Jack Kerouac, Kathy Acker, Douglas Woolf, Bill Burroughs & Samuel R. Delany have all been characterized, with reason, poets' novelists. This is to say that their works are written in the context & milieu of poetry, employ more than a few of poetry’s devices & are read attentively by poets. If there exists an equivalent of this phenomenon in painting, it can be found in the work of Philip Guston (1913-1980), visible in a glorious retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until the end of September, going then to the Met & eventually to London.

 

I almost didn't purchase the catalog to the show — Guston's paintings seriously resist being captured in two-dimensional reproductions, a work like The Painter (1976) is nothing like what you see in the book, even tho the photograph is as "true" as a photograph can be. Guston's brushstrokes — never long save in the background — have an energy, almost an angst, that comes out of his roots in abstract expressionism & which never really goes away when in the 1960s he suddenly seems to add a curious iconography of comics-inspired figures — klansmen, cigars, pointing fingers, shoes, one-eyed (and otherwise featureless) faces.

 

The crisp photography of a catalog doesn't capture the worked, active surfaces of Guston's work in oils & the absolute brightness of crisp, glossy art book paper makes Guston's colors seem considerably different from their consciously muddied tones. One almost thinks that this is a catalog that should have been printed on matte stock. Guston's White Painting I (1951), for example, must be the darkest work ever given such a title, but only the foreground captures this aspect in the book.

 

Books. Hardly any painter of his time had a more active role with regards to writing than Guston. The volume includes a wonderful essay by Bill Berkson on Guston & the comics, from Krazy Kat to R. Crumb — an absolute "must read" if you're Gary Sullivan or Dave Morice — as well as a far less illuminating piece on "Guston as a reader" by Dore Ashton that at least acknowledges Guston's friendships with Berkson, Bill Corbett & Clark Coolidge.

 

What took me most by surprise, circling multiple times through the fourth floor show at SF MOMA, was not simply the early work — the Ben Shahn-esque social expressionism of the 1930s or the somber illustrations from WW2 when the school at which Guston had been teaching — Iowa City! — was turned overnight into a Naval Air Training facility, but the strokes — from his abstract expressionist period onward, Philip Guston, early & late, was a painter of strokes. The strokes widen & narrow over periods, and become softer in his late figurative work generally, but never recede entirely. They're mostly short, as if the stroke indicated one span of attention (thus the shortest are the most intense & the relatively few long ones that do appear are given almost always to the background). The physicality of these strokes simply doesn’t translate well in reproduction & yet at the museum these strokes struck me, even more than the images, as Guston’s primary conveyor of emotion.

 

Watching Guston's evolution, from the didactic paintings into abstraction — the exhibit makes a convincing argument for Guston as an abstract expressionist of the first rank — and then back to a new mode of figuration is the inevitable narrative here, and it's fascinating to watch the tale unfold. Figures appear during the AE period of Guston's work out of his treatment of the foreground. Indeed, Guston distinguishes between foreground & back to a far greater degree than almost any abstractionist of that period, his foregrounds given lots of room in the center of the painting, until, circa 1960, a series of dark shapes, gray into black, almost clots of strokes, more rectangular than anything else, begin to form. There is an ink-on-paper piece from 1966 called Full Brush that shows Guston clearly thinking of this form as a figure. It appears amidst a series that are trying out straight lines, right angles, even the outline of a cartoon head.

 

Much has been made of Guston's iconography — I would point you to Berkson's piece in the catalog & Corbett's writing on Guston (none of which is included here, which seems bizarre enough until Ashton goes an extra distance to slight Corbett's relation to Guston — "who became Guston's friend only during the last eight years" — at which point a yawning backstory of retrospective & catalog politics seems to peek thru) for the best common sense writing on his work.

 

But most of all I would encourage you to see the show. As useful as the catalog is, once you have done so, Philip Guston is an almost textbook example of the painter who doesn't reproduce in two dimensions.