“The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel, who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them, and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn’t wait; I had hundreds of pictures in mind, and when I left the studio, I would make notes to myself —memos: “Put them all around the table drinking beer.” Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn’t stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave."
Painted at a critical turning point in Guston’s career, The Picture is a provocative self-referential work constructed of the most iconic motifs from the artist’s iconography. True to its name, The Picture portrays a painting of a single hooded figure created by a fragmented hand rendered in the artist’s signature palette of lush pinks, soft red, pale lilac, gray, and black. Created in 1971, just one year after the artist’s landmark exhibition at Marlborough Gallery that debuted a shocking new direction in his practice. The exhibition, which reintroduced figuration, was met with skepticism by many; Guston’s peers were left confounded by his departure from a purely abstract mode of painting. Interestingly, one of the few who immediately grasped the genius and originality of Guston’s transformation was another artist known for his distinctive late paintings; upon viewing the paintings, Willem de Kooning remarked that he was struck by the palpable “freedom” in the rosy-toned figurative paintings. (Andrew Graham-Dixon in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy, Philip Guston: A Retrospective, 2004, p. 55). Days after the exhibition, Guston left New York for Italy after winning the Prix de Rome. It was in Italy, in the aftershock of the Marlborough show where Guston painted The Picture, which is a continuation of the figurative style developed in the paintings showcased in the Marlborough Exhibition. In The Painting, the lush, layered background demonstrates that Guston never truly abandoned abstraction for figuration, but rather, he married the two modes of painting to develop a unique Neo-Expressionist style.
In the early 1970s, Guston developed a lexicon of symbols that would sustain him throughout his late practice. The Picture is filled with his iconography, including recurring motifs such as the hooded figure, the hand, and the canvas. Placed near the mouth of the hooded figure, the artist’s tool, a brush or a charcoal crayon, resembles a cigarette, another everyday object that litters Guston’s works. From books and buildings to trees, lightbulbs, shoes, and clocks, Guston’s symbols are rendered with a childlike simplicity that is almost cartoonish. In the epoch of Greenbergian formalism, Guston’s development of a naive and humorous figurative language that challenged the paradigm of sober reverence for abstraction was nothing short of radical.
"Guston made a choice to reengage in the world and to image its circumstances. He took on his own whiteness and complicity and silence and showed them to the public. He could have kept making the luminous abstract paintings for which he was known, but he had the unfinished business of the vile world to address."
The hooded characters that populate Guston’s late practice are perhaps the most complex symbols in the artist’s rich iconography. The ambiguity, absurdity, banality, and sardonic edge of the figures provoke responses ranging from laughter and amusement to confusion and discomfort. These characters have been read as mischievous ghouls, Klansmen, and representations of the artist himself. In all cases, as evidenced in The Picture, the hooded figure is not a neutral character. The artist first introduced representation of the Ku Klux Klan in his oeuvre in his social realist style works from the 1930s after personally witnessing a surge in the organization’s ranks after moving to Southern California with his family. As a Jewish immigrant, Guston’s own identity was targeted by Klansmen. Decades later, when the nation was undergoing an intense period of social unrest, representations of the hooded figure crept back into Guston’s practice. Guston’s fantasization of himself in the guise of the hooded figure creates a contradictory scenario that simultaneously positions him as victim and aggressor. The ambiguity that this contradiction produces is one of the most powerful enigmas within the artist’s oeuvre.
In reading the hooded figure as a representation of Guston himself, The Picture takes on the identity of a satirical form of self-portraiture. Like Picasso, who adopted the harlequin as an alter ego, the hooded character allowed Guston to project his own identity into his art. In The Studio from 1969, a hooded figure works diligently on a painting of a hooded figure, setting up a scenario for a double self-portrait. The large, fat-fingered hand emerging from the right side of the canvas in The Picture could be extending from another hooded figure, as in The Studio. Alternatively, the disjointed hand also relates to Guston’s late masterpiece, The Line, a striking painting of a weathered hand descending from the cloudy sky, armed with a simple writing instrument —a powerful metaphor for the artist as creator. In keeping with Guston’s deference to ambiguity, Guston left The Painting open for a variety of interpretations.
The multitude of meanings that can be derived from The Painting demonstrates the underlying characteristic of Guston’s late works: enigma. In enigma, the lack of a single true meaning allows a plurality of meanings to proliferate. It is no surprise that Guston’s great inspirations were Giorgio de Chirico and Piero della Francesco, two artists who are masters of ambiguity. Guston’s hooded figures have the same eerie presence as de Chirico’s mannequins. The impenetrability of works by Guston and the masters that inspired him is gripping, frustrating the viewer who futilely seeks to uncover the true meaning while enchanting others who revel in its unknowability. Within Guston’s body of work, it is not only the message or meaning of a work that is mysterious, but it is also the subject matter itself. Despite the fact that Guston depicted everyday objects with extraordinary simplicity, it is often difficult to differentiate a book from a building or a tree from a hooded figure. In The Picture, the side of the canvas has the potential to shift into the side of a building, while the paintbrush doubles as a cigarette.
From 2022 to 2024, a major retrospective of Guston’s work traveled from Boston to Houston and London. The title, Philip Guston: Now, highlights the relevance of the artist’s work today. It is the enigmatic nature of his work, which rejects specificity, that makes his body of work relevant now and at all t.mes s. From Georg Baselitz to Glenn Ligon, Christopher Wool, and Cecily Brown, Guston’s practice continues to fascinate and inspire the most important artists working today.
