Always marrying the personal with the political, PHILIP GUSTON’s career defied categorisation. As a new retrospective opens at Tate Modern, Martha Alexander takes a closer look at the extraordinary life and works of one of the 20th century’s most intriguing painters
KETTLES, KLANSMEN, THE SOLES OF SHOES, stray limbs and loose irons; colours by turns as vivid as children’s picture books or as thick and black as a starless night. This is just the smallest slice of what is in store at the Philip Guston retrospective at Tate Modern, the first of its kind on UK soil in 20 years.
Laid out chronologically, visitors will explore the Montreal-born artist’s 50-year career which started as a Los Angeles schoolboy and ended as a recluse in upstate New York.
Guston’s biography is extraordinary and his reach, immeasurable. He was largely self-taught; his work was informed variously by cartoon imagery, European Old Masters painting, surrealism and Mexican muralism. His own drawings and paintings are all shot through with his experiences of and reaction to familial tragedy, social injustice and activism. His work is by turns funny, elegant and heart-breaking. He is now, over 40 years after his death, hard to categorise.
And yet Guston isn’t a household name, unlike his childhood friend Jackson Pollock, or Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, both of whom he worked alongside as part of the New York School in the 1950s.
He was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada in 1913 to Jewish parents who had fled persecution in present-day Ukraine. But by 1922, Guston and his family had relocated to Los Angeles. The following year, his father, Louis – depressed and in low-paid work with a large family to support – took his own life. Newspaper reports from 1923 say Guston’s mother discovered the body, but Guston later claimed he was the one who found his father. Either way, such a loss at such a formative age cannot have failed to have a profound impact on a young boy. The years which came after saw Guston lean into drawing, often practising in the privacy of his closet – paper lit by ▸ a single lightbulb – alone save for what was clearly a rich, intense imagination.
As a fledgling artist, Guston painted public art in the form of murals, always with a social and political message. One of the most exciting parts of the exhibition is a never-seen-before high-definition film
