"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?’’
Gesturally charged yet.mes lancholic in hue, Philip Guston’s 1964 Stranger embodies a pivotal moment of transition in the artist’s work as he negotiates the liminal space between explicit subject matter and an abstract pictorial approach. Emerging at the pivotal culmination of Guston’s abstract period, during which he broke free from the figurative renderings of his early career to experiment with more gestural modes of expression, Stranger from 1964 displays a sea of turbulent marks in Guston’s signature chromatic pallet. In composition, Stranger sees Guston’s abstraction of the fifties and early sixties begin to congeal and coalesce into solid forms – a prophetic indication of the figuration that would dominate his work in the following decade of his career. Materializing from a field of pink and smoky gray, the stoic black shape hovers on the border of legibility: a stranger’s silhouette, only vaguely discernable within a hazy landscape. Prominently exhibited at Guston’s 1966 solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Philip Guston, Recent Paintings and Drawings, Stranger embodies the tension between figuration and abstraction that lies at the heart of Guston’s artistic legacy.
The darkened hues and weighty forms in the present composition diverge sharply from the pastel flourishes and ethereal fluidity which defined Guston’s work of the previous decade. Working in a restrained and somber color palette, Guston here displays a torrent of weighty gray brushstrokes, while fleshy pinks seep outward from the margins of the turbulent scene. Black forms hover and ebb within the swirling sea of gray, curiously revealing and then denying the impression of defined forms within an abstract, atmospheric landscape. Capitalizing on the conflict between abstraction and figuration to forge new ground, Stranger suggests through a frenzied patchwork of agitated brushstrokes the softly illuminated formations of a darkened landscape while also possessing a weightiness and tangible corporality.
Drawing from his contemporaries in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, Guston paints with a visual density and prophetic, atmospheric quality that recall the work of such artists as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. The painterly facture and non-hierarchical structure adopted here also attest to Guston’s study of the Post-Impressionist masters, particularly Paul Cézanne, whose signature taches of paint and experimentations in color and form informed his investigation into the plasticity of paint and image-making alike. Indeed, Stranger is framed by a Cézanne-inspired white border, as thick gray brushstrokes revolve and give way to a border of bare, exposed canvas along the composition’s bottom and upper edge. A test.mes nt to Guston’s painterly mastery, the surface of Stranger reverberates with heightened formal intrigue as enigmatic, shadowy shapes seemingly shift before the viewer’s eyes, intimating at the monolithic structure of object, and yet simultaneously recoiling as form disappears again into the recesses of the canvas.
To create the densely layered crosshatched surface and nuanced gray hues that illuminate his paintings of this pivotal period, Guston began with black paint and, working over the still-wet paint with new layers of fresh white paint, would end up with gray through this process of addition and erasure. Guston explains: “this form is black, and since you’re working wet on wet all the t.mes – it all has to happen at once, you know – it’s gray. You scrape out and put white over the black.” (Philip Guston quoted in: Clark Coolidge, Philip Guston: collects ed Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, Berkeley 2011, p. 47) While Guston describes these grays as the product of “erasure” within his practice, this process is equally one of addition as Guston builds up the surface through thick layers of impasto. The paradox that emerges here – that of both addition and elimination, emergence and disappearance – is vital to this body of work. Guston states: “It’s a question of locating the form you’re making. But this form has to emerge, or grow, out of the working of it, so there’s a paradox. I like form against a background—I mean, simply empty space—but the paradox is that the form must emerge from its background…you are trying to bring your forces, so to speak, to converge all at once into some point.” (Ibid., p. 48) The emotive power of these paintings rests within this paradox.
A leader of the New York School, Philip Guston’s oeuvre followed an elliptical path from figuration to abstraction and back again, and this dual attention to objectivity and abstraction is no better exemplified than in the present work. Painted shortly following Guston’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1962, Stranger features many of the stylistic hallmarks that established Guston as a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, while also presenting a critical divergence in the artist’s practice. Indeed, refusing to adhere stylistically to the parameters of the movement which he himself had been critical in eliciting and intent on forging new ground, Guston emphatically changed his artistic course of action in the 1960s with works such as the present Stranger. This intermediary between figurative and abstract mark-making portends the figuration that Guston would again assume in 1968 after a two-year hiatus from painting altogether. In Stranger, we see through a frenzied patchwork of agitated brushstrokes a tangible corporeality that foreshadows the artist’s late figurative paintings, the central black orb broadly insinuating the cartoonish cyclops heads that would become a recurring visual element in Guston’s work.
"This form is black, and since you’re working wet on wet all the t.mes – it all has to happen at once, you know – it’s gray. You scrape out and put white over the black.”
The muscular brushstrokes, and compelling internal energy of Stranger are all a test.mes nt to Guston’s refusal to accept predetermined truisms about the creative process. Guston’s great task was not only defy the attempts of outside observers to judge and define his work, but to subvert his own previous aesthetic assumptions as he evolved stylistically. A few years after painting Late September, Guston famously stated in a 1966 article titled Faith, Hope and Impossibility, “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?" (Philip Guston quoted in: Art News Annual XXXI, 1966, October 1965, p. 101)
