a canvas deeply rooted in the tradition of Western painting and a stunning illustration of the vitality of Guston’s colorist and painterly sensibilities, which would become central to his legacy as one of the greatest painters in the history of twentieth-century art.
The facture of the present work is evident in every gesture and each ridge of paint that builds up around the ghost trace of Guston’s brush. The warring tendencies in Guston’s most superlative works between the physicality of paint and the philosophical questions of post-war art are further indicative of his maverick spirit and reveal an almost sculptural sensibility in his treatment of paint. Completed after almost a decade of producing important abstract works, Grove II was originally in the renowned collects ion of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Gumberg, alongside masterworks by leading gestural painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
