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Artist or Maker: Philip Guston (1913-1980)
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Provenance: Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, New York
Joseph Hazen Collection, New York
Mckee Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1980
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Exhibited: New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Philip Guston, February-March 1958, n.p., (illustrated).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The New American Paintings, 1958-1959, no. 29 *traveling exhibition
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts; London, Whitechapel Gallery and The Los Angeles County Museum, Philip Guston, May 1962-June 1963, p. 77, no. 40 (illustrated in color).
Waltham, Mass., Brandeis University, Rose Art Museum, Philip Guston, Selective Retrospective, 1966, n.p., no. 14 (illustrated in color).
Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, Paintings from the Collection of Joseph Hazen, October 1966, n.p., no. 29.
Washington, D.C., The National Gallery, American Art at Mid-Century I, October 1973-January 1974, n.p. (illustrated in color).
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Denver Art Museum and New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Guston, May 1980-September 1981, pp. 70 and 130, no. 29 (illustrated in color).
Madrid, Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art and Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina, Philip Guston Retrospective, March-July 1989, p. 45, no. 14 (illustrated in color).
New York, McKee Gallery, Philip Guston: Paintings from The Fifties, April-June 1995, n.p., pl. 10 (illustrated in color).
Polanco, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Abstract Expressionism, October 1996-January 1997, n.p., no. 31.
Orlando Museum of Art, The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection of Works, March-June 1998, p. 72 (illustrated in color).
Kunst Museum Bonn; Kunstverein Stuttgart and Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Philip Guston, February-November 1999, n.p., (illustrated).
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and London, The Royal Academy of Arts, Philip Guston: Retrospective, March 2003-April 2004, pp. 133 and 238, no. 43 (illustrated in color).
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Literature: R. Storr, Philip Guston, New York, 1986, pp. 40-41, no. 34 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Property from the Collection of Edward R. Broida
In The Mirror, the subject matter of the painting is the nature of painting itself. The artist was very much aware that painting had its own intrinsic qualities and was determined to mine it for its essential truth. Nevertheless, despite the non-objectivity of his subject matter, Guston's canvases are filled with sensual brushwork and warm, variegated color.
What is central to Guston's abstractions is its emphatic non-referentiality. In them, the act of painting is less a vehicle for traditional image-making (or as Guston would think of as mimicry) and more the means to transform it as the outward manifestation of the struggle between the painter's will and expectations pitted against the set of plastic values of painting. In The Mirror, the muted tonal values of the background act as the foil to the eruption of strongly pitched color and animated brushwork in the center. The concentrated mass seems to spread to the edges of the canvas; this is a development from his earlier paintings where the mass was more tightly coiled in the center. This kind of structure traces back to his admiration for Mondrian's Pier and Ocean pictures, where the vertical and horizontal lines create a pulsating matrix, and depending on the placement of these lines, display a force of energy. If they are close together, they appear as a concentration of animate matter; when placed further apart, a dissipation of energy. Likewise from Mondrian, Guston also realized that this kind of structure allowed for the central mass to become sharper in focus versus the hazy, soft appearance of the background.
For Guston, painting was not simply a series of consecutive steps that culminated into a finished image. Rather, it was a metaphysical journey, on which the artist embarked without knowing the ultimate destination. A consummate seeker of knowledge, and extremely well read in the areas of philosophy, religion, and poetry, Guston shed the extraneous matter from his painting, resulting in an abstraction that was equal parts formal rigor and expressive touch and feeling. During this critical period, what concerned him was the process of painting a picture. The canvas reveals the trace of his discoveries and revisions. The Mirror is an immensely layered image, each brushstroke corresponding to another one, built up either in harmony or opposition. The challenge to Guston, as well as to other painters of the New York School, was to determine when a work was deemed finished. In a statement made in 1952, Guston asserted that the work was successfully complete once the painting looked old, not new, as if the forms that took shape long existed in the mind and hand of the artist.
Guston's abstract paintings have been compared to Impressionist painting by Monet and Pissarro because of their atmospheric appearance and painterly fracture. However, Guston's questioning spirit is more aligned with Cézanne. The non-hierarchical structure of The Mirror attest to Guston's study of the Post-Impressionist master. Cézanne's inflections of paint do not so much as to absorb the viewer's gaze, but rather to deflect it elsewhere, resulting in an all-over effect. Furthermore, through his signature taches of paint, Cézanne throws into doubt the materiality of objects in his still-lifes or nature in his landscapes. Guston's painting, in terms of color, line and form, privileges these properties above all else so that what is eventually shown on the canvas is the artist's investigation into the plasticity of image-making.
The Mirror's palette showcases Guston's signature use of the color red. While it has been established that Guston looked toward the fleshy paintings of Soutine, (indeed the red in The Mirror looks particularly corporeal), Guston's other influence references the distant past. Guston's study of the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Titian attests to the warmth of his colors and the technique of offsetting the warm colors against the cooler tones, creating an even golden glow.
Guston took on the creation of a new kind of abstraction by using the metaphor of the void. His paintings do not illustrate the void per say, but rather, they are created in a void, where the external reality as we know it bears no influence on them. The void as defined by the French Symbolist poets such as Mallarmé and then later by the Existentialists, Sartre and Camus, was a metaphor for creating something entirely new, solely dependent upon the nature of the art form and its intrinsic properties. It is interesting to note that Guston--who was raised in Southern California in his youth, and even attended high school with Pollock--has been cast as a solitary figure within the literature surrounding the New York School (some of it related to his return to figuration a decade later). It conjures up a mythic image of the artist as the alienated genius facing the void; coincidentally, similar interpretations have been made of other artists from the untamed, Wild West, namely Pollock and Still. It is true to some degree that these artists most relished freedom from orthodoxy and were not afraid of shedding bourgeois views of art to acquire radical powers of transformation in their painting. Guston, along with his western compatriots, achieved this by merging strong expressive power and rigorous abstract idiom.
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