Philip Guston: The Studio

One Work

by Craig Burnett

Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913--1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him -- along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline -- an influential abstract expressionist of the "gestural" tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like T he Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing "coolness" of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex. In The Studio , Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait. In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative) critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure of The Studio , and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting -- as a compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.

Genres: Art

104 pages, Unknown Binding

First published February 7, 2014

Reviews

[Harris]

A mostly boring reading of what, to me, is a very interesting painting. Burnett reduces Guston’s klansman to a “brute,” a “thug,” a “meathead,” and a “bozo.” There is plenty of writing on the geometry and space of the painting, but almost no mention of what it means for Guston to self-identify as a klansman. I have always read it as a radical self-implication, an acknowledgment of his/my complicity in the contemporary racial order.

While my reading is possibly/probably not what Guston was thinking, it's absolutely bizarre that there is no mention of American racism here and the only thing Burnett has to say about the Klan is in reference to their union busting.

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reaching and eggheady, but what did I expect... marvellous painter, though!

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

a nice balance of close-reading analysis and airy reaching; basically just what I want out of art crit! Especially for something like a late-Guston work study, every line is so suggestive

[Giovanni García-Fenech · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't recommend it, unless you feel there's value to descriptions like "Is the white area, marked by green and orange strokes, as well as some reddish-orange contaminated with black, meant to be a tube of paint? Probably. A spot of orange sits just above the tube (as if it had just been squeezed out), while three increasingly large smears of red-tinged white move in an even pace to the left..."

[Michel Ortega · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this was a really nice book about a single piece of art. 
Sometimes I enjoyed the way the author described the metaphors that the symbols inside the painting create when they fuck. 
Other times it was as exaggerated and absurd as the humor inside Guston paintings.

Good book.

[Aaron Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provides a nice bit of biographical-intellectual context—accounts of Gaston’s reading, viewing, and reflecting habits—all of which help situate the piece; however, throughout the book there’s a sense that Burnett must continue writing despite having run out of things to say.

[PBurmeister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, this volume works very well as a self-contained concept: manageable and convenient size, accessible content organized around the interpretation of a single image, good supplementary material (well-chosen reproductions and helpful endnotes) and above all good writing.
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